When Jonas Temple joined Top 40 supplier The Magnet Group (asi/68507) in 2013 as a software developer, he was shocked – his exact reaction was along the lines of “Are you kidding me?” – to enter an industry where some customers still relied on fax machines to send in their orders. Other orders would come in via phone or email, which, as far as Temple was concerned, was just about as antiquated.

Temple’s previous employer, which manufactured refrigeration valves for HVAC systems, used electronic data interchange (EDI), a standard method of accepting order invoices that has been used by retailers and other industries for decades already. “That was just the way you did things,” says Temple, who is now chief information officer for Magnet. “For most big customers, information just flowed that way. I was a little taken aback by the lack of integration in the promotional products industry.”

For many suppliers and distributors over the years, technology was almost an afterthought. Bigger companies were often reliant on clunky homegrown systems – revolutionary perhaps when first implemented, but less useful and harder to maintain and update over time. And the smaller industry players were likely operating in the kind of stripped-down atmosphere where processing an order and keeping records still relied on pen and paper.

Slowly but surely, promo companies are modernizing. Temple, Counselor’s 2018 Technology Executive of the Year, implemented APIs to enable electronic orders at The Magnet Group; the supplier was one of the first companies to integrate its product data into platforms like ESP. “I was kind of the guinea pig for that,” Temple says. Industry collaboration on PromoStandards, a series of supply chain integration standards aimed at improved efficiencies, has also yielded benefits. “That’s helped us a lot to get inventory data and cut down on phone calls with people asking about order status,” Temple says.

Dale Denham, senior vice president and chief information officer at Top 40 distributor Geiger (asi/202900) and one of the founders of PromoStandards, is encouraged by the industry’s momentum. “I think we’re moving in the right direction,” he says. “We’re moving much more in line with the rest of the world.

“We’re still at a deficit overall though.”

The coronavirus may be the push that companies need to embrace the digital technology revolution. Still, the promotional products industry can’t rely on just a few far-seeing tech leaders to bring it into the 21st century. It requires companies across the industry, both large and small, to commit to the vision. And it isn’t necessarily about which software solutions they choose, but more how they go about implementing that solution and whether their teams embrace technological change – or resist it at every turn.

Rolling Out New Tech
Today’s technology promises a lot of solutions to long-standing business problems. But beware of going on a mad shopping spree to fix all those issues. “If you just keep building things to solve today’s immediate problems, you end up with a bunch of disconnected solutions,” Denham says. “While I don’t believe in being on the bleeding edge of technology, I believe in being ahead of the curve so you’re not late to meeting your clients’ needs. Without a strong, business-oriented and ethical vision, you’ll end up making choices that leave you with legacy systems that are hard to support.”

The Magnet Group had one of those legacy systems, using a sort of Frankensteined tech solution with “three or four different packages that were bolted together,” says Temple, one of which was written in-house and couldn’t easily be exported or accessed remotely. For the last two years, however, the supplier has been in the process of selecting and implementing a brand-new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and began rolling it out at one of its divisions a couple of months ago. “We came up with a pretty aggressive implementation plan to try to get it across the finish line,” Temple says.

Top 40 supplier SanMar (asi/84863) is also in the midst of updating its ERP system. “Our existing ERP is decades old, and it’s built from the ground up,” says Mike Knapick, chief information officer at SanMar. But the “care and feeding of a homegrown system” is intensive. “It takes a team to build and then to continue evolving over time.”

Instead of feeling compelled to build software from the ground up, Knapick notes that nowadays there are a ton of package solutions that are customizable and offer ongoing support. Another thing many industry companies are taking advantage of is all the cloud-based apps available. That’s how Steven Farag helped modernize Campus Ink, the Illinois-based decorated-apparel shop he co-owns. He spends around $2,000 a month on a slew of web-based software tools – everything from Shopify and Stripe to streamline e-commerce to Spotify accounts for employees so they can listen to the music they like. “I’m not scared of investing in good technology,” Farag says. He treats technology as if it were just another employee (one that never calls in sick either): “It’s still my least expensive employee, and it powers the whole entire company.”

“It’s a complete mind shift to look at technology from an opportunity perspective instead of a challenge perspective.” Sue Timbo, Hexa | Custom

For smaller companies especially, it would be cost-prohibitive to develop all the tools in-house that can be had for relatively small monthly subscription fees in the app market. “It would require a six-figure engineer to do all the things apps can do, and the engineer might not even be doing a good job of it,” Farag says. “If you tell me you’re going to build the software yourself, I’d say, ‘Get out of 1999.’ There are so many more powerful companies out there that can get you where you want to be.”

Still, relying on a bunch of cloud-based apps rather than a more unified tech system supported by an in-house team brings its own challenges. “If you end up buying a bunch of cloud-based solutions, who manages them?” Denham asks. “Every small business is far better off because of Microsoft 365, but it’s still a pain when they upgrade something. … The drawback to the cloud is that when they decide something changes, it changes and there’s nothing you can do.”

Going All-In
Like Temple at The Magnet Group, Sue Timbo was a bit surprised when she entered the promo products industry as a supplier last year. Timbo is the general manager of Hexa | Custom (asi/60557) in Boulder, CO, a customizable premium outerwear company that started in the retail space. “The industry is still incredibly manual and labor-intensive and prone to error,” she says. “There’s been a void in the industry. Distributors are begging for suppliers to advance customization, provide more color choices and faster turnaround.”

When Timbo was first learning about the promo industry, she shadowed a distributor to see how custom orders were done. “I watched the number of steps it took to complete just one order and thought, ‘There just has to be a better way.’”

“When we see an opportunity to apply technology to make our business better or to bring more business to the company, we jump on it.” Jonas Temple, The Magnet Group

For Hexa, that better way involves automation, which allows distributors to fully customize premium down jackets and vests from the inside out, choosing from a variety of size, fit, feature and color options. “The more you’re able to automate in your business, the more you can creatively think out of the box,” Timbo says. “It’s a complete mind shift to look at technology as an opportunity instead of a challenge.”

Hexa is a prime example of a company’s total commitment to a technological vision. The factory production line is “100% software-driven,” with every station equipped with a screen that receives order specifications, and an automated aerial conveyor that transports products from one station to another to increase accuracy and efficiency, Timbo says. Thanks to that robust investment in technology, Hexa can ship fully customized outerwear, with orders of 300 units or less delivered within three weeks.

In a similar vein, print-on-demand outfits have emerged to streamline e-commerce and company stores. “If you install our app, you have access to 100 different products,” says Christopher Hamze, owner of Infinite Supply (asi/62582). “When someone purchases, we make the order and fulfill it. It takes out a lot of steps that were done manually in the past.”

“We’re trying to dummy-proof orders,” Hamze adds. “There’s not a single point in the process that a person has to touch an order. It’s all automated.”

Using a print-on-demand solution to handle one-off orders also helps distributors limit inventory risk, says Chris Robbins, vice president of sales at Custom Color Solutions (asi/47905). “The end-customer doesn’t want inventory anymore,” he adds. “We’re seeing distributors trying to get out of fulfillment and looking for solutions they don’t have to own or operate a warehouse.”

Ultimately, technology is about more than just buying the right software or adding another layer of automation. It’s also about analyzing your business practices and figuring out which procedures are critical to your success – and which can be retired. “I know everybody in the company got sick of me asking this question,” Temple says, “but whenever someone said, ‘We need to do this process,’ I would ask, ‘Why?’ and if the answer was, ‘Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it,’ I would challenge it.”

It’s not about adding unnecessary bells and whistles, but rather supporting and enhancing the growth of the business through technology. “We try to look to the future as much as possible,” Temple says. “When we see an opportunity to apply technology to make our business better or to bring more business to the company, we jump on it.”

THERESA HEGEL is the executive editor of digital content for ASI. Contact: thegel@asicentral.com; follow her on Twitter at @theresahegel.