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On Demand Webinar

How Enviolo Streamlined their Ecommerce Order-to-Cash with Integration

Managing ecommerce order-to-cash processes is one of the top challenges for growing companies. Fast and accurate order processing is crucial to drive a positive customer experience, but also for operational efficiency.

Whether it is B2C or B2B, with every order received on an ecommerce platform, there is a need to bring in the order data into the ERP for processing and accounting. Without automation, companies find themselves dependent on manual processes, such as, data entry, downloading and uploading data across software via spreadsheets. Not only are these activities resource intensive and prone to error, but they also create backlogs in order processing.

Enviolo, a bicycle component manufacturer, streamlined their B2B processes for providing bike shops and mechanics with spare parts, through Shopify and NetSuite integration, leading to improved operational efficiency.

In this webinar, Billy van den Ende, Director, Brand Experience at Enviolo and Gert-Jan, Senior Director of EMEA at Celigo discuss how to streamline order-to-cash processes for ecommerce. Watch and learn:

  • The importance of order-to-cash business process automation in ecommerce
  • How Enviolo streamlined their order-to-cash processes
  • Key business results Enviolo obtained through automation
  • Automation through Integration with Celigo’s iPaaS
  • And much more…

Watch today!

Full Webinar Transcript
Welcome, everybody, to the Celigo [inaudible] webinar. We are going to wait another minute for more attendees to join in, and then we will get started. [silence] Okay. We will go ahead and get started. First off, a couple of housekeeping items. This session is being recorded. And a recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants of this webinar after the event. Also, it is meant to be an interactive session. So if you do have questions, please type it in in the question or the chat functionality on the go-to-webinar panel and we will take those questions either during the webinar or, certainly, afterwards as well. And with that, I’d like to welcome everybody to the Celigo [inaudible] webinar [inaudible] streamlined B2B e-commerce order cash processes through integration. Our hosts are Billy [Mandaninda?] from the director brand experience for [inaudible], the senior director of AMIA for Celigo. And with that, I would like to pass it on to [inaudible] to get us started on this webinar. [inaudible]. Thank you, Rico. Thank you for waking up so early this morning to moderate this event in Europe. I would like to say welcome, to everybody again, and good afternoon, bonjour, Buenos Dias, [foreign] we have a mixed audience from different European companies. I’m looking forward to an exciting conversation around applying an ecommerce order to cash process and how you all think about that. Of course, we are very happy with the participation today of Bailey [inaudible]. He will explain the case of Enviolo and how they applied our technology to improve the order to cash process. I will pass it onto Bailey a little bit later, but we’ll start today with some introduction. Sorry, I had some problem with the slides. We’re having the following agenda. There will be a brief introduction of Soligo, then I will pass it onto Bailey. He will introduce the company, what they’re doing, explain their order to cash process and why there was a need for automation, and then how they tackled that applying the Soligo integration technology and then focusing in on the results that has delivered. Then we will zoom out again a little bit to a larger scope of order to cash in ecommerce and look at potential future plans that Enviolo has and order areas where improvements are possible in the order to cash integration. And then lastly, we will have a specific timeslot allocated for questions and answers. So about Soligo. We are an integration company with about 10 years of experience with thousands of customers, a little bit more than 3000 across the globe. So also a couple of hundred in the [inaudible] region of various countries. [inaudible]. We’ve always had as a goal to make integration as simple as possible. That was from the beginning and that is still what we are striving for. We provide our integration solutions based on what we call an iPaaS platform. That is a category of integration technology specifically designed for integrating cloud application. And we call it a 2.0 platform and that is because it’s not only for usage by technical IT resources, but also a platform that can be used and leveraged by business users. And that is something that makes it more powerful for the company. On top of our platform, we provide what we call pre-built integrations. And they are actually what we call best practices for integrating specific business processes. So like today we’re talking about order to cash, it’s a process that we have a lot of experience with and over the years we’ve pre-built integrations to support that business process in the best possible way, and that best practice is shared typically by hundreds of customers that are leveraging those pre-built integrations. We are a global company with presence in the US, where we are headquartered. In Europe, we are present in several countries but we also have presence in India and the Philippines and Asia, for example and we support customers globally. Not so long ago, we opened up a new data center in Germany, specifically because of the ask of our customers to provide the possibility to keep all the data inside the EU domain. And with that, they are in a better position to comply with GDPR, for example. So with that, I would like to ask Billy to introduce himself and to tell us a little bit about who Enviolo is, what the company is doing and how they are impacting the transportation market. Thank you, Kurtian. And thanks again [inaudible] for inviting me to your webinar. I feel very honored to be part of this. My is, as you said, my name is Billy [inaudible]. And within Enviolo, I’m the director of brand experience. And what that means is that I’m responsible for all the different touch points that customers have with our organization. So from both from a product perspective, as well as from a customer experience perspective, including service, support, and marketing. And Enviolo is active, as you can see, by it on the slide is a company active in the bicycle industry. And we, as a goal, we actually exist to try to change the world gradually from people taking less trips in cars to taking more trips on bikes. And that sounds very ambitious and our company and the people working in our company – we are in total 40 people – are very ambitious and passionate about this goal. And we believe that our products enable the bike manufacturers to create bikes that make people smile, that make the right experience much safer and deliver a much more pleasurable ride experience. Here are a couple of statistics on our company. I won’t read them outloud, but it’s fair to say that we are doing very well in the recent years. Of course, we are only a little part of the bicycles, so that’s also why I can illustrate the slide with a big variety of type of bicycles that you guys can see here. We are part of so many part of bikes and– but we always have the same goal, and that is make the right experience easier, safer, and more pleasurable. And we do that from based out of a head office in Amsterdam. We do that based off on a big portfolio of technology patents. And we try to– and we try to develop that into a set of very attractive products that manufacturers can put on their bicycles. Okay. Great. Yeah, that’s my first slide. [inaudible]. You wanted to add something to that, Billy? No. So– Okay. I was just curious to know. So you were talking about is specific technology that you provide to all kind of bike manufacturers. So how is that actually adopted by the different clients that you have? Yeah, that’s a good question. And maybe the– no, I don’t know the audience, but I think the audience knows and are all in a different way familiar with, of course, riding bicycles in different cities in western Europe is, of course, a different level of adoption. They’re going on on bicycles, bicycling themselves even. But we are a very different product and we are a very different product than our competing products, and that, normally, people know from riding a bike. Riding a bike is kind of identical as– while riding a bike, people always have to shift gears. Our system is based upon on the CVP track technology, meaning that there are no steps. It’s not a stepped system. It’s not a stepped gear system. It’s a continuous variable system. So there are a continuous– there’s an unlimited amount of different gears that you can cycle in. And that actually allows us to also deliver this pleasurable ride experience because it’s not– you don’t have to shift your bike constantly from gear one to two and three. But especially in combination with our automatic product, the idea is that you set your bike and you’ll forget it. The only thing you do is pedal the pedal the bike and the bicycle, and in combination with our system, decides in which gear s it most comfortable for you to ride your bicycle. So what kind of stimulated this whole adoption of our product is, of course, the big boost that you can see in Europe with the coming of e-bikes. So urban mobility is changing rapidly. The e-bikes sales and e-bike adoption have boosted, and that led to a very– how to say it? Accelerated adoption of us and [Violo?] as a product in those bicycles because often on an e-bike, it even makes more sense to use us as a transmission, to use us as part of the drive train of an e-bike because it’s so much more pleasurable and it’s delivering such a beneficial ride experience. So yeah, I think we exist also, and we flourish currently because the e-bike industry as a whole, the urban mobility is rapidly changing. Okay, so electrical biking, that is something that you should try for. Are there other, let’s say, factors that are increasing the demand for your products? Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, like I touched upon this a little bit, is the changing urban mobility needs. So you can see in Europe, the big cities are, of course, more and more increasing the barriers for cars to get into the city, right? Everything that stimulates, for people riding their bicycles and taking a bike, the quality of the bicycles that are increasing and increasing, it becomes a lot safer and to ride bikes and that’ll contribute to kind of the rapid adoption of our technology. And it’s [just trying to everywhere?] the same or is this regionally very different? I would say in Europe, there are countries that are, of course, running in front of the market, so to say. And that’s for sure, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium. But we can see similar trends in the UK, France, Scandinavia, where the numbers of commuters, the numbers of people using their bike as their main vehicle, their main mode of transportation, we can see those figures rapidly increasing. Of course, the US, we are a US-based. We are a company that also has a presence and a history in the US. And we are there located in Austin, Texas, with an office. And that market is still, of course, looking at the infrastructure, and the culture is a lot less biking culture– biking oriented than we are here in the western part of Europe. Interesting. So tell me about what the situation was like in your company before you started with Celigo and integration? Yeah, even though we only started working on looking at integration [inaudible] by the end of last year, beginning of this year, if you asked me this question, it feels already a long time ago that we were in that situation. And I think that’s very good because you tend to easily forget how kind of clumsy your IP systems were before and appreciate and embrace the current situation. So how it was is that we kind of started with Celigo at the same time in parallel with changing our complete ERP system. So that was difficult in terms of the world before that was a world where we had a lot of people on the phone answering and keying in orders from one system to the other system. Our ERP system on the front end where we have a Shopify platform active there was no integration. There was no link connection so we had to do everything very manually. And with the coming of NetSuite and we started to think about ways of how to improve that. And I think I was in a unique position back then to be responsible from the executive team– to be responsible for this project. And it’s very typical that we didn’t approach this project from an IT perspective, right? I’m not an IT person. I’m in the brand experience team. I’m heading up the brand experience team, and that makes us look at this integration much more from a nontechnical point of view. So I was very interested to look at how can we become a better company to do business with and an easier company to do business with and also align those interactions with placing an order with us or placing your spare part order with us, aligning those experiences with the experience of our product line. We claim to deliver a very pleasurable ride experience, but if the ride experience completely does not match with the way you need to order spare parts and how clumsy that is and was, to me that felt– from a brand experience perspective that felt bad. So I think it’s important to know that, for example, we spend an equal amount of time entering an order for a 10K spare part order– that costs us as much time as lo put in a 100K production order in the system. And of course, as you understand, the volume of service orders or spare part orders is huge because of the whole biking industry is reordering parts. On a bicycle there are always things.breaking, needed service on the bike. So we have a huge amount of small orders and only a couple of very big production orders. But if the time people spend on entering the small orders is equal to the amount that they spend on the big or then there is something very wrong with the way people spend their time. And if I have to summarize all of that all of the time before the new ERP system in combination with Celigo and Shopify, I would say that we were not scaleable, right? For every 10 extra orders we have in a month we needed to almost hire an extra person to be able to keep up with the demand, right? So scalability and the experience. Interesting. So specifically then what opportunities did you see for making the improvement in that order to cash process? And could you maybe describe what value those opportunities represent for your company? This I try to summarize by giving three big takeaways, big wins that we defined and that if I looked back that I can categorize those wins into those three big categories here is one is timeliness. This means that in the past, it used to take– depending on of course how busy it was, depending on the capacity and -how to say that – the people that were working, it always took a while before you got an order of confirmation before we could tell somebody on the phone when they would have their parts, when they would have the order delivered, etc. So timeliness and with the integration being real-time so we had real-time orders into the system . We could also real-time give order confirmations. Everything that sounds very normal in these days, right, that we live in. And this is a topic which I kind of underestimated but the accuracy of an integration is, of course, a big win to us because if you need to re-key or re-enter an order from one system to another and there is a huge time pressure because there is always more orders coming, there is a lot of– that process is very prone to make errors, right? It’s mistakes in just keying it in, just having wrong addresses, typos different mistakes in order quantities, etc that’s very easily made if you need to re-key stuff into the different systems. And the last but not least is availability is that we had a lot of challenges with if parts were not on stock in the warehouse, then the ERP system would of course notice, but the front end wouldn’t know it because the front end was just showing the products to the customers. And we wanted to become very transparent because I believe that it’s not always a problem if you don’t have a part, but if you are not able to the customer when he can expect the part, that’s a bigger problem. So what the plugin allows us to do, the integration allows us to do is that it allows us to be very transparent about availability of products, inventory, and with that, set the right expectations towards our customers in terms of when they order, what can they expect and when will it be delivered. So those three categories are for us the big gains that we got when we suddenly had the ability to connect our front end to the ERP system. Okay. And so can you tell me a little bit more about order savings maybe that you could make? So by cutting short and costs or inefficiencies? Yeah. I always struggle also internally when we are– when I have to tell something about what was the return on investment or something in deadline because quantifying the savings is very difficult. And what I am a lot more interested in is to see how those changes potentially impact kind of the perceived quality of the brand and [viola?], right. So like I said earlier we are quicker, we are more accurate, we have a lot of a lot less open invoices. So connecting the front end and the back end also connected or streamlined our order to cash process in a way that we don’t have [AR?] or at least we now know exactly which orders are paid and when they are paid. And we have that synced with our ERP system so we don’t have this unknown bucket of open invoices that we don’t know for sure if they are paid, yes or no and that could potentially delay shipping out. And we set the correct expectations towards the customers and we have a real time picture, a snapshot of our inventory in the warehouse so it saves us also a lot of phone calls and emails in the customer service center. So we run a customer service center with around 12 people, being there part of the warehouse but also part of the phone and the emails [for towards?] our customer. And they don’t need to answer questions anymore about did you get my order because it already is 40 hours after I placed it and I still didn’t get the confirmation? They don’t need to answer questions anymore about when can I expect my order etc. That’s all sold. But we didn’t use this process to get rid of people and to do– and to kind of– [have decided?] to kind of have a lower amount of people working in us because we are at the same time experiencing a lot of growth like I touched upon in the beginning, is that– and now suddenly, we kind of open up a big bucket of resources extra that we normally would probably have gone out and hiring extra additional resources to be able to handle the workload. But now suddenly, we can reuse the stuff that was normally keying in orders and we can use them in other parts of the business, and we are a lot more scalable and staff can focus on the parts of the business that actually need that expertise knowledge. Okay. So, when you realized that you could improve your order to cash process through integration, how did you find the solution and how did you eventually select SELIGO? Yeah, so like I said– like I touched upon in the beginning is that what we did this in parallel. We kind of decided to implement the new ERP system within our company. We decided and we picked the NetSuite too. But in the beginning, we didn’t really envision to– that to be, how do you say that? That to be a bigger project in terms of integrating the front end, the customer front end, etc. We were thinking actually– to be honest, we were thinking about potentially replacing Shopify by the e-commerce platform built into NetSuite because we were just so sick and tired of the fact that we are not– that we were not integrated and that there was always manual labor involved into reorder–rekeying, etc. When it kind of dawned on us when we started to talk about e-commerce is that the standard e-commerce functionality of NetSuite was not as state of the art as Shopify was. So the more we went into this implementation process of ERP, the more I realized that I actually really liked Shopify for what we were doing with it and the more I actually started to warm up to think about there should be a way to integrate Shopify with it’s a leading e-commerce tool with one of the leading ERP systems in terms of cloud-based tools. And that is when we started to ask that questions to both our ERP implementation company and consultants and as well as to our Shopify team. Both of them, independently from each other, advised us to look into Celigo as a possible integrator. And of course, when that is recommended from both sides independently, I looked into it. And even though I would like to say that Celigo was part of a big – how to say that? – selection process, I just felt the love with the interface and the people that were interacting with us. And we haven’t looked further than our first pick. And Celigo was the first pick. I was very impressed by the personal level of attention, the speed at which Celigo was answering my questions, and also, yeah, kind of the professional support even before I signed any commercial contract with Celigo, right? So it was just very good. And it felt very natural, both with the main tools that we were using. We’re recommending it. So that is also very– that was also very important to us. And the interface and the workflows are so relatively easy to use and clear that I didn’t feel that there was a huge barrier for me to say, “Let’s go and try it out and see what it can do for us,” instead of going to a big selection process, right, instead of going in through a, yeah, big tool-selection process. So Celigo was our first pick. And in terms of implementation, we are a company that doesn’t have an IT team. So we don’t have an internal IT group, department, team, how you want to call it. So it was really up to me and a close colleague of mine based out of the US. We were running the implementation of NetSuite together with the consultants from NetSuite itself. But nobody had experience with – [inaudible]? – implementing– they were enthusiastic about Celigo. But nobody has experience with Celigo. And yeah, we looked into several options. And then one of our leading– one of my contact people at Celigo said that, “If you’re doubting between using consultants or not, then why don’t you join one of our group-implementation sessions and see how scary it is yourself?”. So I joined the group. If I’m not mistaken– but if I am, then correct me. I think that whole group-implementation is even a free service that you guys are offering. And I joined it. It helped a lot for me to understand the basics. And it’s really modern, right? So I’m used to Shopify interface and NetSuite interface. And then there was this integration interface that was just drag-and-drop fields, connect the customer ID field from the left system to the customer ID field from the right system. And there was no coding or custom coding involved. And yeah, that helped me a lot. It saved us a lot of money on probably expensive consultants. And that all, without even having a known internal IT team. So this kind of the the flow or the process that we went through when it came to selecting Celigo and actually implementing Celigo. So how long did it take, all in all? Let me say, we had a target go live of January 1st, which was probably naive, because it was a big– like I said, it was not only Celigo that needed to go live, it was a complete new ERP system, so that was pushed to February 1st. And we started in November– yeah, we started the second week of November with the– so to say, the group implementation sessions. So by that time, the ERP system was already quite mature, the basic workflows were defined. We were using Shopify already a long time, so that was not new. And we started working on Celigo somewhere around November, and we went live at the same time as that the ERP system went live, that was February 1st. So I think it took us roughly three months. But, yeah, with a side note of that was not only bringing live Celigo integration, right? That was part of a bigger project. Yeah, I understand. So with a small team delivering an ERP system, plus an integration to your storefronts, I think that’s a remarkable thing that you did. [inaudible]. Yeah, I have to say one thing is that we started already earlier than November with the basics of the ERP, right, so. But when we arrived at the order to cash process in the ERP implementation, there is, of course– with a product company that we are, it is the core– it’s one of the core processes that are part of the ERP system, and that is when, in November, we started to involve Celigo. And, yeah, again it is not– it’s not as if — it was not a big achievement because of, we are so smart, I think it was also because we had the right partners within NetSuite, and we made very clear decisions not to do any customization in the ERP, adjust all of our processes to the out-of-the books best practice processes that were there, part of the implementation. And if you do that, and you stay very close to the NetSuite core functionality, the Celigo integration is even more powerful and even easier to integrate, right? Because that integration is based upon the best practices as well. So if you don’t deviate from any NetSuite best practices, the Celigo integration was– to my experience, was also very easy to configure and set up. Yes. And I remember actually you were one of the first customers to go through a group implementation, and that’s why it was offered as a free pilot, I think. We’ve made– [inaudible] sorry if I set the wrong expectations here towards other customers, but– It is a very low cost model to implement this. And it’s the fact that you could do it, and the pilots worked out for us as well, successful, so we’ve further built this out as a way of implementing our best practice integration apps. Which now brings us to, of course, the situation after implementation and the question is, of course, have you achieved what you hoped to achieve? Could you comment on that in terms of your objectives for gains and savings and maybe give some idea about what the value is for you now [inaudible] what you have today with your order to cash process and how you support that also in your company without any IT department? Yeah. So I think that we– like I said we started the process of the new ERP system without any expectations on the integration side but once we started to get a feel and get a hang of it in November, December we started to also become ambitious about the integration and see okay, how far can we push this? Can we also do realtime inventory? And can we also make sure that we synchronize the payments and what we do about returns and so on? So we actually [inaudible] we were kind of becoming a little bit over-ambitious in terms of hey, this opens up a lot more benefits potentially than that we previously expected or what were our expectations towards the integration so I can say that we realized everything that we hoped for and even a little bit more and we saw that using it from the beginning of the year February 1st so I’m still waiting to– I’m still [inaudible] is a little bit in terms of really saying something about the big impact in terms of resources, etc. But I think it’s safe to say that we built in a lot of scalability now into the service aftermarket order to cash process is that I’m not afraid of how busy it will be this summer because I know that I don’t have to scale up my human resources to handle an increased demand in aftermarket spare parts, right? So and that is actually a feeling that’s very great because if you don’t have to worry about something anymore you can focus all of that energy and attention to the processes and the parts of the business that do need a lot of attention and that are and maybe not as scalable and that are not as efficient as this order to cash process so if I would say that’s our biggest win is that we know that it is solid. The integration is running. We don’t need an IT team to maintain it and work on it and we can focus all of that intention to fixing other parts of the business and that brings me to something that I think is interesting to say about the integration because we were as [inaudible] we were very skeptical integration. That has come because of the past and because of legacy systems, etc and not having good experience with integration or basically with a lack of integration and we were actually willing– and we were actually willing to basically sacrifice a lot of functionality, a lot of nice functionality that we are using in Shopify and also in Zendesk to really seriously look at can we use the native functionality out of NetSuite instead of using an external third party to– that is maybe better for us. We are a small company. Running a huge NetSuite service management plugin is maybe not good for the business or Zendesk is a lot– to me is a lot better. It’s a tool that is focused and exists only because of service management. And we have been– we have been defining two or three projects already where we look at what is actually the best CRM tool, for example, that we can use instead of asking the question is what is the CRM tool– what is the CRM functionality of NetSuite natively like? And the same for service management. So instead of asking how can we use– how can we continue using Zendesk because we love the online. We love the reporting functionality. We love their scalable setup. We love the interface. And how can we continue using Zendesk and NetSuite? And how can we use [inaudible] to just connect them and make sure that we have all the customer data in one place in our ERP system but that we continue using all those third-party software tools that are available to us? So this project opens the door for us to think about integration and to think about using tools that are best for us instead of accepting the functionality of a canned ERP system. So what you’re saying is you now have a different way of thinking about how to onboard new applications. And you are better empowered maybe to [drive?] best of breeds application strategy, right? Yeah, you could say that. And I would say that if I internally need to now argue for it, I would not be afraid to argue very strongly and passionately about using an external tool because it’s better for us. And being able to tackle and handle objections from the company internally to say [inaudible] difficult to integrate, etc. Because I know that it is part of the cloud of tools that you guys are [inaudible] are working with in terms of if it’s shipping and fulfillment or if it’s, like I said, service management and it’s one of the modern tools, the UPSs or the Zendesk of the world, then I’m comfortable that that integration is something that I would be able to set up myself or at least with the help of the subject matter expert in terms of the expert of Zendesk or the expert of the UPS integration that we would be able to do that ourselves without getting into trouble. Yeah. So that brings us to this picture here where we have again the order to [catch?] applications that could be in play but in a larger scope involving order application areas, shipping and fulfillment. You talked about support in Zendesk and returns but also involve, for example, payment gateways that could involve order ERPs, of course, specific sales and marketing applications as well as order points of sales and maybe the connection with marketplaces which is not relevant for you in the [inaudible] context do you have any other advice for the people in the core to– what are maybe key takeaways that you have that you could give them or lessons learned? That’s a good one. So if there’s one thing that we have learned is that– I think it’s very important to– to us, it was very important to be part of this initial group implementation, etc. Because that allowed us to really understand the simplicity of the connection and the simplicity is also a part of the power of the tool. Right? And I am saying that now that I know– I’m not an IT guy myself. I’m not the most technical person, but the fact that I’m able to go into the interface of failure and that I’m able to look at a status of a flow and to see that it is all green and that there are no errors. Just the fact that we were able to do that made it to us very low barrier to continue using it and experimenting it with potentially other tools because it’s not that you always need a huge amount of consultants and external consultant hours. And you need a huge budget to be able to run the integration. I strongly believe that everybody that is used to the normal days and the current way of working in terms of in the cloud and is used to the interfaces of all of these type of tools is able to understand an integration because ultimately it’s not that much more than looking at a set of fields or a set of fields and data on the left side, and you’re in one system and deciding carefully on where do you want the data to end up in. Which fields and what process does the data need to trigger on the other side? And ultimately it made me understand the node of my own processes better by being part of this integration and the group implementation. So if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that I think it’s crucial to make it a success that you as a company are part of the core implementation of the integrator yourself without only relying on external consultants to do it for you. Okay. Great. Thank you, Billy. We’re now going to open the core for questions and answers. So I’d like to ask Rico as the moderator to tell us if any questions have come in then we take them one by one. Yeah. Thank you all. Thank you, Billy. We do have some questions. So Billy, would you have built the integration yourself if you had the internal resources to do so? You mean without [inaudible]? I would imagine so. Yeah. Yeah. You mean just this coding. So I would say if we would have internal team, and we did in the past have an internal IT team, I think the answer would be, they would for sure try it but I think we would have end up with using the [inaudible] e-commerce platform, right? All those ERP systems also have their own– have, of course, their own front ends or version of Shopify or version of [inaudible] that is kind of native to the two. So I don’t think we would have gone so far as to program it ourselves, but we would have defaulted to discontinue using Shopify and instead, using the built-in ERP version of Shopify. How should I decide if I should build this myself or if I should hire a consultant? Imagine this is for [inaudible] integration. Like I said, that programming differs from the type of company or the type of customer you are. So I can speak to– we are a relatively small company, so when I– we are at 40 people. We have relatively simple process flows, but I can imagine that if you have a very customized ERP system, right, with a lot of custom functionality that doing the integration yourself would [inaudible] will already be slightly more difficult. Because we were so much out of the books [inaudible] functionality, we had a very easy time in those workshops or implementation sessions to do it ourselves because we could just stick to the people on the phone from [inaudible] that were kind of hosting the workshops , etc., and they knew everything from [inaudible] and [inaudible], of course, and Shopify. So as long as you stay close to the core standard functionality of the tools you’re integrating, I think, to me, that would be one of the triggers to say then I would feel comfortable that everybody could– every company with enough dedicated time to do it could do this themselves without using a set of hours or expensive consulting hours. Does that answer your question now? I think so. What size or number of transactions does it make sense to integrate and automate instead of using manual processes? Was there a certain size, I guess, that it makes sense to maybe stick with manual processes versus trying to automate it, and when does an integration start making sense? Yeah, so in our case, that already is– how do I say that? That already became very beneficial at the beginning with only 30 to 4 transactions a day, right, because, like I said, from the 30 to 40 transactions a day, 35 of them are going via the integration completely without any involvement from staff, right? And that allows us to focus all those energy on those five that are maybe coming in manually with an email or big a PO. But also, those are also the orders that are big production orders that you maybe don’t even want to run via the integration because you want a level of personal connection to the customer and the order yourself, so I would say when we started, we were looking at around 40 to– yeah, 40 orders a day. Currently we are growing, and that is already an outdated historical figure. But even with that model, we could still it would still be very beneficial. It’s still very beneficial to use the integration instead of doing the manual process. Right. Does Saligo offer any training? I guess, [Jan?], do you want to take that or do you want me to take it? You can take it, [Rico?]. Okay, so yeah, Saligo does offer we just launched Saligo University, where you can go through certified training programs regarding the Saligo integrations and the product and so yes, there is a mechanism now. We also offer office hours where someone can come in, ask questions, and get some direct help on issues that they may be having. Is that something that you’ve leveraged before, Billy, have you used Saligo office hours? Yeah. Sure, as part of the group implementation, also the guy that the person that made– the person running the implementation had office hours that we could tap into and that– and an office hour allows you to be a little bit more specific for your business case only, right? So you have a half an hour or I don’t know how long but often, let’s say I’ve never reached the point where the person on the other lines would say, “Hey, sorry, my time is up.” But it was often already solved before. Before we were kind of reaching that limit. But yeah, we have been using office hours not very frequently because I think the group implementation sessions were answering a lot of the questions already, but now– and then we tapped into the possibility. Final question; does Saligo offer a trial? The answer is yes. And as a matter of fact, we offer a free edition where you get a free integration flow. So you get full access to the platform functionality. You can go to saligo.com; get started right away. You can also visit the marketplace there and see many of the connectors listed on the screen where you could also connect other applications to Saligo. And there is a 30-day trial for unlimited flows where you can expand your integration use case to more complex use cases as needed. The integration apps themselves where everything is pre-built for you don’t– those don’t have trials but you can certainly test some of the connectivity and functionality with your applications and even have a perpetual flow from that. So that’s it from [viola?] and Saligo. We’ll stay here for one more minute to see if there are any additional questions. But thank you very much for joining us. Billy, where can they learn more about your products and [viola?] . Yeah, so yeah, everybody that wants to know a little bit more can go to our website and viola.com or maybe have a look at our YouTube channel is youtube.com/[mViola?] and where you can see some easy product videos, etc. That makes probably maybe illustrates the theoretical explanation I gave you earlier in a more fun and clear way. Excellent. Thank you. Any final words from either of you? No, I just want to thank Billy again for presenting his business project and looking forward to extend a relationship with you going forward. Thanks again [inaudible] [Jan?], and of course also the rest of the Saligo team for having me. Thank you all very much and we hope to connect with everyone in the near future. So have a good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining. Bye

About The Speaker

Gert-Jan Wijman

Director Senior de EMEA
Celigo

Gert-Jan Wijman is Celigo’s Sr. Director of EMEA, operating from the Netherlands. Gert-Jan is responsible for directing our expansion into the European market, spearheading efforts to grow our company’s global footprint.

Gert-Jan comes to Celigo with a wealth of experience executing growth strategies for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, having worked in sales & commercial leadership roles at both startups and large software companies. In the past, he helped MatrixOne and Blackboard, two US companies based on the East Coast, expand into the EMEA region.

Gert-Jan holds a Masters in Engineering from Delft University of Technology.

Billy van den Ende

Director of Brand Experience

Innovative and strategic manager with over 7 years sales, management and digital marketing experience combined with an in depth understanding of the online marketing landscape. Extensive experience in the development and execution of new business activities.

Meet Celigo

Celigo automates your quote-to-cash process with an easy & reusable integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), trusted by thousands of eCommerce and SaaS companies worldwide.

Use it now and later to expedite integration work without adding more data silos, specialized technical skillsets or one-off projects.