The Platform is the culmination of more than four years of development, testing, research and feedback from industry leaders (as well as intrepid clients during our very early releases).

The product was initially aimed (as some readers may remember) at solving the quoting problem electronically for contract manufacturers. When we got into this space more deeply, we found that it was a fairly well-solved problem.

But there was an even more fundamental problem in the marketplace as a whole: There existed no easy way to connect disparate systems across the supply chain. This was typically handled via a very expensive EDI solution (not feasible for many suppliers, distributors of manufacturers) or just via spreadsheets (a big drain on human resources).

So we went back to the drawing board, looked at the problem, and landed on the current version of the Orbweaver Platform – a sophisticated data protocol-switching engine, along with powerful integration tools. More simply put, it is a translator that allows data to easily flow between systems – both within a single company and across may companies in a supply chain.

The Platform “speaks” many different languages: EDI, XML, CXML, JSON, and, of course, Excel. (We even built a specific Add-In for Excel to allow for the easy movement of data into and out of spreadsheets.)

While quite useful for contract manufacturers, the Platform is gaining special traction with suppliers (both manufacturers and distributors). As a central link in the supply chain, they feel the data integration pain more acutely than others.

Distributors have price books and availability feeds from their suppliers (not to mention POs, expedites, invoices, etc.), as well as forecasts, embedded orders and POs and invoices with their own clients. There’s a tremendous amount of data flowing in and out of a typical supply business, and in many cases, the work falls to an IT staff or an overworked sales team to manage the data intake.

That is the pain we are working hard to solve. Moving data around the supply chain should be painless, and should not fall to high-value members of your team who have other full-time jobs. The Orbweaver Platform takes the grunt work out of managing your data so your team can get back to work growing your business.

We encourage you to learn more about the Platform, and what it can do for you. Give us 30 minutes for a free consultation and we’ll show you how you can respond to three times as many quotes – and increase sales as a result.