Since the emergence of b2c online marketplaces in the early 2000s, the way we’re buying goods has been drastically changed. The Internet made sourcing and purchasing of items for personal or business use convenient and fast. Yet despite all technological advances a lot of business to business transactions nowadays are still handled via telephone, email or cumbersome software solutions. Here at Zaikio we believe that it doesn't have to be this way.
We believe buying and selling industry goods should be as fast, easy and convenient as you know it from your personal purchases. With the Zaikio Procurement App we set ourselves the goal of building a holistic procurement process with the same ease of use we all enjoy when we shop for ourselves. For everyone in the print industry! No matter if you’re in the business of supplying print partners or if you are a printer yourself, we want to make your life easier. But how?
When people think about digital procurement processes or e-commerce, the first thing that comes to mind is a webshop. A web interface like Amazon, where they can browse articles, put them in a shopping basket and then checkout. But e-commerce does not equal webshops. And while our Procurement App offers all those familiar features, they are not at the core of our endeavour.
The reality looks like this: Printers already use many tools on a daily basis: An MIS or ERP system, maybe warehouse management software and of course they have a lot of existing and trusted relationships with suppliers and dealers. We don't want to change any of those. Instead we want to make communication faster and easier by providing fully API-based ordering from inside the tools that are already there. And only if this is not sufficient, the fallback is our very own web interface.
But how can we achieve this, especially in conjunction with legacy systems? By bringing everybody together: the suppliers and the makers of the software tools. As a team, we take care of the technical integration, the testing and the maintaining of a healthy connection. So that the printers can simply just order without further complexity and especially without any integration burden on their part.
We’re offering fully documented, comprehensible and easy to use state of the art APIs within the Zaikio Procurement App (and all of our other software products for that matter). We strongly believe that bridging the gaps between isolated systems will make the life of everyone in the industry easier and more profitable in the long run.
So whether you use your existing tools or our web app, we cover your entire process, both for suppliers and for printers. Manage your partners including associated contracts and contract conditions? Check! Create or easily browse product catalogues like you’re used to from e-commerce giants? Check! Effortlessly build up a purchase order like a shopping cart and send it to your supplier? Check. Track all your in and outbound deliveries? Also check! And on top of that it comes with a clean and intuitive interface that doesn’t need professionals to explain to you how it works.
The Zaikio Procurement App is currently being tested with a few selected customers and suppliers. We are already cooperating with many more suppliers and software makers to get them onto the platform quickly. In early autumn of 2020 we will start our closed beta, where you can register to participate. We will tell you when we are ready. If everything goes smoothly, we should be up and running for everybody later this year. So stay tuned!
In the previous article we talk about how data exchange between different systems works with our product Mission Control.