Office Depot Inc. is planning to roll out a new way to connect electronically with thousands of suppliers across Europe, the company said last week.

To improve how it sources products from its European suppliers, Office Depot says it will deploy the Atlas Products network-based supplier collaboration platform from HighJump Software Inc. to share demand and production information with more than 4,000 suppliers across Europe, covering eight countries and seven languages, that provide it with the office products and related items that it resells to other businesses and consumers.

Office Depot operates multiple business-to-business e-commerce sites—including OfficeMaxWorkplace.com and several sites under the Viking brand, including Viking-direct.co.uk in the United Kingdom, Vikingdirect.fr in France and Viking.de in Germany. It also has more than 2,000 retail stores and the retail e-commerce site OfficeDepot.com.

The Atlas system is designed to let companies also share data from electronic product catalogs and pricing software, enabling trading partners to maintain records of electronic documents from initial orders to final payment of invoices. The Atlas system is also designed to support European value-added tax laws, which result in a tax added to a product for each country in which a product’s components were produced.

HighJump acquired Atlas Products International last year, adding to HighJump’s suite of supply chain software the Atlas software-as-a-service technology for enabling client companies to automatically exchange electronic business documents over the Internet. Atlas technology is designed to integrate with companies electronic data interchange and e-invoicing systems, enabling companies to exchange purchase orders and invoices electronically over the web.

Office Depot is No. 9 in the Internet Retailer Top 500, which ranks companies on the annual web sales.

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