SendOrder.com offers document integration

By Mark A. Brunelli -- Purchasing, 5/18/2000

he secret is out about electronic procurement.

By now, buyers everywhere have probably heard that purchasing what your company needs over the Internet saves time, money, and hopefully contributes to an overall increase in productivity.

This is great news to buyers who work for Fortune 500 companies and can afford to spend millions on the systems that facilitate electronic procurement. But what about the small to mid-size companies with tight budgets and outdated legacy systems? The answer is that the Internet has a little something for everybody.

One Internet start-up that can help buyers jump aboard the electronic procurement bandwagon is SendOrder.com. The company offers a Web-based service allowing buyers to integrate their purchase orders with the back-office systems of just about any supplier. The company launched the new service, the SendOrder.com Commerce Interchange, on March 9.

Steve Mezak, the company's CEO, says the initial Web-based service is free, but if buyers want to integrate volumes of purchase orders back into their own ERP systems, then there is a subscription fee. The company is currently deciding new prices for the service, but Mezak says the first several purchase orders will be integrated for free. After a certain limit is reached for the month, he says, buyers using the system will pay about $3 per purchase order.

Mezak says the start-up was formed to address the problem of integrating volumes of purchase and sales orders with a diverse set of trading partners that have various EDI or legacy systems.

He says to solve this problem, the SendOrder.com Web-based service provides business buyers and sellers with a real-time, color-coded view of all orders as they make their way through the various stages of fulfillment. The system acts as a central hub in cyberspace to which each trading partner can link.

Because SendOrder.com is a new company that is still trying to spread the word about it's services, buyers who have used the site to process purchase orders are currently hard to find. But several people who have done business with the company say their capabilities have made handling transactions a much easier process.

"My experience with SendOrder. com has been good," says Jose Rocha, vice president of marketing at Zytalis, an applications service provider that offers systems integration consulting. He says that recently, after closely analyzing what the company has to offer, Zytalis began suggesting SendOrder. com as an integration solution for purchase and sales orders to and from smaller to midsize companies. "It really is an Internet transaction exchange. It's an application where an organization can process all of its purchasing via the Internet.

"When you create a purchase order on their Web site, they have the capability to put it back into your own ERP system" so you don't have to re-enter the data, Rocha says. "This is really a good piece of software and I think it's going to help a lot of clients. It gives them a hosted alternative where they don't have to install complicated technology."

Rocha, who has looked at the system closely, adds that he thinks SendOrder. com is particularly good at handling volumes of orders between many different buyers and suppliers, which requires a solid understanding of database technology. "They are good at the database end of it, database design, and they also have data center management," he says. "They have designed a network architecture that is scalable to the millionth degree."

Jamie Caglia of Skyline Designs, a company that sells wood display fixtures, slatwall and tradeshow booths among other things, says she had the opportunity to see SendOrder. com's service in action when SendOrder purchased a tradeshow booth from her company.

Once SendOrder decided upon the booth it wanted to buy, Caglia sent the company a generalized quote via e-mail. The people at SendOrder sent the order back to her through their hub on the Internet.

Caglia says she was then able to go online and correct any mistakes she found on the sales order. But rather than having to resend it with the updated information, the hub linked directly into computer systems at both her company and at SendOrder, and the changes were made in real time.

"We were a supplier to them, but they actually became a supplier to us because we used their services," says Caglia. "It made things so much easier compared to the way we normally do things."