Customer Success Story
Designs for Health improves customer experience and drives global expansion by automating processes with Celigo
“Celigo is a Designs for Health success story. It has been perfect for our strategy for growth because it has allowed us to really serve our customers in the best way possible, as quickly as possible. We make the whole customer experience better, and when we make our customers happy, we increase our revenue. It’s a huge win for us to just be able to do this.”
Wasseem Elkhatib
Information Technology Data Services
at Designs for Health
Customer
Designs for Health
Industry
Retail, Ecommerce
Headquarters
Palm Coast, FL
Partner:
Products Used
Celigo with Shopify, Amazon FBA, NetSuite, Snowflake, Hubspot, Shopify – NetSuite Integration App, Amazon- NetSuite Integration App, WooCommerce – NetSuite Integration App
About
Designs for Health offers high-quality dietary supplements and medical foods to health care professionals and their patients. Designs for Health has been the healthcare professionals’ trusted source for product innovation, leadership in clinical education, and practice development solutions for practitioners worldwide.
Background
Designs for Health was one of NetSuite’s first customers (since 1999), when the company was still called NetLedger. Designs for Health provides premium, high-quality vitamins, and supplements directly through its brand, as well as white labeling its products for private brands, with millions of orders per year.
Today the company has approximately 500 employees with operations in North America, Europe, and Australia.
The Challenge
Using such a long-standing NetSuite instance, the Designs for Health’s data and operations grew exponentially bigger and more complex due to years of customizations. In particular, with each private label added, the company custom-built a solution to manage inventory and fulfillment with each one of its partners.
In an effort to scale, the team had previously integrated these systems with another connector. However, the solution lacked functionality and customization features. As a result, the solution required as many as four dedicated people to resolve integration errors and push orders manually on a daily basis.
“We’re very big, but we have dozens and dozens of low-volume stores,” said Wasseem Elkhatib, Information Technology Data Services at Designs for Health. “It’s really hard to go into each connector and see how many errors we have. And that work adds no value to the company.”
With the company aggressively scaling globally, the setup was a risk to its business model and no longer tenable. It was time to find a more powerful solution that was robust and easier to implement and maintain.
“
It allowed us to grow and evolve. The sales teams and IT believe in us because we can turn things around so quickly. It just opened doors for more business. We’ve been able to do so much more and focus on decision-making and making customers happy, as opposed to making sure orders got through. This is pure cash flow savings from all departments.
”
The Solution
The company initiated a search for an integration platform, looking into platforms such as Workato, CartRover, Tray.io, Boomi, and Celigo. The complex requirements quickly narrowed the choices to Boomi and Celigo as the only viable candidates.
The team initiated a free trial of both Boomi and Celigo to test the experience of integrating and automating processes between Shopify and NetSuite.
“We put one store up with Celigo, and it worked seamlessly,” said Elkhatib. “There was richer functionality, and Celigo’s interface allowed us to capture errors and identify patterns that we could use to improve our operations.”
After a quick and successful trial run, Designs for Health selected Celigo over Boomi and began the process of transferring dozens of private-label stores, as well as its Amazon FBA process, onto the Celigo platform.
“I was amazed at what Celigo was able to do,” said Elkhatib. “Once we built a template, it was easy to duplicate for other stores. This was a huge win with our strategic Australia expansion: it allowed us to bring in a pretty big volume store in the millions of dollars to be fully automated in our system, saving 40-plus hours a week for six or seven reps in Australia alone.”
After successfully moving the storefronts and Amazon FBA to Celigo, the company will leverage Celigo for all its automation needs, starting with a Sage-Snowflake integration of its manufacturing data.
“We know that Celigo has the capability of tapping into data and transforming it in whatever way, shape, or form before dumping it into Snowflake,” said Elkhatib.
“Because we have so many data sources, it was a double win to be able to leverage Celigo for this as an existing vendor.”
Next, the team will be expanding use cases into payment gateways and payouts reconciliation to accelerate the time to close and automate order-to-cash processes between Hubspot CRM and NetSuite ERP.
Bottomline
Using Celigo, Designs for Health has redirected significant resources to improve the entire customer experience and drive its global expansion.
“Celigo has allowed us to really make our legacy system work for us flexibly. Instead of having to change our complex systems, we were able to use a tool that can work seamlessly with our system because of the capabilities and flexibility that it has,” said Elkhatib.
With the implementation of the stores alone, Elkhatib said the company has already been able to redirect at least 10 full-time resources into more strategic activities. “Instead of inputting orders, they’re contacting customers and making customers happy,” said Elkhatib.
Today, stores can be added in five minutes, errors are extremely rare, and finance has much better visibility into the state of operations.
“Celigo allowed us to grow and evolve. The sales teams and IT believe in us because we can turn things around so quickly, said Elkhatib. “It just opened doors for more business. We’ve been able to do so much more and focus on decision-making and making customers happy, as opposed to making sure orders got through. This is pure cash flow savings from all departments.”
“Celigo has been perfect for our strategy for growth because it has allowed us to really serve our customers in the best way possible, as quickly as possible. We make the whole customer experience better, and when we make our customers happy, that’s where we increase our revenue. It’s a huge win for us to just be able to do this.”
“I’m not going to lie, I got a promotion because of Celigo,” added Elkhatib.
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