DemandBridge is excited to be part of the 2022 Brand Chain Technology Showcase! Check out our feature article on how DemandBridge technology can help you simplify the quote-to-order workflow for your promotional products. Read the full article below.
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. 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. 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 rekeying 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. 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 — 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, 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.
