integrator.io is Zoro’s Intuitive iPaaS Tool

About

Zoro offers industrial supplies, tools, MRO products, and other items to small businesses and individuals. Launched in 2011 with 180,000 products, Zoro today offers millions of SKUs from over 7,000 brands. Zoro is a subsidiary of Grainger, a Fortune 500 industrial supply company.

Background

In addition to offering online purchases, Zoro provides customers the option of phone orders by calling customer service agents to order products. As a result, agents are taking credit card information over the telephone. Due to PCI compliance requirements, Grainger mandated that Zoro implement P2PE (Point-to-Point Encryption) keypads for agents to securely receive and transmit tokenized credit card information to their ERP system, NetSuite.

Zoro partnered with CyberSource and Bluefin for the payment capture and security, and chose Celigo integrator.io as the integration platform to connect these applications with the ERP application. Zoro was quite happy with the Celigo integration which was up and running quickly and met the PCI compliance requirements within their existing processes. As Zoro expands their e-commerce business and move their focus to include larger enterprise businesses, they are facing different integration requirements.

The Challenge

Zoro acquired several large business customers that have different procurement requirements from Zoro’s original customer base of consumers and small businesses. Kiko Stefanov, IT Director at Zoro, was tasked with building and managing this new e-commerce business and finding a way to integrate these customers with Zoro’s ERP.

Kiko understood that he needed an integration platform that would be nimble enough to support his current and future customers’ varying integration needs; some required full EDI support, others sent orders via Excel or CSV files, and others used e-commerce platforms. The integration had to be easy enough for non-technical customer service agents and junior developers to monitor, maintain, and if needed, build integrations to meet the requirements of new customers.

The Solution

The first project on Kiko’s list was to automate orders from customers that were sending them via Excel or CSV files. In fact, some customers were sending multiple Excel spreadsheets to Zoro every day which customer service agents had to manually enter into the ERP. Kiko’s goal was to off load the bulk of this manual work while still giving agents the ability to review orders as they were received.

When Kiko was managing the credit card payment capture project, he was impressed with Celigo’s integrator.io intuitive platform. He turned to the platform to see if he could quickly automate this process. Kiko was able to easily figure out how to use integrator.io to set up the integration so that customer order files were automatically sent to the ERP without any manual intervention.

“The initial setup and mapping of integrator.io with NetSuite was easy,” said Kiko. “The Celigo tech folks were a great help whenever I had questions.”

Zoro has additional projects that they are considering for Celigo. For example, they need to integrate with a new B2B procurement marketplace. They have customers that require EDI integrations. The Finance department plan on using Celigo’s Cash Application Manager product to automate cash application process – from automatic transfers of bank files for customer payments made via lockbox, wire transfer, or ACH into NetSuite to automatic invoice matching of customer payments to save the accounting team countless hours of manual work.

Bottomline

Celigo integrator.io is helping Kiko meet his goal of off loading much of the manual data entry that support agents were having to perform as a result of customers transmitting data via Excel spreadsheet. “I couldn’t be happier with the way the Celigo integration is working out,” said Kiko. “I’m confident this integration will save our customer service agents a lot of time, and the data going into NetSuite will be more accurate and consistent.”

Celigo’s integrator.io intuitive platform is allowing Kiko to hand off the integration management and maintenance of the customer order file integration directly to the customer service manager. Longer term, Celigo is helping meet Kiko’s vision of enabling integrations to be built, managed, and maintained by either business units or less experienced developers. “I want to focus the developers on business growth initiatives and not use that level of technical talent for integrations. Celigo helps me achieve this by making integrations more self-service.”