Systems providing supply chain visibility and control over Logistics functions have been available for over a decade to those with the funds and staff to support them. These enterprise systems can handle the volume and detail of information necessary to enable it. According to Leetzow, these systems have significant value; however the cost of acquisition and ownership has been beyond the means of most small to medium Enterprises.

Agile Networks and other companies in this new market segment offer more affordable systems with starting prices in the $25,000 range. More importantly, this smaller investment is almost always justified by an ROI of less than one year.

- What is the current focus of your company's business?

Leetzow - In order to avoid compliance charge backs from retailers, today's suppliers are complying through manual processes and a multiple system approach.

Agile Networks focus has been extending our current Enterprise Web Services product portfolio down to small to medium Enterprises to automate the pack/ship/ASN process to comply with customer requirements.

- How has this focus changed in the last 2 years?

Leetzow - We have gone from a capital investment licensing model to a subscription basis on our lower tier products; this goes hand in hand with SPS Commerce software as a service offering and eliminates the hurdle of capitalizing the purchase of software.

- What are your current initiatives?

Leetzow - Agile is expanding upon our growing partner community in the ERP space. We are pre-building connectors for our products in order to create a replicable business model that can be used in a wide variety of implementations. Being able to re-use a standard set of components lowers the threshold of cost for packing and shipping products.

As this happens, we are making advanced capabilities available to the tier two and three level companies that have, until now only been affordable to tier one enterprises.

- How has the market for EDI changed with the impact of the Internet?

Leetzow - The market for EDI has never been stronger than today. The internet is making possible the delivery of a new suite of SaaS tools for EDI. This has had the effect of lowering the cost of retail compliance by a large margin, offering a price effective solution to small suppliers, where as only expensive and custom solution to EDI were available just a few years ago.

As an example, carriers are now offering rating/routing applications that are available as web services. If a company wants to get rate information for FedEx for example, they can simply connect to the FedEx programming Interface and use it.

This is in marked contrast to having to create a software application and Import the carrier rating and routing data into it. Advances like this lower cost and widen the ability to enter the market. The function is the same. The outcome is the same. It's just that deployment cost is reduced.

- What are the greatest challenges for your customers?

Leetzow - The greatest challenges I hear from clients every day is "how do we comply with our trading partners... profitably?" Historically they either accepted the retailer fines for the lack of compliance as a cost of doing business or simply found other non EDI demanding outlets for their products.

Fines are typical, and unfortunately they have even become profit centers for many hubs. The hub identifies the mistake like mis-packs, short-ships, etc., and imposes a fine for each. On top of the fine, of course, the supplier still has the costs involved in correcting the mistake. One of our customers represented that fines accounted for 7% of the cost of sale. That may not sound like a lot, but they are a small company. More to the point, those fines were direct hits on their profit margin, so how many additional correctly executed sales did the company have to make in order to get back that lost profit?

- How are you helping your customers address these challenges?

Leetzow - With the implementation of Agile's pack and ship process, companies with Sales volumes as small as 5 million dollars per year can now cost Effectively meet the visibility requirements of large retailers. This puts these small suppliers on an even footing with world class fortune 1000 Companies. In many ways we have leveled the playing field for small businesses to compete.

Using our system, these companies can automatically create carrier and vendor compliant labels. If retailers have to receive shipments manually they can charge [fine] the sender for hurting their workflow. And at this time there is no standard format for the labels among hubs. Our system produces labels to the specifications of each retailer.

- What is your stance on the eC-BP organization and tenets?

Leetzow - The sole reason that we have been successful with this move to smaller business is system replication. Standards save everyone time and money by allowing replication of these systems to a broad range of uses. Historically without standards, every system was custom developed, and their maintenance was costly. These expenses kept small business from being able to deliver advanced functionality to the retail community.