Integrations and new features inject speed and accuracy throughout the global supply chain and into store operations

RedPrairie Corporation , a global supply chain and retail technology provider, has announced its 2012.1 product release. The new release connects supply chain execution capabilities to the store and commerce sites so that retailers, manufacturers and distributors can achieve the greatest visibility and accuracy. Enhancements include new integrations; global labour standards compliance and enhanced support of industry standards such as GS1 barcoding requirements, VMI, VAT, GSIN, SSCC and others; and a new traceability offering. Advancements were also made to RedPrairie’s Commerce, Enterprise Store Operations, Warehouse Management and Enterprise Workforce Management product suites.

“Our 2012.1 product release is designed to help retailers, manufacturers and distributors manage inventory with greater speed and accuracy,” said John Kopcke, RedPrairie chief technology officer and executive vice president of Product Development. “New integrations between our solutions deliver unprecedented visibility between store operations and the supply chains serving them.”
RedPrairie Commerce Suite
RedPrairie Commerce Suite enhancements include a more robust, merchant-centric business user interface and the introduction of Store Centre and Customer Engagement Management modules. Store Centre brings the versatility and flexibility of all-channel commerce into the store by offering retailers an enterprise-wide visibility of inventory and orders; a 360-degree view of customer and product information; and an extensive range of cross-channel fulfilment options. Customer Engagement Management offers retailers the ability to track and manage loyalty programs across all selling channels.

Additionally, with the 2012.1 release, the RedPrairie Commerce Suite is now available in a hosted model called Commerce Cloud, which gives retailers the flexibility to purchase either an on-premise or cloud-based version of the application.

RedPrairie Enterprise Store Operations
RedPrairie Enterprise Store Operations enhancements enable site managers to access Fresh Item Management, Cash Management, End of Day, and other key process flows through a new role-based user interface. The new user experience allows for site managers to perform some tasks on an exception basis and others in a more streamlined fashion, increasing efficiency and saving labour. Additionally, POS management and fuel reconciliation tasks were also enhanced in this release, allowing for more powerful internationalisation capabilities and more flexible fuel management processes.

RedPrairie Warehouse Management
RedPrairie Warehouse Management has been enhanced to include additional integration capabilities and user configurable workflows to the RedPrairie Enterprise Workforce Management product. Additional enhancements include extended GS1 barcode parsing to support various radio frequency picking methods; bulk allocation and bulk picking with configurable distribution workflows; streamlined receiving without order or trailer dependencies; the addition of more pick methods to support advanced cluster pick and cart position capture; and cycle count and adjustment by unit of measure breakdown.

RedPrairie Enterprise Workforce Management

RedPrairie Enterprise Workforce Management enhancements include a new scalable punch processing feature, a new rich text editor and an improved Long Range Labour Planning capability for Corporate Planners.

• New scalable punch processing feature: The new punch processing capability in the Time and Attendance module enables flexible punch rounding rules and significantly increases the volume of punches that can be processed without requiring an increase in the database server capacity.

• New rich text editor: By adding a new rich text editor to RedPrairie’s Execution Management modules customers are able to leverage content from their business partners that existed in other document formats such as MS Word®.

• Improved Long Range Labour Planning capability for Corporate Planners: Corporate Planners can now leverage the exact same detailed store-level labour standards, drivers, constraints, and powerful engine that are used for weekly planning and execution to project their enterprise-wide labour spend requirements for the entire year. This capability increases accuracy of labour budget allocations, brings the power of the site specific bottom up labour model to long range planning, and helps to align execution requirements of stores to the enterprise labour budget.

RedPrairie Traceability Solution
The RedPrairie Traceability Solution is a hosted offering that provides a complete electronic traceability chain of custody down to License Plate Number (LPN) level mitigating risk through timely execution, and giving companies a strong method for brand protection.

“Our new solution is a natural extension for us as it is built upon years of experience managing inventory, orders and data combined with our powerful visibility capabilities,” said Prashant Bhatia, RedPrairie vice president of product strategy. “Ultimately, we are providing end-to-end Enterprise Inventory Management and Enterprise Visibility offerings to our customers across multiple industries and geographies.”