Resources
"SPS Commerce has provided Arena with an outsourced EDI solution that has exceeded my expectations. By outsourcing to SPS Commerce, Arena has been able to improve our productivity and enhance our supply chain relationships."
Keith Ritchie, Corporate IT Director, Arena Brands Inc.
Resources Case Studies
Jerky Snack Brands, Inc is the leader in Natural Style Beef Jerky, the fastest growing category of meat snacks and facilities in Minnesota, Texas and Brazil. The company was experiencing rapid growth. It found itself facing more and more complex EDI requirements from its customers, dramatically increasing its EDI transaction volume. To further the Jerky Snack Brands position within the meat snacking industry they wanted to automate the purchase order and invoice document process to eliminate excessive amounts of data entry into their MAS 200 system and focus on the core competencies of their business.
Growing EDI Demands from Retailers
Jerky Snack Brands sells its products to large and small retailers including Academy Sports, Ace Hardware, Kroger, SuperValu, and Target. These customers were becoming more and more sophisticated in their EDI requirements of their suppliers, and Jerky Snack Brand’s fax EDI solution was no longer able to keep up. Jerky needed a solution that could be quickly manage all of its customers, had rapid scalability, provided fast compliance and was easy to use.
SaaS EDI Offers a Hands-Free Solution
Owning and managing their own EDI infrastructure (hardware, software, network/communications), was not part of Jerky Snack Brands vision. It did not want to be responsible to design and maintain the ever-changing EDI rule books that itemized the details of all EDI transactions with their retailers. Their business was the meat-snacking industry, not EDI. So Jerky Snack Brands preferred to have a proven third party in charge of their application and system monitoring, backups, data monitoring and diagnoses, system upgrades and more.
They choose SPS Commerce’s Software-as-a-Service (Saas) integrated EDI solution in 2007.
During their review of EDI offerings in the market, Jerky found SPS to be the best fit for their organization. As the market leader in SaaS EDI, the SPS EDI service fit its budget, provided a highly accessible and reliable service, had strong customer support, and easy to understand training. SPS’ integrated EDI service was the perfect solution to fit their growing EDI document volume and they can use SPS’ web-based service with lower EDI transaction volume trading partners. With its multi-tenant architecture, SPS only needed to be integrated with Jerky Snack Brands ERP system, MAS 200.The multi-user capabilities made it easy for them to keep information secret from customers and trading partners.
“SPS Commerce has provided Jerky Snack Brands with an outsourced EDI solution that has exceeded my expectations. While the technology is superior, the best part about partnering with SPS Commerce is their people. Over the past three years, we have been continually impressed by their professionalism, attention to details and EDI expertise. By outsourcing to SPS Commerce, Jerky Snack Brands has been able to improve our productivity and enhance our supply chain relationships.”
Paul McPhail, Jerky Snack Brands
