Perceptant - EDI & Supply Chain Management as a Service (SaaS)...

[In2EDI]

All,

I recently posted about our seamless move to the EDI VAN provided by Perceptant (http://www.perceptant.com) and thought I'd follow-up with a further post regarding their EDI and Supply Chain Management solutions, which are offered as a fully-managed service.

Now I realise there are other suppliers out there with competitive offerings, which is why I'm compiling this post. As a company we're beginning to invest heavily in streamlining our Supply Chain and view Perceptant as a valued partner, which is why I'm exposing some of their USP's to the community for comments and feedback.

Rather than writing pages about what we've seen I'll attempt to distil their solutions down in to what we perceive are 5 main differentiators:

1) Everything they supply is on a fully-managed and hosted basis. They charge for their solutions based on a per annum fee, immaterial of VAN/Network traffic.

2) They have pre-built mappings available that cover all major EDI standards and pre-built connectors available for Epicor, Infor, SAP, Sage, IBM, Oracle, K3, Pegasus et al. Crucial not just for our own internal integration but also with the computer systems of our supply chain partners (3PL's, Suppliers, Customers and Industry data feeds). Any new mappings or connectors that are not in their library are charged for on a fixed fee and timescale basis.

3) Their Business Activity Monitoring and Supply Chain modules allow business rules, workflow and decisioning to be applied to the data and messages. In addition, this same technology has been used to build "off the shelf" supply chain applications including Vendor Managed Inventory, Promotional Campaign Management and end-to-end real-time production scheduling.

4) They maintain a 5 year online repository of all our electronic messages, which really helps from a regulatory and customer/supplier service perspective.

5) They're now developing mobile applications for the Apple iPhone that for example allow delivery drivers to generate GRN's and also integrate with Satellite Tracking systems for real-time delivery notifications to customers.

Thoughts/comments are welcome.

Regards

In2EDI