EASTON, PA – December 22, 2014 – Essent® and the Advertising Specialty Institute® (ASI) today announced a strategic partnership to offer ASI’s ESP® product database as part of Essent business management and ecommerce systems.

Essent is the developer of a fully-integrated business management system for the promotional products industry and ASI is the provider of the industry-leading product research database ESP. Under the agreement, Compass™ Business Management System and SiteBuilder™ ecommerce content management system customers can now access ESP’s robust database of promotional items from more than 3,500 supplier companies.

At no additional charge, distributors who already use Compass will be able to access ESP from right within the Essent tool. Users must have an active ESP license to access full search results.

"The vision of Essent is to provide a fully-integrated business and commerce solutions that enhance business productivity,” said Eric Alessi, Essent president and chief executive officer. "That starts with distributor product research and goes all the way to decorators and suppliers through our comprehensive technology ecosystem. Our partnership with ASI is a powerful extension of this vision.”

The partnership brings together world-class technology solutions from two industry leaders. ASI’s ESP is the industry’s first, largest and most advanced sourcing system, providing one-stop shopping for rich, accurate product details through a fast, precise industry-specific search engine. Essent is the largest provider of end-to-end workflow solutions that automate the entire business pipeline.

"We’re excited to partner with Essent to ensure that valued clients have easy, reliable access to millions of precise product details, allowing users to run their business more efficiently than ever,” said Timothy M. Andrews, president and chief executive officer of ASI, the largest media, marketing and education organization serving the industry.

Over 46,000 users in ASI’s flagship ESP shopping engine conducted nearly 73 million product, supplier and decorator searches to date in 2014 across all platforms and products in ESP and ESP Mobile. In the last year alone, ASI’s User Experience and Product Development teams have made 150 enhancements to the ESP platform, resulting in new features, stronger functionality, faster speeds and a superior experience. Visual search technology is now available in ESP and ESP Mobile™, allowing distributors to upload images to ESP for an instant scan for similar items.

Essent solutions are used by progressive distributors and suppliers – including numerous organizations in the Top 50 – to process millions of transactions per month, adding up to billions of dollars per year.

The combination of Essent and ASI streamlines workflow for customer relationship management, proposals, quoting and sales – all the way through supplier relationship management, order processing, fulfillment, customer invoicing and supplier billing. Using product information from ESP is the first step to delivering what Essent calls a "well-formed order” to decorators and suppliers – orders free of time- and money-sapping errors and omissions.

"Essent creates software solutions for the way distributors, decorators and suppliers want do business,” said Bryan Sheaffer, Essent VP of sales and promotional industry specialist. "All ESP users, no matter their size, now have the option of using the premier industry business system. And, large distributors now have the power of enterprise-grade, industry-specific ERP integrated with ESP.

Essent is an innovative provider of fully-integrated business management software solutions and services for process-intensive industries. Essent solutions combine flexible workflow management with innovative technologies that automate repetitive tasks and simplify business processes. Since 1981, Essent has offered the systems, service, software, and support critical to success in today's highly-competitive marketplace. Visit Essent at www.essent.com and on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

About ASI
The Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI) is the largest media, marketing and education organization serving the promotional products industry, with a network of over 25,000 distributors and suppliers throughout North America. ASI leads the industry in technology solutions, providing cloud-based e-commerce, enterprise resource planning software (ERP) and customer relationship management software (CRM). ESP Web® is the industry’s leading tool for sourcing hundreds of thousands of products. A family-owned business since 1962, ASI also provides online research, marketing, advertising opportunities, trade shows, education, award-winning magazines, newsletters, custom websites and catalogs to help members sell, market and promote their brands. Visit ASI at www.asicentral.com and on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the CEO’s blog.