A supplier comments

January 2006

Suppliers are just as quick to sing the praises of e-procurement as the colleges and universities they sell into.

The Fastenal Corporation is a national company selling industrial and construction supplies. Brian Fihn, Fastenal's e-business manager, says their business that is generated electronically represents about 14 percent of their overall sales. He expects that to grow to 25 percent in the next five years. Combined with the company's overall sales growth at 28 percent annually, the numbers quickly add up.

"We think this is the trend of the future," says Fihn. Colleges these days, and especially at the CFO level, understand the benefits of e-procurement and the cost savings that can be realized using e-procurement platforms."

Brian Fihn

Fihn says Fastenal works with 25 different e-procurement platforms. He considers working with SciQuest to be a plus, since one of his company's objectives is to grow their higher education business. They also like the fact that they only had to register with SciQuest once, and they now can process transactions with any of SciQuest's customers. "We have one connection to SciQuest, which basically opens up the entire market for us to all their customers," Fihn remarks.

When a university orders, that order is transmitted to the Fastenal headquarters in Winona, Minnesota. After some processing, the order is then transmitted to the nearest of 1,700 Fastenal offices for delivery -- all in less than five minutes.

Finh says that once online ordering began to catch on, most companies preferred procurement systems rather than ordering from web sites. "It took several years for the Oracle's, PeopleSoft's, and the SAP's to develop their e-procurement modules, but now we see most of the customers turning in that direction."

Finh says Fastenal worked with Sterling Commerce to develop customized software to translate 25 different e-procurement system formats, so orders do not need to be re-keyed. "SciQuest is one of the good ones, because they adopted a commerce format called cXML that is prevalent in the marketplace." Finh wishes other e-procurement providers would follow suit in standardizing their formats and technologies.

"Another benefit of working with SciQuest is their hosted environment. It makes new customers come onstream with us quickly" he adds. "I'm just now getting sales from customers through other platforms installed in early 2004."