DemandBridge is excited to report some of the many developments we have been working on this past quarter, related to product enhancements and new integrations. We strive to provide constant improvements to products, services, and customer support.
In this quarterly review, we’ll highlight the following:
- Simplifying the Quote-to-Order Workflow for Promotional Products using DB Sourcing – With this latest integration, we leverage real-time product information coming directly from SAGE, including imagery, pricing, and specifications to populate customer proposal documents. Users can then employ DB Sourcing to send that proposal to their customer before going on to submit a purchase order to awarded suppliers.
- Next Generation Q-Design Template Editor – With a brand new re-designed interface that is functional on modern browsers, template creators will love the familiar functionality with a fresh look and feel that will cut down on template creation time. Currently in Beta with an official release coming soon!
- Introducing Promo Personalization Dropdown Variable in DB Commerce – The ability to incorporate a list variable with the use of company profiles has been added.
Simplifying the Quote-to-Order Workflow for Promotional Products
Distributors, Suppliers, and Agencies have long relied on DemandBridge software to power their businesses—often alongside solutions from other mission-critical technology partners. While we at DemandBridge are pleased to offer a comprehensive, fully integrated platform complete with eCommerce, ERP, Sourcing, and Reporting capabilities, we realize that our customers lean on other trusted suppliers for their operations. Opportunities often arise for us to work together with those providers and our mutual customers on points of synergy to provide an added layer of integration, and sometimes the end results of those collaborations become the most valuable and highly utilized tools on users’ workbenches…and we think our latest such example fits that bill!
Over the past several years, we’ve heard from our customers about the increased significance of Promotional Products to their growth strategies. And we’ve been happy to deliver improved eCommerce features regarding the administration and end-user display of these very dynamic types of items. However, potential still exists to add efficiency for our customers—from site builders to “order takers”—to reduce redundant data entry across systems and streamline the process of sourcing these products, and eventually getting them into customers’ hands.
That’s where our latest integration with SAGE comes into play. The SAGE® Connect API™ offers a host of services to facilitate the transfer of product, category, vendor, and order information to and from applications like ours. With these tools, users can continue to utilize SAGE as they do today to execute product searches, create presentations, and more, but cut down on the eventual re-keying of pricing and spec information into the DemandBridge products they ultimately use to manage projects, propose pricing, and place orders.
We felt that our DB Sourcing solution was the logical first candidate for bringing SAGE data directly into the DemandBridge product suite. Customers love our web-based procurement solution for its ease of use, job status dashboard, and other features aimed at slashing the time it takes to get from quote to order. DB Sourcing has been put to the test for years by users at some of the highest volume distributors in our industry, largely (though not exclusively) for printed products. It has been especially useful in reducing touchpoints and consolidating project-related correspondence into a single channel, especially for ad hoc, custom projects in need of quotes and input from many suppliers. DB Sourcing also shines as a remote order entry mechanism through which users can quickly submit orders for contracted or repeat business into their back-office accounting and inventory management system, such as our popular DB Distributor and EQ Distributor products.
With this latest integration, we leverage real-time product information coming directly from SAGE, including imagery, pricing, and specifications to populate customer proposal documents. Users can then employ DB Sourcing to send that proposal to their customer before going on to submit a purchase order to awarded suppliers. Along the way, users can monitor the progress of these jobs and actions taken alongside their “print” projects from their job status dashboard, manage attachments, and interact with their colleagues within the context of their electronic file jacket. And perhaps most notably, DB Sourcing facilitates the handoff of the order to the user’s ERP system to handle the downstream processing and accounting functions like customer and vendor invoicing—thus eliminating any copying and pasting or reentering of this data.
We’re excited to share more information and to demonstrate this new solution in the weeks and months ahead, and look forward to additional opportunities to add value and efficiencies for our customers alongside SAGE and other technology peers in the industry. In fact, our development roadmap includes a similar integration to offer this workflow to our customers using ASI’s ESP® software as well, in addition to exploring ways to make use of this real-time data transfer within our eCommerce products. Stay tuned for more to come on this and other exciting efforts in our Technology Release series, and of course, don’t hesitate to contact our team at productinquiries@demandbridge.com.
We are excited to announce the release of the much-anticipated next-generation Q-Design template editor!
With a brand new re-designed interface that is functional on modern browsers, template creators will love the familiar functionality with a fresh look and feel that will cut down on template creation time.
Features include:
- Internet Explorer is no longer required! Completely new interface featuring cross-browser compatibility
- Pre-existing templates are immediately editable in the new program; no conversion required
- Configure Distributor Setup Users for each user accessing the editor to ensure session security and retain customized user settings
- Editor tools such as font and color profile setup, variable creation, history configuration, page editing, and test template are now all accessed from the same screen. No need to navigate in and out of the page editor to make changes
- Improved page navigation and editor display preferences, including page zoom, the ability to adjust display coordinates, and customizable user display settings
Our team has been dedicated to this exciting project over the last many months and is pleased to move this project into Beta with select EQ/c customers in the coming weeks. We cannot wait to share this with our users in the field!
Introducing Promo Personalization Dropdown Variable
DB Commerce users have been able to add text-based personalization to their promotional items, but we’ve recently made improvements to streamline the process for the administrator, their setup, and performance.
The ability to incorporate a list variable with the use of company profiles has been added. This change helps resolve issues around long lists of logo options presented to the end-user. This update will help decrease the load time of the Item Summary tab by no longer including this as a variant option, as well as having Chili do the work of creating a preview, rather than creating individual media files for each variation. With the use of company profiles the administrator now will only need to update and/make changes in one area, rather than on each promo personalization item when using a variant.
