DiCentral is looking for a few good EDI experts. But the company’s also happy to take on a few good VARs who can recognize their customers’ need for Electronic Data Interchange and are willing to send a few referrals its way.
When suppliers send items to retail stores or other “trading partners,” such as Target or Costco, each chains imposes EDI standards that their suppliers must follow.
EDI enables the parties to speak to each other electronically in order to transmit information from sender to receiver in the format the receiver wants, explains Eric Braswell, DiCentral’s senior director of global channels.
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Depending on how many trading partners a supplier deals with and which types of documents those partners want sent via EDI—purchase orders and advanced shipping notices — the process can grow overly complex and open businesses up to making errors, for which they often get charged, Braswell says.
DiCentral’s job is to keep track of what each trading partner wants. Because the company’s EDI system is Web-based, if suppliers do not fulfill the specific requirements outlined by each of those retailers, transactions will not go through, and the DiCentral system sends error messages, Braswell says.
DiIntegrator serves as an on-premise tool that integrates with various ERP systems including Microsoft Dynamics AX and GP, QuickBooks and SAP Business One, with plans for Dynamics NAV and Sage Accpac integration in 2009, while DiWeb serves as the Web-based translation piece to send information to more than 800 trading partners.
Smaller businesses can use DiWeb to manage their supply chains for a much lower monthly fee than the cost of DiIntegrator. DiWeb costs about $200 to start and $30 per month, Braswell says.
SWK Technologies, based in Livingston, N.J., was one of the first VARs to come on board, closing its first deal in August 2006, before DiCentral officially launched a channel program. Today, the Sage reseller, which ranked No. 37 in Accounting Technology’s Top 100 VARs, has roughly 25 to 30 customers using DiWeb.
“DiCentral is good for 1 to 30 trading partners, all determined by customer needs,” says Dane DeSantis, SWK’s channel sales manager.
SWK markets its own Mapadoc application, which serves as the EDI integrator for MAS 90/200 and 500, similar to the way DiIntegrator does with other ERP systems.
However, before working with DiCentral, DeSantis didn’t have a tool to help customers who weren’t MAS shops get EDI compliant.
“If they didn’t want integration, I couldn’t do anything for them, now I can make them happy (by referring them to DiWeb,)” he says. “If they leave Sage and go to Microsoft or SAP because Sage is not working for them or they got bought, they already have DiCentral, which allows them not to have to buy something else.”
