BizSlate offers cloud-based supply-chain management tool for small companies

BizSlate unveiled a supply-chain management tool for small medium-sized businesses today.

Until recently, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been an expensive, complicated proposition, offered by the likes of SAP, Oracle, and Sage to large companies that can afford multi-hundred-thousand-dollar packages and consulting contracts that can run into millions of dollars.

But small businesses have supply chains, too, and getting a handle on what’s where is an increasingly important competitive point in the global marketplace.

BizSlate’s ERP solution offers small businesses, typically with 100 employees or fewer, the ability to monitor and diagnose supply chain and operational issues as efficiently as larger companies, but with a lower cost. It’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, delivered over the internet. Among the features BizSlate offers are support for the following:

• Placing orders to factories for products
• Receiving products into inventory
• Receiving customer purchase orders
• Generating sales orders and fulfillment documents
• Printing pick tickets, packing slips, and shipping labels
• Shipping products to customers
• Creating customer invoices
• Automatically syncing with QuickBooks for general ledger and financial reporting purposes

BizSlate unveiled its ERP solution today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Above: CEO Mark Kalman

“It is exciting to fulfill our mission of helping [small and medium businesses] overcome the challenges they face managing their supply chain,” said cofounder and chief executive Mark Kalman (pictured) in an email to VentureBeat. “SMBs need to remain agile, they need rapid access to key information from anywhere in the world, and they need to maximize efficiency in their warehouse and back-office.”

Although it’s delivered over the internet, BizSlate’s technology is based on Java and Oracle on the back end. The company has raised a total of $370,000 to date from Kalman and from BizSlate’s 19-company customer steering committee, each of which contributed an average of $18,000.

These customers have been instrumental in helping BizSlate develop its ERP offering, Kalman said, providing input, guidance, and feedback from the company’s earliest stages.

Previously, Kalman was co-founder and chief executive of eZCom Software Inc., a SaaS Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) provider focused on helping SMBs streamline supply chain operations around EDI relationships. While at eZCom, he realized that almost half of his customers were using QuickBooks and were having difficulty integrating their own supply chains with Intuit’s tool. He left eZCom to start BizSlate in October, 2011.

The company is based in New York, New York.

BizSlate is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo and screenshot courtesy BizSlate.