ASI's ESP: Industry’s First E-Commerce-Enabled Product Platform
Integrated connections between distributors and dozens of suppliers with billions in industry sales
TREVOSE, PA – June 6, 2016 –The Advertising Specialty Institute® (ASI) today announced ESP® will soon become the promotional product industry’s first e-commerce-enabled platform, giving distributors near real-time product, inventory, pricing and order status updates from integrated suppliers, along with digital purchase orders submitted into supplier workflows.
ASI will demonstrate the all-new ESP platform at ASI Show® Chicago, Tuesday, July 12, through Thursday, July 14. The annual show features a special keynote Q&A with national political pundits Mary Matalin and James Carville.
ASI is now working with dozens of suppliers – representing tens of thousands of products and billions in industry sales – to fully integrate ESP with supplier systems and workflows by mid-summer. By the end of the year, a quarter-million products will be e-commerce-enabled in ESP.
This means distributors who opt in will get instant access to product inventory and the most updated pricing. Distributors will also be able to place an order through ESP and get order and shipping notifications in ESP, all from the supplier.
“This is a game-changer for the promotional products industry – the biggest ASI announcement in years,” said Timothy M. Andrews, president and chief executive officer of ASI. “The full-service ESP platform means greater trust, greater data integrity and more peace of mind. For anyone confronting increasingly independent clients and potent online competitors, speed and efficiency are critical to gaining a competitive edge.”
The e-commerce-enabled ESP platform will be integrated with ASI’s SmartBooks® and ProfitMaker® and Intuit QuickBooks™.
ASI’s ESP platform includes an open architecture that will allow easy integration into any other order management or financial packages, and several distributors and software vendors are engaged in development already.
Last month, ASI announced that over 20,000 users from 9,500 distributor companies are now enjoying thelatest upgrade to ESP.. The ESP rollout continues until mid-summer, with more and more companies automatically receiving free upgrades to the most powerful version of ESP yet.
“Three years of effort by ASI’s world-class technology team has already made quick, vital data sharing and communication widely available across our entire industry,” said Andrews. “Today, the end-to-end workflow – from product inputting to price quoting and inventory to order processing – is becoming straightforward and uncomplicated. ASI is offering users nothing less than the most flexible, complete, modern database in the history of the promotional products industry.”
For more information on ESP, contact Julie Murphy, ASI senior vice president of distributor services, at jmurphy@asicentral.com, or Christy Tramdaks, ASI director of integration solutions, atctramdaks@asicentral.com.
About ASI
The Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI®) serves a network of 25,000 suppliers, distributors and decorators in the $22 billion promotional products industry. ASI’s flagship product, the technology platform ESP®, manages the industry’s entire supply and marketing chain. ASI also produces award-winning digital and print content, live events and educational programs that enable companies in 61 countries to be more efficient, productive and profitable. ASI’s Counselor® magazine provides the most authoritative business content in the industry, and the ASI Certification Program features 500+ live and online education courses for over 40,000 professionals. The company, family owned and operated since 1962, is proud to have been consistently ranked among the “Best Places to Work” in Philadelphia and Bucks County, PA. For more info: www.asicentral.com.
