TelQuest International Gains Scalability and Operational Efficiencies with Celigo
“We would not have been able to grow as well as we did if we did not have a platform like Celigo. One of the reasons we’re able to achieve that is because of the automation that it provides. We would probably need 20 or 30 more employees to handle everything that Celigo does on a daily basis. We probably saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, if not more.”
Frank Baert
Sales & Purchasing Administrator,
TelQuest International
Telecommunications / Ecommerce & Retail Distribution
Wayne, New Jersey
About
Telquest International is one of the leading independent distributors of telecommunication equipment in the nation for over 30 years. The company also offers repair, installation, replacement, maintenance and other related services.
Background
With plans to expand their B2C offerings underway at TelQuest, management had to ensure that they were equipped with the right technology tools to support the expansion. Frank Baert, the Sales and Purchasing Administrator at TelQuest, was asked to get involved in examining older processes in the company. His goal was to determine which processes might be slowing or hindering the company’s operational efficiency, and to identify how they could use automation to improve things.
The challenge
Before Celigo, the company had a team of over 25 people to manage hundreds of orders from online marketplaces. They were just manually entering sales orders all day, every day,” said Baert. “Employees would have to go to the website and grab all the information manually, copy it into the system, rinse and repeat. Physically, it’s impossible for s single person to create more than a hundred orders in a day.”
Not only was manual entry not scalable, but the resulting errors caused issues as well. “I’m sure we had orders that were entered for the wrong items, the wrong quantity, the wrong price, right,” added Baert. “And then you end up having to deal with those headaches.”
The solution
To automate key business processes at TelQuest, the team selected Celigo’s prebuilt Integration Apps to NetSuite. For other applications such as Paypal, the team leveraged custom integrations built on the Celigo Integrator.io iPaaS.
In addition to using Celigo to automate processes across applications, they also used Integrator.io as an in-product automation platform, by automatically exporting NetSuite data through Celigo,transforming, and then returning the data back to NetSuite to trigger tautomatic updates. “There’s some things that you can’t do in NetSuite very easily,” said Baert. “But because of the way that Celigo works, it is easy to trigger those processes directly from NetSuite.”
Baertz, who is a sales administrator by profession, did not have advanced technical experience or prior knowledge on integrations, but was able to use Celigo’s solutions quite easily. “I set up my own custom integrations, exports, imports and some other pretty complicated stuff.” He credits the ease-of-use largely to Celigo’s user interface, which enhanced his experience with the solution. “I think it is fantastic, because that’s what enabled me to actually learn your system, with no prior experience whatsoever.”
Bottom line
Celigo’s solutions helped TelQuest to save a significant amount of on operational costs alone. Currently, they are able to run the entire order processing and technical operation with just three people, compared to before when they required a much larger headcount of a few dozen people.
In addition, Celigo has allowed TelQuest to manage the fluidity in the market caused COVID-19. “It would have been insane having those extra 25 people processing orders right now. We wouldn’t have been able to stay in business, “said Baert. “With everybody we transitioned into different roles, we probably saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, if not more.”
With their online marketplaces fully integrated with NetSuite, and the processes automated, Baert and the team have a level of accuracy and clarity in their operations like never before. “The integration does the billing, the fulfillment, and the inventory. It does the settlement imports automatically. Now we can actually go in and find the one transaction that they didn’t pay us enough money on, so obviously, having the level of detail that we have through Celigo is just incredible.”
The company was also able to move confidently into the direct-to-consumer market, thanks to the overhaul in setup with Celigo. “I don’t know of too many businesses like ours where you can try to expand into B2C with just two or three operational guys on staff.” Baert believes that they would have struggled simply to just stay in business if not for Celigo. “Instead of hiring tons of new people, we were able to redirect those resources elsewhere by placing them into more revenue-generating strategic initiatives.”
“Not only has Celigo helped us gain operational efficiencies, but it’s really helped us accelerate growth and expansion into other new businesses.”
I tried other integration platforms to test and see what features they offered. Just in terms of the simplicity of the user experience, Celigo absolutely took the cake. And I can’t think of any feature I looked at that Celigo hasn’t been able to provide.
Frank Baert,
Sales & Purchasing Administrator,
TelQuest International