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"SPS Commerce has provided Arena with an outsourced EDI solution that has exceeded my expectations. By outsourcing to SPS Commerce, Arena has been able to improve our productivity and enhance our supply chain relationships."
Keith Ritchie, Corporate IT Director, Arena Brands Inc.
Resources Case Studies
Kamino is an award-winning global logistics provider and freight forwarder founded in New York in 1969. The company operates 32 facilities in major global markets. Kamino first began its supply chain integration partnership with SPS Commerce, the leading provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) EDI services, in 2005. Kamino offers American retail vendors a flexible, outsourced solution to the traditional fixed costs of physical, company-owned warehouses as well as global visibility into their supply chain, and Kamino themselves then outsource the EDI services to SPS.
SaaS EDI = Integration Without the Hassle
Unlike traditional software implementations of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), the SaaS or multi-tenant model for B2B integration enables thousands of companies to share the specialized expertise, infrastructure and existing maps of a service provider. Nothing is hosted onsite, so the solution can be accessed from any location with no onsite expertise or infrastructure is necessary. International factories or sourcing companies may have limited or no technical infrastructure and staff, making onsite EDI software implementations cost-prohibitive. With SaaS, this barrier is removed.
As a result, the SPS Commerce partnership has provided Kamino International with the ability to offer flexible, global supply chain solutions to small and medium-sized American enterprises importing and selling goods to major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and other major U.S. retailers.
Every CPG manufacturer doing business with major retailers like Target or Wal-Mart are required to build and upgrade integration code—mappings—to allow their computers to share information with the retailer’s computers in compliance with the retailer’s business rules. Thus, there are hundreds or even thousands of manufacturers creating the same maps, each one paying their own in-house technical staff to essentially do the same work. These retailers have raised the bar so high on EDI requirements that the cost to enter the market has often been prohibitive and the complexity to do so even higher. The even greater challenge to the sellers of CPG or FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) has been that each American retailer map is unique and different.
A New Competitive Advantage
Today, Kamino offers vendors a flexible, outsourced logistics solution to the traditional fixed costs of physical, company-owned warehouses as well as global visibility into their supply chain using SPS’ SaaS EDI services to ensure data compliance with their retail customers.
By partnering and outsourcing Kamino’s EDI department to SPS Commerce, Kamino is able to provide competitive and flexible solutions to its 3PL customers. Electronic documents such as purchase orders, advance ship notices (ASNs) and UCC 128 barcode label data can now be sent to thousands of supplier/retailer combinations with ease and confidence of data integrity.
By leveraging SPS’ EDI services, Kamino has:
- Increased market share in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) vertical
- Improved its ability to compete with major logistics companies
- Created the ability to sell a complete supply chain solution including an EDI component to the Retail Vertical Market Sector quickly and economically
- Enabled its customers to focus more on selling their products and not worry about logistics, fines, mis-ships and chargebacks
- Reduced internal IT costs
- Provided green or environmentally-friendly options using outsourced EDI to significantly reduce traditional high paper volume and transportation usage
“Kamino has freed itself, and its 3PL customers, from the restrictive software EDI model by opting to outsource our EDI to SPS Commerce and using their pre-built maps already in use by other vendors. The collaboration/integration between Kamino and SPS Commerce’s outsourced EDI solution is innovative because it has created a robust, flexible and competitive solution to SME businesses that they may not have had, or would have to pay prohibitive pricing that would create a barrier to enter the marketplace.”
–Lesley Hume, Vice President Sales and Marketing – USA, Kamino
“Artemis Woman is a women-owned beauty appliance company – designing professional home spa beauty appliances for women’s everyday beauty needs. Growing at an annual compound rate of over 100%, our customers range from high end specialty stores and catalogs to large mass retailers. Finding the right 3rd party distribution and logistics party was a key decision in our organization. Kamino has proven to deliver an excellent level of service: a competent and responsive staff; web-based visibility to our distribution and inventory transactions; interface with our EDI vendor, SPS Commerce; and streamlined transportation of goods directly from our factories to their warehouse. We are pleased to be building on a long term partnership with Kamino and SPS.”
- Linda O'Shaughnessy, CFO at Artemis Woman
