SPS Commerce Fulfillment

Kommentare: Triple-grade A, top-notch overall experience: EDI enables the timely acknowledgment of PO's (sales opportunities) to be serviced in as timely a manner as possible with the help of SPS Commerce...in the CPG industry, EDI is an absolute must and this platform affords our organization the ease of access with our various national and regional retail partners to conduct seamless and streamlined transactions. I recommend this service to small and medium-sized enterprises that only seek the finest tools in their respective trades and fields to get the job done right.

Vorteile: Seamless integration with varied retail partners through EDI link up, real-time receipt of digital documents from party to party, ability to accept or reject PO revisions with select retail partners, endless types of transactions to conduct business through in the software platform (from initial PO receipt up to freight/logistics servicing and finally to the sought after finish line with the fulfillment/invoicing of PO's), back-end deduction claims management, debit-credit adjustments and remittance advices simplified...and then some.

Nachteile: Manual inputting of data points for all of our PO's serviced via our various national/regional retail partners...has to be a workaround to digitally uplink fulfillments and invoices from ERP platform (NetSuite). At least in my experience, it has all been manual submissions but otherwise, the above reviews would be flawless. Perhaps, the same rule of thought could apply to advance shipment notices for uploading signed BOL's but not as much of a hindrance compared to our constant billing cycle to maintain.

Kommentare: My experience hasn't been easy. There was no first hand training. We had to rely on webinars and video training to gather the knowledge we needed to understand how to navigate SPS Commerce and the fulfillment process. However, if we had an in-person training and if our in-house software was more up-to-date so that integration and automation was an option, I believe my experience would be more pleasant.

Vorteile: The ability to communicate between retailers and suppliers in a very real time exchange.
The ability to merge a large quantity of orders directly into our CMS software for quick and easy fulfillment.
The search ability to easily find any PO and the ease with being able to separate retailers by name.
Love the work flow chart associated to each order- easy to see notes and activity in regard to any given order.

Nachteile: The complicated and lengthy process of sending and receiving PO Acknowledgements and Changes.
All recent activity is noted on the over and transaction tabs, making it confusing to scroll through. I like the idea of only showing 1 PO number and having check marks within the box that show the activity that has been completed for that particular PO.
This software does not work well with our very unique "small company" CMS/ ERP software. We have to manually print out each PO, manually respond with a PO Acknowledgement after manually checking our inventory, and then have to manually enter the drop ship addresses and order into our software for fulfillment. We then also have to manually respond with ASNs and import invoicing. We do have the ability to merge large quantity orders, with a specially crafted application so long as it only has a few consistent addresses the account/retailer ships to. Automated merging is not possible for many and varying drop ship addresses, those we must manually print, review, and enter through the entire fulfillment process.

Kommentare: Before using SPS Commerce we had to do everything manually in the form of emails and our company software. Now whenever we receive an order we just log in to the portal process it on our end and then enter the tracking information and invoice information. Easy peasy!

Vorteile: Very easy to use. Once everything is setup we get prompt emails for orders received. This helps us in processing the order. Once we login to the portal everything is just a click away. All the open order are shown on the dashboard instantaneously. Furthermore, there are very userfriendly and vibrant buttons or blocks that differentiate between orders, errors, shipments, and invoices. If anything is missing from any order for example shipping information or invoicing information, it's just a click away to complete it. When we open the order, the presentation of the order workflow is so easy to understand, even a layman with no technical information can easily understand at which stage the order is. We have one of our trusted resellers also using it and they are able to extract information very easily. Also, when we signed up I was afraid I would not understand how everything works on the SPS portal, but the training center feature helped me greatly understand how each of the processes works. I had an issue once, I was unable to find the carrier code for one of my carriers, I talked to the support rep and she helped me with it. Although it took her some time also to find it but the issue was resolved.

Nachteile: Well, I wouldn't say its a very bad feature but when I tried adding more users to our account, like our accounts personnel and other team members who interact with it, there was a fee associated with it. It's not a con but we were not informed about it before.

Kommentare: As I described above, we were required to come up with a solution which started as an EDI interface to receive and acknowledge POs, but turned into requirements for ASNs, Invoicing, etc. SPS has been easy for all of our users and has met the needs of our customers with these requirements.

Vorteile: A number of years ago, one of our distribution networks started to demand we use an EDI platform for the receipt of purchase orders. Our ERP does not support this feature, so we had to look outside for solutions. We evaluated SPS Commerce and found this service to be the broadest, most user-friendly and economical solution in the marketplace. Some of our other distribution networks have since come on board and created new demands for different functions which SPS offers. Access by all of our departments (sales, customer service, bookkeeping, shipping, etc.) allows us to seamlessly meet our customers' needs.

Nachteile: When rejecting a purchase order, an anticipated ship date still has to be entered in order to process the rejection even though the order is rejected. This often confuses customers because you are both rejecting the order and entering a ship date. If the drop down option is to reject the order, then one shouldn't be forced to also enter a date.

Kommentare: SPS Commerce allowed us to connect to dropship and bulk-shipment retailers via EDI. We were able to fulfill orders manually via this software, and then eventually set up the software to communicate automatically with our warehouse.

Vorteile: If you need to connect to a sales channel via EDI, SPS Commerce is going to be one of the most reliable options to do so. SPS is a large organization, and they seem to have experience connecting with any retailer we would want to do business with. This makes the integration process a lot easier. SPS also has a very responsive technical support team. Any time an issue comes up, we send them an email, and almost always get a response within one business day. The technical team seems to be very knowledgeable.

Nachteile: The main con is the price. SPS charges a flat per-document fee. When you are receiving large dollar-value orders, this small fee per document doesn't amount to much. However, if you are doing high volume, low dollar-value dropship orders, the fixed fee per document takes out a large percentage of your profit. Depending on the type of business you do, you need to clearly negotiate with SPS to get the pricing that works best for you. Other than that, the experience with SPS Commerce has been good.