Outdoor Research takes back control of EDI and fully automates B2B trading

About

Outdoor Research is a leading brand in performance outdoor gear and apparel, recognized for innovative design, exceptional quality, and sustainability. With both domestic manufacturing and international sourcing operations, the company manages a complex B2B infrastructure to support retail partners across North America.

Challenge

Before adopting Celigo’s B2B Manager, Outdoor Research struggled with fragmented, rigid EDI systems. They relied on two legacy managed EDI vendors that fell short in critical areas:

• Limited visibility and control: Document mapping was controlled by vendors, making changes difficult and troubleshooting cumbersome. Any changes or fixes—such as modifying logic or resolving issues, had to go through the vendor, slowing down time to resolution.
• Rigid workflows and manual effort: Certain documents, such as EDI 860 (order changes), could not be automated with their initial vendor, requiring manual processing of order changes. While their second vendor supported automation for 860s, it still lacked the flexibility needed to innovate and customize certain workflows.
• Technical constraints: Integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O) was limited across both systems, significantly hindering operational efficiency.
• Transactional cost model: Transaction volume based pricing models with both vendors were a longstanding pain point for the team. While not the primary driver in switching solutions, it was a constant source of dissatisfaction they felt powerless to change.

Eric Leung, Director of Enterprise Applications at Outdoor Research, summarized their frustrations with legacy EDI vendors as follows:

“Everything really was sort of a black box. We didn’t have control of the document mapping. If there were any changes, we always had to go back to the vendors to fix logic or mappings.”

Why Celigo B2B Manager for EDI?

Having already experienced success with Celigo Integration Platform, Outdoor Research saw Celigo B2B Manager as an opportunity to consolidate all B2B/EDI and application-to-application integrations within a single platform for centralized management. Celigo B2B Manager provided the team, capability to fully automate EDI processes between Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O and trading partners, eliminating manual work and delivering significant efficiencies. “We knew the potential of the rest of the Celigo platform. This was a real opportunity to drop our two existing EDI solutions and migrate everything,” Eric explained.

Eric and his team first signed up for B2B Manager to implement their new trading partners. After going live, experiencing the solution firsthand and realizing the efficiencies, they kicked off a project to migrate their remaining 20 trading partners off their legacy vendors.

Implementation and Immediate Results

Having been on Celigo for a while and knowing how things work, Outdoor Research found the implementation experience very efficient. They are currently live with two EDI integrations, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Elastic, a widely-used B2B ordering portal for wholesale customers. With support from Celigo’s advisory services to guide their first implementation and leveraging B2B Manager’s prebuilt trading partner connectors, they were able to self-service integrate their trading partners with Dynamics 365 F&O, building all the integration flows from scratch.

Key benefits achieved include:

• Greater efficiency and scalability: Pre-built trading partner connectors and Celigo’s user friendly UX helped streamline their implementations. They are expecting future trading partner setups to be progressively faster due to reusable integration flows.
• Fully automated EDI processes: The team has now gained the capability to fully automate their B2B processes between Microsoft Dynamics F&O and their retail trading partners, reducing manual workload and leaving no room for human errors and delays in business processes.
• End-to-end visibility and control: Celigo’s AI based error management and dashboards enable proactive management of integration health, and minimize the need for manual intervention. Most of the integration errors are auto-resolved, and the team gets notified when there is an error that needs their attention. The team is now empowered to self-service manage, troubleshoot and customize integrations.
• Power to innovate: Leveraging Celigo, Outdoor Research now plans to build a custom staging and approval interface within D365 for handling EDI 860 order changes—a capability previously unattainable with legacy EDI vendors.

IT Team Impact

The transition to Celigo has provided significant morale improvements for the Outdoor Research IT team. The team is excited to get to a position to get back in full control of EDI and move much faster, where they no longer have to contact a vendor to make a change and wait 3 weeks, and find out they don’t understand the changes they want to make.

Future Outlook

Outdoor Research views the next year as a transition period, expecting substantial value realization as more trading partners migrate to Celigo. Although functionality was the leading factor in choosing B2B Manager for EDI. Moving away from transaction-based pricing to Celigo’s predictable cost structure will reduce financial uncertainty for the business.

Eric’s team is especially excited about regaining complete control:

“We’ll no longer have to wait weeks for external vendors to make simple adjustments. Once fully migrated, it’ll be fantastic.”

By adopting Celigo’s B2B Manager, Outdoor Research is confidently positioned to streamline operations, significantly improve their internal efficiencies, and achieve long-term scalability and cost predictability.