Dave Wardell
Chief Financial Officer
Chubbies
Customer
Chubbies
Industry
Ecommerce & Retail
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Products Used
Integrator.io with Orderful Integration for EDI and Loop Returns Shopify-NetSuite Integration App
About
Background
The Challenge
At the same time, the wholesale arm of Chubbies had become one of the biggest drivers of growth for the company. One of the major challenges they faced when dealing with big-box retailers such as Nordstrom was staying EDI-compliant, an area in which Chubbies had no experience. “I felt like I was learning a new language,” said Hunter Leeming, Internal Operations Manager at Chubbies.
Chubbies engaged a global EDI provider which offered two options: a direct integration that charged a large amount for each touchpoint implemented, or a web-services portal, which allowed the team to do it manually via guided prompts.
“We tried both solutions,” said Leeming. “The volume we were doing was too big to do it via the services portal. We also had a lot of trouble connecting our fulfillment center directly to NetSuite via the direct integration bundle.”
There was a mismatch in field structures between the EDI solution and NetSuite that made integration difficult. “We were having to duplicate all these fields just so our fulfillment center could access this information,” said Hunter Leeming, Internal Operations Manager at Chubbies.
On top of that, the EDI solution did not support automatic updates for transactions in NetSuite. “For example, a single purchase order can create up to 100 individual sales orders in NetSuite because of all the different stores they’re being shipped to. If we’re removing five lines of items for every one of those orders, that’s virtually impossible to manage from a manual perspective,” said Leeming.
Leeming described the entire process as frustrating. “We got to a place where we were sort of compliant on a couple of different transactions, but we were never fully compliant. And we were charged for every invoice or shipping notice that wasn’t compliant. It was extremely trying on our relationships with the customers”.
Chubbies had to increase the headcount of their wholesale team from three to five people just to cope with the volume and complexity of fulfilling these orders. This resulted in infractions on the company’s part that were significantly eating into their profit margins.
The Solution
Chubbies settled on a combination of using Celigo with Orderful, and API-based EDI solution. With Celigo’s Orderful-NetSuite Integration Template, the company created a hub for EDI integrations. All information surrounding EDI transactions that the company commonly used, from purchase orders to invoices, are now automatically imported and exported between Orderful and NetSuite.
“There were two things that we really wanted when we were looking at the initial configuration plan from Celigo,” said Leeming. “First, we wanted to ensure that the flows were consolidated as much as possible. We were able to come to a solution where that is how it is set up. We see a single flow for all of our trading partners and it’s very clean. I’m not a developer, but I can make changes easily in Celigo when necessary.”
“And then the other thing was a hook from the Orderful system to see if a transaction had failed,” added Leeming. Being the sole operator of the business systems at Chubbies, the ability to manage all integration flows and view and resolve errors in real-time from a single dashboard has been a real advantage for Leeming and his team.
Bottomline
“We have reliability in our EDI information coming from Orderful to our ERP instance, where we are more confident in the accuracy of our orders than we’ve ever been. And it’s also saving our team an average of 10 to 15 hours, probably close to 30 hours a month because they’re not having to go through and manually upload and create all of these transactions,” said Leeming.
Leeming explained that the integration also brought great benefits to customer relationships, as having improved visibility into inventory and fulfillment processes has helped the company make informed decisions and respond promptly to their customers.
With the integrations in place, Chubbies expects to be able to handle more EDI customers and continue growing their wholesale division.
“Celigo and Orderful’s EDI solution is a game changer for Chubbies. We are expecting to see at least 55% in EDI-enabled growth and a 50% increase in EDI customers, and Celigo’s Orderful integration is enabling this growth,” said Dave Wardell, Chief Financial Officer of Chubbies.