From complexity to clarity: How La Sportiva simplified EDI management with Celigo B2B Manager

About La Sportiva North America

La Sportiva is a global leader in outdoor footwear, ski hardgoods and apparel, recognized for innovation, performance, and sustainability. They serve diverse customers through wholesale and direct-to-consumer channels, maintaining high standards for operational efficiency and customer experience.

Challenge

La Sportiva struggled significantly with their legacy managed EDI provider, facing challenges such as limited visibility, control issues, and extensive manual processes. Mapping updates with the legacy vendor were particularly problematic due to limited visibility and inability to resolve issues internally, causing further delays and operational disruptions. Frequent back-and-forth communication with the vendor was necessary for resolving even minor updates, significantly delaying processes and creating additional inefficiencies.

Moreover, the limited flexibility in customizing integrations or adapting to specific business needs further constrained their operational agility, necessitating frequent external support and creating additional barriers to efficiency. They encountered prolonged onboarding periods—up to six months for certain trading partners—and incurred substantial financial penalties due to delayed issue resolution, amounting to thousands of dollars annually. Specifically, handling EDI order changes (860 transactions) was highly problematic, resulting in duplicate orders in NetSuite and manual corrections, creating inefficiencies and increased workload across sales, operations, and accounting teams.

Additionally, La Sportiva was also dissatisfied with the legacy vendor’s transactional pricing model, which led to unpredictable and increasing expenses, especially for high-volume dropship operations.

“Having a more robust EDI solution will enable us to onboard new trading partners quickly, instead of taking six months to get them on board. It will also help us respond more promptly to non-compliance fees, allowing us to improve our partner relations and focus on providing a high level of customer service.”

– Rebecca Carroll, Operations Director, La Sportiva

Solution

La Sportiva selected Celigo’s B2B Manager due to its intuitive interface, superior visibility, advanced control over EDI processes, and predictable pricing based on the number of trading partners and document types—critical factors for their small yet experienced Operations team. Already experienced with the Celigo integration platform, they opted for a guided self-service implementation supported by Celigo’s advisory services. This approach empowered the Operations team to build in-house expertise, ensuring they could independently implement and manage future EDI integrations.

“I really trust now that I have a view of exactly what data is being passed when, and control over the steps we build into our flows,” said Danielle Larson, La Sportiva’s Operations Manager. “I’m really excited for future projects and cutting implementation times in half.”

Their first project involved integrating NetSuite and Public Lands to automate EDI processes for dropshipping. Despite external delays related to the partner’s testing processes, the advisory services and resources from Celigo proved immensely valuable, making the implementation a foundational experience for future self-managed projects. La Sportiva has plans to systematically migrate their remaining trading partners from their legacy vendor to Celigo B2B Manager, ultimately replacing their legacy solution entirely.

B2B Manager provided granular control over individual EDI workflow steps, clear visibility into data flows, and an intuitive interface enabling rapid internal troubleshooting and issue resolution.

Bottom Line

Today, La Sportiva benefits from significant improvements in operational efficiency, reduced manual effort, and enhanced responsiveness. They are expecting the automation of EDI processes for Public Lands to further reduce manual processes. They have optimized order processing, and cut down onboarding times for new trading partners, positioning them competitively in a rapidly evolving retail environment.

With Celigo, La Sportiva will be able to consolidate their application integrations and B2B/EDI integrations on a single platform. They currently have their NetSuite ERP integrated with Magento for ecommerce, Zendesk for customer support, and Narvar for returns management, and have plans to migrate to Shopify. With automated commerce processes, they are eliminating delays, errors, and maintaining excellence across their operations.

“We were impressed by Celigo’s intuitive and user-friendly products and wanted greater visibility and control over our EDI,” Carroll said. “These were the two primary reasons why we chose Celigo B2B Manager. This decision also enables us to manage all our integrations using a single platform rather than dealing with multiple vendors.”

Key Takeaways

Enhanced Visibility and Control: La Sportiva can now efficiently manage and resolve integration issues internally, significantly improving process transparency and responsiveness.

Accelerated Onboarding: Implementing Celigo B2B Manager is helping reduce onboarding times, enabling quicker trading partner activation and minimizing costly penalties.

Unified Integration Platform: By consolidating application and B2B/EDI integrations onto a single platform, La Sportiva streamlines operations, simplifies management, and ensures operational excellence.