Cloud ERP Supports Growing Promotional Products Companies

At a glance, the promotional products industry seems straightforward enough: work with corporate clients to design logos and messaging, then place those designs on everything from t-shirts to mugs to keychains. Peel back the layers and you’ll find a complex enterprise made up of many moving parts, each of which must sync perfectly with the next in order to achieve the desired results.

“Promotional products is probably one of the most complex industries I’ve ever worked with due to the diversification of responsibilities,” said Cassius Kellogg, Director at Bryant Park Consulting, a NetSuite Alliance Partner. Those responsibilities include controlling the end-to-end process of receiving the materials or “blank goods” from a supplier, designing the logos, sending the blank goods to a decorator and drop-shipping the final products to an event, association or individual company.

This guide will examine the challenges that these systems present for companies in the promotional products industry and explain the value that a cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution presents when organizations bring all of their core business activities onto a single software platform.

In the U.S., the promotional products industry is a $15.6 billion sector with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.8%1 . Made up of 40,742 companies that employ about 150,000 people, the industry designs and distributes promotional products (e.g. key chains, magnets and pens) and also provides advertising-related services like sign lettering, painting services and window signs. Highly fragmented and spread across the U.S., the industry encompasses everything from smaller enterprises with 15-50 employees up to those with $10 million in annual revenues to operations with hundreds of associations and more than $250 million in revenues.

“For best results, promotional products companies need one spot where they can see and interact with all of their information,” said Kellogg. “They don’t get that from their aging disparate systems.”

Click here to read the full article in PDF format for how BPC collaborates with NetSuite to help spur growth of promotional products companies.