CHRIS: Yeah, I would. I think you did a great job. And I would say, just briefly extending on that, a lot of our clients work with distribution companies, 3PL companies that even have different warehouse locations, distribution locations, so we can work with them too. There is a lot of fidelity here.
The big takeaway is that, if you don't work with an integration platform or a partner that can deliver a group buyers platform with an integration platform capability, then you're going to have to figure this out. I mean, this is—I don't want to say it's a guaranteed requirement, but it most likely is, and it's the most likely low friction path. So you definitely want to dig into that.
Like you said, Ron, there are several other key areas. And just to go through a few of them, I think most obvious for everyone is the accounting ERP. You may have other similar systems, but typically it's going to be accounting back-office ERP, warehouse management. Possibly all of the above.
But ultimately we can integrate with basically any ERP system that has API access. We've already successfully integrated with 50 of the most popular ERPs on the face of the planet. And then, of course, really anything that has access, it can be API database, it can be EDI, any format where we can interact with it, flat file, you name it, we can interact with it.
This is really important because, the name of the game, at this phase, is to be able to enable self-service, not just for the end-user but also for your internal team, to get content pushed out to the site and allow that content to reflect the source of truth for wherever that is. So if you have a source of truth for inventory, a source of truth for pricing, maybe you have a PIM that is managing the actual marketing content. The list of different sources of truth can be quite large depending on how skilled-up your organization is.
And really, it's incumbent on your buying group platform or software, your group purchasing organization software, to be able to bring all of this data together and marry it effectively within the user's experience. Then it should leverage the right business logic so that, whenever we're integrating the ERP, the PIM, and the warehouse management system, then we are accurately reflecting the content with category/subcategory. All the attributes that we want to show on the site, the variations, possibly the customer-specific pricing, the locations in the inventory at the different locations.
This could be for distribution purposes. It could be for jurisdictional issues with—maybe it's a restricted chemical and we can't show it in certain regions, things like that. All of this then needs to be able to tie back to any inventory management and order management. Typically that's going to be through the above-mentioned systems. So ERPs, PIMs, warehouse for eCommerce, but it could be another model that you have. We do a lot of work with clients who have custom systems. Whenever someone gets at scale, they do weird stuff, but it's weird to the outside world because it's what works best for their business.
And you get to the point once you operate at scale where you realize that there isn't really an easy solution. And in most cases, if you're going to look at the cost-benefit analysis, you're going to get a lot of benefit for the spend.
If you're focusing on making everything seamless for the customer's workflow and for the business's workflow, instead of trying to make the business and the customer adjust to the software limitations. So we really want to make that a key takeaway from this integration aspect, we need to be able to get the data from the source of truth wherever that is, and you should be able to continue to operate your business and scale it up.
Obviously, if the business isn't doing something that is just optimized enough and we know that as a group, we're going to call that out and say this isn't best practice. It doesn't mean we're not willing to do it, but, “You may want to think about doing it [in an industry best-practices sort of] way. This is what a lot of folks in your specialty area do to handle this with their inventory.”
Or maybe you're trying to roll out something new and you're not very experienced with it. That's where having an experienced partner is going to help you save some time. But ultimately, the key takeaway with all these integrations is, they really need to be able to continue to operate the way that you have them designed. And the buying group software needs to pull all this data in seamlessly without you having to do a lot of manual work.