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On Demand Webinar

How Hairhouse Automates Ecommerce and Retail Operations with NetSuite and Integration

In today’s shifting business environment, ecommerce and retail businesses are looking into optimizing their operations and management processes. Whether they need to work with fewer resources or process an increasing number of orders, automation of manual processes is key for operational efficiency, especially in light of recent events.

Hairhouse is the largest retailer of professional haircare products and employer of hair stylists in Australia, with more than 120 salons nationwide. Viv Paverd, National ICT Manager for Hairhouse with more than 30 years of Information Systems experience shares how Hairhouse leverages integrations between key applications such as Keplers, Shortcuts, PeoplePulse, BazaarVoice, 3PLs, and NetSuite to reduce cost, provide a superior customer experience, and scale.

In this on-demand webinar, we discuss:

  • The importance of automation to drive efficient ecommerce and retail operations
  • Common challenges facing companies trying to sell goods today
  • Prioritization and resourcing
  • Hairhouse’s evolving journey with NetSuite and integration
  • Leveraging integration platforms
  • And more!

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Full Webinar Transcript
Welcome to today’s webinar, how Hairhouse automates eCommerce and retail operations with NetSuite integration. We are honored to have Viv Paverd here from Hairhouse. He’s the national ICT manager. My name is Rico Andrade. I’m the VP of marketing for Celigo. So before we kick off, here is the agenda. We’re going to do a quick introduction to Celigo and then jump right into Hairhouse. So Viv is going to speak about Hairhouse’s business goals, their business challenges, and then we’ll walk through their own integration journey from the beginning. And then actually go into quite a bit of detail on some of those use cases, and share some diagrams on how they’ve done what they’re doing. And for those of you who are not familiar with Celigo, Celigo is an integration platform as a service. We allow you to quickly connect to applications and automate business processes. So as you have different applications across different areas of your supply chain, Celigo is the glue that brings the data from one system to another, automatically does the transformations on the data as needed. And for many customers who use NetSuite, NetSuite tends to be the financial and customer source of truth. And so that means that all the entire organization needs information from NetSuite and needs to send information from NetSuite. And so Celigo, not just with NetSuite, but allows us to make sure that those processes are automated and seamless. So I would like to introduce you to Viv. He’s the Hairhouse national head of ICT, with many years of experience in retail and supply chain IT system implementations, as well as business process improvements. Most recently, he’s been the architect and program manager at the successful Hairhouse NetSuite implementation, including multiple NetSuite modules and customizations using the NetSuite development tools. Hairhouse is currently using NetSuite for most of their enterprise systems, including financials in-store, POS, eCommerce platform, CRM, customer loyalty programs, marketing inventory management, and providing their business with the fully-integrated system environment. And so also Hairhouse is almost exclusively used by the Celigo integrator.io platform, which he will talk about in detail here to connect mission-critical external systems such as third party logistics facilities and guest providers, [inaudible] scheduling tools, digital marketing product feeds, and more. So it’s an honor to have you here, Viv, and please take it away. Yeah, thanks, Rico. Thank you for having me on. It’s great to be here. I do have a few slides, but I don’t just want to present all of this to you. It’s a bunch of information, really, and you’ll get a copy of the presentation if you need it. But I just really wanted to tell you the story of how we’ve come about our journey with Celigo, and what got us there at the end. So we have been using Celigo for several years now. In fact, we’re probably into our fifth year now. So a very mature user of this legal platform. But let’s just put some context around that for starters. A little bit about Hairhouse is a business, privately-owned, founded by two brothers back in ’92, more than hundreds [inaudible] of stores across Australia. We do retail and salon services, retail being professional hair care products. We were the largest retailer of professional hair care products. No disrespect, but we’re not selling supermarket-grade shampoos and conditioners here. We’re talking about professional hair care products which, typically, your local salon might stock their own preferred brand that they’ve got a license to sell or an arrangement to sell. But we sell pretty much all of the professional brands all in one place. So it’s quite a unique business model from that perspective. And then, of course, salon services, full range of salon services, largest employer of hairstylists in Australia. We’ve got a mix of corporate stores and franchise stores, but it’s primarily franchise. We don’t have corporate stores by plan. It’s not part of our plan. But typically there’s always a handful of stores which get brought back into the franchise or before they transfer on back to the franchisee. So we’ve done a lot of rebranding in recent times. The name used to be Hairhouse Warehouse. So we dropped the warehouse because, well, we’re not a warehouse. We’re an upmarket retailer of professional services and retail products. And that, of course, has also brought a huge focus on our customer service, in-store services, and of course, digital relevancy which today if you’re not in that space, well, you’re not going to last too long. So we move on to the next slide. We have a look– so just in terms of– without going into too much detail because there would be a lot of confidential information. But to the [inaudible] high level, driving our customer loyalty through our loyalty program is key to our success. And as we go through this presentation, I think you will find why. Particularly in a franchise business, this has been so important. So we needed to provide online capability for both B2B and B2C. So B2B being where we onsell bulk products to our franchisees, and of course B2C, customer-facing site. Salon services, as I mentioned– this is a key part of our strategy because people cannot compete with us online. And so this is because it’s all in-store. We do have a large range of home brands which are very popular and a key part of our business. Again, nobody can compete with us on those home brands. So we’ve got a lot of strong, loyal follows in our home brand products. Omnichannel, a nice throwaway term for many things. But omnichannel is essential in the digital world. We have to be able to provide a consistent experience with our customer, whether it be online or in-store. Providing things like Click & Collect, etc. is vitally important in this day to remain relevant from a digital point of view. And by digital, I’m not just talking about online. It’s about the whole marketing, the communication, the messaging, the positioning of our brand across social media and all the other external channels of which there are so many of them. And then of course, finally, the focus on customer service, on actual customer service. It’s nothing quite that gets a customer back in-store or to your online platform if they don’t have a very good customer experience. So customer service is a focus across this business. All right. So if we go to the next slide then let’s just take a little look at where we’re coming from. Over the past years, the increase in online competitors drove us to invest in the online space. Now you [inaudible] moments, it’s logical you have to be in the online space. Well, here’s some background. As a franchisor, if we’ve got an online platform we’re essentially competing with our stores. In other words with our franchisees. And of course, they’re not going to take lightly to that because well, it’s effectively cutting their lunch. And we took a lot of, I say flack, it was problematic because it’s their businesses and we’re affecting it. So, the problem is that if we didn’t do that then somebody else is going to take their business. And there’s lots of players. And over the years these players have increased and they’re competing on price and all sorts of other angles. And there’s lots of them out there. So, if we didn’t do it we’re going to lose their business. So, as a result of which, we came up with a model whereby we start sharing the profit of our online business with the franchisees. And just to give you a snippet of how we do that is the [Salovey?] program which I spoke about. If the customer belongs to a particular store which we track, and their customer buys online that store gets a slice of that revenue. So in other words, it becomes automatic revenue for the business, the franchisee, for them looking after their loyal customers, even if they buy online. Anyway, to move on to that. So this investment put us in a position today where we’ve got a lot of leverage in the market space to be able to move forward with things like click and collect, and there’s a few other initiatives which I’ll talk about in a little while. So, that kind of sets the scene for why we need all these systems and to put them together to provide this level of system integration to our business. So, onto the next slide. This is more of the challenges that we were faced and this goes back to the year 2015 where we had this challenge, we needed to take all of our business functions onto an entirely new systems platform. So we started in 2015, went live in 2016 and it was massive because every single thing needed to intertwine with the other thing. So you’d replace your point of sale but oh, hang on a moment, you need to replace the multi-program at the same time because now you’re dealing with a different system. And you can’t deal with two different systems across– rolling across the business for too long. And it took us nine months to roll out all of the stores onto the new system herein which time you’re running two separate systems, which is a nightmare for managing all of the data and the reporting. Anyway, we rolled out the NetSuite across the entire network, NetSuite, including inventory management, the Ecom platforms, point of sale, the loyalty marketing– loyalty and marketing systems straight into NetSuite and importantly the integration to Acer by a logistics facility which is where Celigo came into play. Salon scheduling is something that NetSuite doesn’t do and probably never will so we needed a separate system for that which needed to integrated. We’ll talk more about that. Our technology strategy has always been we wanted to go cloud and as we sit here today we do not have a single application on local service. The entire service is in the cloud. So it’s a really good place to be. And that included the integration platform. So, multiple external systems and it’s inevitable if you’ve got these external systems whilst you can see we use NetSuite for a lot of things there’s always a requirement for external system integration. And you need to do so quickly. And the challenge that we were faced with. So what we wanted is a scalable platform, we wanted a single solution. And we did find that in the [inaudible] platform. Part of that was in these integrations, we also need to do data transformations. So as you take data from one system, you need to transform it to a different format, or different structure or different decimal position, for example. And we needed to be able to do that inside of the integration. And then finally, we don’t have a big ICT team, and we don’t have a big budget. So it needed to be cost-effective. And those were the challenges that we were faced with. And that led us on to the journey that we went on. So let’s move on to the next slide. So just a quick snapshot. This is where we started. This is all Oracle NetSuite and fitting the Oracle Bronto platform the marketing platform up at the top of this diagram, but everything else that you see on this slide is Oracle NetSuite point of sale inventory, financials, the loyalty program, and b2b and b2c side all rain on the NetSuite platform. But as I said, there’s always extra assistance. So if we go to the next slide, let’s have a look at what we– We have a quick question here. What POS Are you using for company-owned and franchise stores? It’s an industry point. So and I suppose. Okay, thank you. Okay, so on the slide, you can see so got a few more bubbles in there. So we added a system called focus, which is a business intelligence analytics tool, and a good one too. And we’ve also implemented shortcuts which is a sell on scheduling tool, which is entirely integrated into next reading fair when we went live with it. It was entirely standalone from the Oracle NetSuite system. But of course, we want to be able to share data between the two systems. And that poses some challenges. And then, of course, we chose to go with silica and that became our integration platform. So let’s go to the next slide and focus on this silica bubble cloud and little see how we use this. So to start with you start to the clockwise shortcuts I’ve spoken about our salon scheduling tool. So we built some integrations. We started with some limited one-way integrations between Oracle and shortcuts. For example, we have replicated or synchronized our pricing for the various salon services between our Oracle system and shortcuts. We’ve gone on from there to start synchronizing our customer’s synchronizing, the bookings that come through shortcuts, etc. So to Mediterranean continues but we use the Leo to pass at information to and from our shortcuts platform. Then the next one ran not in any sort of order, but Kepler Analytics is a store traffic system traffic counting system. And again, we needed to be able to pass sales data from the store hourly daily weekly sales figures from NetSuite system integrator analytics. So, they sackless data in and then they produce a huge amount of reports which are very useful for stores to be able to track their conversion rates track the volume of customers going past and how many come into the store, how long they stay in the store, whatever, which has been super useful for our business. Now, this effectively is built at that particular integration is built through a standard straightforward so search at NetSuite and plugged into Sligo and say every day do this and it just parses that data through to them set and forget we do not touch it. It just happens automatically every day. No technical requirement, technical knowledge or coding required straight up set it up, takes you about half an hour maybe to set up something like that. Next one ran is Facebook product feed. Now, that just really represents all things digital. It’s Facebook. It’s Instagram. We’ve got feeds to Google Shopping, for example, is a whole bunch of product feeds that we send out to external system so that they can absorb our current position on stock in products, images, imagery that they need to use for social media tips. We’ve got several integrations to easily get straight out product feed one directionality to those external systems. The next one which probably the biggest one and certainly it was the first [inaudible] was the east store logistics, which is our 3PL service provider, our warehouse. We were never going to run our own warehouse. It’s not our business to be running in the warehouse system. So we add to whichever way you look ahead to build an integration to our [3PL?]. I’m going to talk more about that. They’ve got a slide that I’ll step through in a little while. Next one around is the Net Promoter score, which we use a system called People Pulse. And again, yeah, we’ve pulled data, sales data that comes through from our store network, push that into the Net Promoter score system. They do their thing, sending out surveys and getting survey information back from customers. And then we take that information, we pull it back again by Celigo. We put it back into NetSuite, into customer records inside of NetSuite. And we’ve given the stores the ability to look at this customer profile, the results, the promoters, and the detractors, etc. On screens inside of the NetSuite user interface, not logging into some separate system directly inside of NetSuite, they’ve got their own Net Promoter Score dashboard on the NetSuite log in because all their data is pulled back via Celigo into NetSuite. And then finally, ratings and reviews, we use Bazaarvoice, which is very popular common ratings and review system. And it all works pretty well. And even on our platform, it’s just a few pieces of script that need to be implemented and it works on our website. However, again, we want the result, the ratings and review results inside of Oracle so that we can use them for all sorts of other purposes, whether it be populating them into some of our marketing emails, etc. So we pull the ratings reviews back again through Celigo back into Oracle. And we’ve got them in our centralized platform. So pretty quick little overview of what we’ve done, and it’s not by any means all of it, but I think it gives you a view that one single platform, there’s no huge amount of technical knowledge required, has given us the ability to be able to do all of these integrations without too much pain and certainly not taking too long. Okay, so let’s have a look at this one. And so it is a complicated slide, but there’s some– let’s step through this and see how we go. On the left-hand side, we’ve got our Oracle, NetSuite system. In the middle, we’ve got a representation of the Celigo flow orchestrations, and on the right-hand side is everything related to [3PL?]. So let’s go through this. From the top, left hand side in the Oracle NetSuite box, the only app and data, so item master data for xylem records, purchase orders, and sales orders, as those get created inside of our NetSuite environment almost real-time, we don’t do it real-time. We don’t really need to. We’ve sheduled using the Celigo scheduler. We pick those pieces of data up and we push them into Celigo and into their orchestration. So for example, if you look at the new item, Master Data and the delta updates it was talking about. So for example, in this instance, we use grams and millimeters for our dimensions. But the distribution says center, our 3PL, they use meters and kilograms. So right there, we do a conversion before we send it on to the SFTP location for them and we send that into their item master in their systems. Similarly, the purchase orders and sales orders go through the Celigo flow. We separate them out. We got a separate flow for [inaudible] all the headers and separate one for the line items. So the header goes through first and then populates the line items. Same for sales orders. And the [inaudible] can be updated to as often as you wanted. So it’s very flexible, easy to set up [inaudible] that looks after those integrations, pushes that information into the 3PL service provided. So yeah. Updating the item master, keeping them up to date. If there’s any change to the item record in NetSuite, the last modified date will update in the item record. It’ll get picked up by the flow and pushed into the item master on the 3PL side. In other words, the master will always match hours. Similarly, [inaudible] purchased orders lined up in their system as do sales orders. Those sales orders through on a pretty regular basis because we do want those to be picked up by them quite [inaudible] so that they can pick, pack, and ship those orders as quickly as possible. So when they do receive the purchase orders, there’s a receipt record in the sales orders. There’s a fulfillment record and those then flow back. They dropp them back into an SFTP location, which then Celigo picks those up and passes them [inaudible] again, passes them into NetSuite into the inbound section of this NetSuite box on the left. We create the order fulfillment or for a sales order. So sales orders and order fulfillment or a secret code for the purchase orders, [thereby?] automatically untouched by us. When that data comes back in, the purchase orders move from pending fulfillment to fulfilled and, and that is entirely untouched. In addition to that, so we will [inaudible] pick up a lot of information. So if you look at the blue box in the bottom right-hand corner, we do pick up a bunch of information from them that helps us manage the environment a lot better in terms of variance reporting. You get a sense here that we like to have a lot of the data not in external systems but inside of NetSuite, so let’s have a look at this. So once they’ve got a stock position, they’ve been 3PL, they’ve got a stock position, our NetSuite’s got a stock position. We do want to check that. So every day, we take a snapshot of the inventory. They drop a file into the SFTP location. We take that inventory snapshot. We drop it into a custom field, just a general custom field on the item record. And thereby, we’ve got a snapshot of what their stock position is. We know what our stock position is and we run variance reports. If there’s any discrepancy between their stock and ours, we’ve got a system that just allows us to run this variance report every day. In addition to that, so got the the 3PL status, and again, in the blue box on the bottom right. So what that means is that every record that goes into their system has got a status, whether it’s pending, [inaudible] in the process of getting picked, or the pick is being completed, those statuses– and the last date and timestamp that those statuses change, we pull a date off a file [inaudible] FTP location, we pull that into NetSuite, we update the sales order, for example, with– has it been completed? Is it in the pull? What’s the status of that particular order? The status as far as the warehouse management system or the 3PL system. So we can track that, again, straight inside of NetSuite. Don’t have to go looking in [inaudible] or go and ask them for information. It’s automatically in our system. So we can look at the sales order and see how far it’s progressing through the picking process in the distribution center. Okay. Very useful because if, for example, a sales order doesn’t arrive in the system, well it’s not going to escape us and we will very quickly say, “Oh, hang on. Something’s going on, yeah? We didn’t send it or something went wrong.” Next one is shipping status. We had thought to go straight to Australia post which we primarily use for our shipping, but Australia post don’t really provides all that shipping status directly to our 3PL. So they’ve got that, so we said, “Oh, we’ll just drop that for us and we pulled that into the same records and then not only can we see where it’s at inside of the distribution center, we can actually see where that parcel is in the process of getting delivered by Australia post and, indeed, when it got delivered. All the way through the process. Not just a tracking number. It’s tracking number plus that status of each step of the way. So very useful to be able to pull that data through Celigo into the sales order record and, at the same time, item dimensions. There’s occasions where the warehouse would go and do item weights and dimensions updates for us. if something’s incorrect, they provide us with a fee. We pull that back into the item record on our side and update that. So, again, our item records are up to date, which then keeps the two systems in sync. So, as you can see, there’s a lot of flows there. There’s probably a little bit more complexities around that. We use Celigo to do file management as well, so once files are truly properly looked after, we use Celigo to move them into different FTP locations, for the sub-directories, for example. But, that, I think it should give you a pretty good idea of how this particular flow actually works for us. It’s– So– Sorry. Go, Rico. We have some questions about the– I think it’s actually relating to the previous slide, but let’s go ahead and finish this and I’ll ask you [crosstalk]. It’s fine. Let’s go back to the previous slide. It’s no problem. How many skews are you updating via product feeds? Can you automatically update all images and descriptions without manual intervention? So we’ve got about 8,000 skews, which probably not all that much compared to other retailers, but we don’t do full updates everyday. We don’t need to. We do an initial load for new items and then, everyday, we just use deltas. As I mentioned, where the item records go to date last modified, date to it, and we just use that in the creation of the search, which pulls the item record data and pushed it through the flow and thereby updating the master record on the site for the 3PL service provider. Are you matching reviews in Bazaarvoice to individual products on NetSuite? How do you handle that? Yeah, okay. So, again, our item records aren’t– they don’t exist twice. They only exist once on NetSuite. So the Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews, we pull from Bazaarvoice, straight back into the item record, and those are the actual ratings and reviews from Bazaarvoice. So whatever Bazaarvoice pitches onto the frontend of our website– when you go into a product, for example, and you can look at the ratings and reviews, and Bazaarvoice actually populates that for us. It’s part of the Bazaarvoice service, but that doesn’t necessarily reside on the item record for us to actually do any form of analysis and that’s why we pull this Bazaarvoice data back from them and we populate them into these custom fields for ratings and reviews and we can use that for whatever purpose we need, to reporting or other purposes. We have a few more questions but they may be more appropriate for the following slides so I think we can keep on. Okay. Should we move on then? I think that’s all good. So let’s spend just a little bit of time on this one. So why did we choose Celigo? So the bullet points are fairly clear. It’s cloud-based. No infrastructure required, fantastic, we love it. You log in, get your permissions, etc. You’re going to have blank screen, you go create whatever integrations that you actually want to. So this whole interface is so intuitive. It’s like a– think of a blank sheet. An Excel spreadsheet, you can create whatever you really want to. And creating these integrations it’s really– it’s so simple to go and quick-start the creation. Pick the system that you want the source data to come from, determine what you want to do with it, to flow in, it can be simple or complicated, depends on what you want. And it’s not just about NetSuite either. What we can see from this is, “Sure, we only primarily use NetSuite but there’s so many systems where you can pull data from and do stuff with it, build your dataflow and then send it to another system.” And honestly without– well, you can do coding. I mean, you can put some pretty complex coding inside of the Celigo platform. But you don’t have to, in many cases we don’t. There’s minimal or no coding that we require for this. In the NetSuite world, when you process, create a safe switch, use the criteria within the safe switch to be able to put fills in, take fills out, exclude fills, whatever you want to do within a typical self-search which is very, very comprehensive in terms of what you can do within a self-search. Drop that into the Celigo integration and say, “Okay, here’s the destination, I want it to go to the same point and these are the things I want to do and – by the way – yeah, let’s put a schedule on it,” which is very simple to update and very simple to monitor in my time. Talking of which. So the errors in these dashboards is pretty good. We don’t want to have to sit there looking for errors every day. So we’ve configured Celigo to send us email downloads for whenever the system does fall over. When so, “Okay, we’ve got to–” Let’s talk about a purchase order, the received records come back in and the lines that we expect to receive are not there and the system says, “Oh, hang on, I’ve got a problem.” System says, “Okay, look, I couldn’t write these back into NetSuite because the line numbers don’t match” or whatever the case may be. Then sends you an email download. You go into the dashboard, it’ll have a little icon on the integrations saying, “Well, you’ve got an error here.” Click straight into that area and it shows you where that area is, what the details and download the files and you can have a look at it in detail, fix it if necessary, put it through again and problem solved. So from that perspective, we don’t spend a lot of time managing and we don’t spend a lot of time just looking for issues at this dashboard and these alerts just give us a very, very simple and easy to use process of managing. Of course, it’s cost-effective. It is– there’s lots of alternative solutions out there. Which could be arguably said, a lot more comprehensive. I don’t know, we’ve not found anything that we can’t do in the Celigo platform. And then from a cost point of view, it’s been very effective for us. Okay, we’re not asking for you to increase the price, though. It is a good and cost-effective platform. And then there’s also the option for those of you who are not actually using NetSuite and the pre-build connectors which we’ve played around with some for those, as it turns out, the business didn’t require. There was an integration that we were going to do, which I can’t really mention on this call. But there was a pre-built connector, which we went a long way down the path to saying, “Well, this is actually pretty cool.” As opposed to the, shall we say, destination system was saying, “Oh, no. You need to go to some other integration partner to build this and build that.” And lots of cost, etc. And we said, “No, I don’t think so. Let’s just have a look at the pre-built connector out of Celigo.” And to be honest, it was great. There was just one of them. There’s lots of them I’m sure. You’re aware that there’s this plenty of other connectors that can be used out of the box from Celigo which we haven’t had a need for, but they have the size, a great selection of those. So that I think is probably the primary things that made us choose Celigo. And now I could say after so many years that we’ve been using them, we would recommend them. Absolutely. There’s no question about that. So what did it do for us? What sort of business impacted we had as a result of disability? Well, before COVID-19 came along, we were having high double-digit online growth, and I can’t really give the actual figures. That was before the pandemic. I’m thinking now it’s in triple-digit growth and climbing. And so we were very ready to be able to deal with the influx of the increase in our business. And mentioned the word scalability earlier on in the presentation. We had absolutely no issue with scalability. The system just dealt with the extra volume, and there was no issue with that at all. So to touch on some of the systems we spoke about this net promoter score, the ability for us to manage customer satisfaction is quite unique. I would say unique, but it’s quite comprehensive from our franchise point of view. Think of it like this, if you’ve got in your NetSuite user interface as a result of this integration, data coming back into NetSuite, and you can look at a report by staff member, not just for your store, by staff member by day, by date or date range, you can look at our debt staff members been rated by the customers. You can see all the good feedback. You can see the bad feedback. You can actually [inaudible] a bad feedback. You can contact the customer directly because all of that information is pitched back into this net promoter score dashboard as a result of us pulling this information straight back through to Celigo into NetSuite. So as a tool for store owners, franchisees to manage their stuff, not just the negatives but to focus on the positives and there’s lots of in. Stores are actually in the same team that the staff to get good ratings on the NPS system. So the power of this from a customer’s service point of view is huge. Moving along just conscious. We want to leave some time for some questions as well. So delivery services, for example, last year we built clicking collect, which was built inside of NetSuite. So we actually didn’t need any integration for that. We just recently built a partnership with DoorDash to do express delivery, which has now kicked off. And, in fact, they’re in Victoria now. With this lockdown has proved to be very, very popular. Of course, as you can imagine, customers can’t go into stores, don’t want to go to the stores, jump online, have it delivered within an hour or two directly to your door contactless delivery. So we’ve done some amazing things. The team have done a fabulous job getting it off the ground. Digital marketing, the research we spoke about earlier about social media, and we’ve got another project coming up where we’re looking to build a link to a customer data platform where, again, we’re going to push all of the customer information, sales information, customer information, contact details, etc. Now think about it like this. Lots of customers get too many emails. I’m sure we’re all inundated at some point and say, “This is too many emails coming through. Unsubscribe.” And we get that. Of course we do. Everybody gets that. And therefore, as soon as the customers unsubscribe, guess what? You’ve got no ability to market to that customer anymore. Yes, transactional emails can be sent to them, etc., but you cannot send emails to them directly any longer. But what you can do is, via social media channels, reach to them via the digital channels. And you know that X, Y, and Z customers are unsubscribed, so let’s push some marketing through to them via digital media. And again, we’ve got this customer data platform, which we’re busy building the integration as we speak, to build it out to better capability so that we can expand the reach to our customers via digital marketing mechanisms. We spoke a bit earlier about customer tracking and conversion of in-store conversions. This hasn’t drawn to all of our stores. We’ve got a significant number of our stores. It’s a terrific solution. If you want to, by all means, go and have a chat with them. I shouldn’t be pushing Kepler. This is a Celigo presentation. But we’ve had some really good successes with this. And again, using the Celigo platform, we set it up, send the data to them, and forget about it. There literally is nothing more for us to do. And if a new store pops onto the system, just simply add them to the saved searches that we send to Kepler through the Celigo platform. Done. We don’t have to actually even worry about it after that. So it’s so easy to build these integrations. Analytics using this data. We’ve spoken several times now about porting data back into the NetSuite environment. That means we can provide a full suite of analytics and reporting straight out of the NetSuite system. What we don’t want in the store or in our business is people having to log into a huge number of multiple systems to be able to get information. So the principle that we’ve used here is one source of truth, that’s got to be the NetSuite platform. And to do that, well, we’ve got all these data flows coming in via Celigo, and to be honest, through other integrations as well. We do still also use API when necessary. And I haven’t covered off on that, but where it makes sense we would still do that. And then I think the final point, but by no means the least of these points, is a shared business model with the franchise owners. This is vital to our business. Without them we’re not a business and if we don’t provide the systems, well, none of us will have a business. So this whole concept of sharing loyalty customers, sharing the revenue out of online pushings, orders to them through click and collect and other means through Door Dash, etc., those mechanisms are all increasing their business and making them central to the customer, whether engage Fire online or through the click and collect function or through in-store salon or retail services, the franchisee is sharing this model with us and to the benefit of all of us. And at the same time, keeping the competition at bay in the fact that we are providing all of these services out of this one central solution. So if anything, if you’re asking me whether Celigo is a good product or not, I think you can sense from this presentation that we are very supportive of this and happy to give a good review for the system and we and we’ll continue using them. So hopefully this information has been of great use to you. [inaudible] questions. And I’m sure [inaudible] you might have some questions ready to go. Yes. There are questions that are coming in. And so thank you so much. And before we jump in the questions, just reiterate what [inaudible] said that you able to connect to many more applications. And so if you do see something that needs manual processes that needs to be automated, go to celigo.com. Log in. You can start integrating for free with the free flow. And might be able to [inaudible] your issues. So the question here, [inaudible], thank you so much for the presentation. I really appreciate it. Next week is very customizable. What did you customize in NetSuite versus what did you leverage out-of-the-box? So just to get some clarification around that question. In terms of customization in the NetSuite environment, or in the Celigo environment? The question’s on the NetSuite environment. NetSuite environment, okay. So NetSuite is a platform. Comes with a lot of things standard. That inevitably due to the uniqueness of every business, particularly retail [inaudible] worked with many, everyone has got some variance in some degree of difference or uniqueness that they need to accommodate. So within NetSuite, so from a customer service, our loyalty program, for example, is building [inaudible] NetSuite. NetSuite doesn’t have a loyalty program. They got a very comprehensive customer database that can track calls on sort of different categories and types. And it’s up to you as to how you classify your customer groups, whether they’re franchisees, or retail customers, or based customers, etc. So talking about– let’s talk about an item record, for example. So we’ve built numerous customer [inaudible] inside of our item record, and allow us to put attribution data against it. Is this product, for example– let’s take this. Every product, we can have certain [inaudible]. What’s this product for? Curly hair, blonde, long hair, short hair, oily hair, dry hair. [inaudible] hair such as [inaudible] hair condition. They’re preferences. So we can build this attributes inside of the item record. And so, okay, these products are targeted for this type of hair. At the same time, you can get the customer and we do this. The customer can go online into their profile, and now you can flag several [inaudible] short, blonde, whatever. And so the hair preference [inaudible] now you can flag their [inaudible] particular profile. And guess what, now he’s got an item with customer. You can match those too and automatically you’ve got some sort of linkage between those two. Now, that’s not standard functionality inside of NetSuite. Because NetSuite is that flexible to be able to customize it without causing a situation where you can’t take the next [inaudible] for example. And under that, you can– within the bounds of the system, you can create all these customizations. And every release that NetSuite comes up with is not going to affect that. So for years, we’ve been doing [inaudible] to either [inaudible] customer records. It’s almost every record, that we’ve got sales order record, transaction records, we built custom records. Or just that, like custom records, we get multiple fields within those custom records. So like that [inaudible] well, that’s just custom record that we’ve created. We feed that back from the data coming from the [inaudible] score system. And we populate that. We’re going to link from there to the customer. And therefore, we’ve got an automatic ability to do reporting [inaudible]. So if anybody is thinking that you have to go with the NetSuite standard, no you don’t. Of course the standard functions of sales orders, and purchase orders and customers, etc., they’re all there but can you modify it? Can you build custom fields and customer voting around it? Absolutely no problem. Great. Thank you. Where does it make sense to use direct API integration versus leveraging a platform? Oh, that’s a good question. So I didn’t mention that in the presentation. We do use API calls in certain instances and most times that’s because potentially the destination system, whichever you talking to, doesn’t want to bring files in by some other automotive mechanism, whether it’s [inaudible] FTP or any other type of file transfer or so on. So in any instance that you provide an API mechanism for us to be able to call the API to do whatever validation. So for example, this [inaudible] they didn’t want to take file data from us from an order and fulfillment point of view. They’ve got direct API calls, so NetSuite does this standard. There’s a very simple way to actually interact with API calls straight out of NetSuite. So in that instance, we mostly use their APIs, call the API to do a delivery range validation for example. Once the order is placed, we use the API call to send them the order and they in turn make available the API for us to ping every so often, 15 minutes or whatever the case may be. With ping the API [inaudible] pull the data back from them, and we can see that this order is now being delivered. So it didn’t make sense in that case for us to use this integration, because they had such comprehensive API calls we didn’t actually need to. So where it’s available and it makes sense we would use the API calls, but in most instances where you talking, a lot of the feeds that we’ve spoken about in this presentation, it made sense for us to use the Sligo as in put the flow into action, certain figure and let it just simply do its job. Hopefully that answers that question. How do you approach the question of building it yourself versus hiring consultants versus buying new applications? Okay. So I can only talk to my experience here, is when we first signed up with [inaudible] we sort of moved this [inaudible] try it, went on and got the [inaudible] and we said, “Well, it’s time to go.” And to be honest, it was pretty straightforward. We know we learned quite a lot quite quickly just by trial and error really. And [inaudible] “Well, this is working for us.” So we signed up for a certain level of integrations, [inaudible] different method back those days in terms of licensing, that you signed up, then they said, “Okay, well, sign up. This is your cost per year,” or whatever the case may be. And as part of it, you get a certain number of hours of consulting to help you get your system up and running. Well, I can tell you that we actually never used a single minute of their consulting. I’ve got some really good business analyst guys and some coding guys, which to mention [inaudible] you can put coding language scripts into these integrations but we didn’t really need to. And these guys just got stuck in and figured out how to use this setup, these codes. The user documentation was very, very helpful. And for the most part we actually managed the build of these things ourselves. So to answer the question, do we need an external consultant? Well, you could. You could get that and I’m sure there’s lots of Sligo specialists out there that could help you. It’s not going to be something that you’re going to need them for on a long-term, ongoing basis. Come in, build it, [inaudible] forget and if you get a problem down the track, you got to pull them and have a look at it. You could probably do that, particularly if you went into that more comprehensive or complex integrations, but we chose to do it in-house, and we did and it worked out pretty well for us. So if you were to go and get other integration platforms, I would suggest that that’s going to cost you a lot more and it is a lot more complicated than– not really wanting to mention names but lots of other folks that have– porting to very expensive integration platforms and found that they’re not that easy to use and quite complex to set up. So if you’re looking for something that’s comprehensive and easy to use, Celigo’s your best bet. Thank you. Do you have a data warehouse? Okay. Do we have a data warehouse? On one of my slides I mentioned there’s a system called Focus which is a BI tool. Pop back to that one– there it is, top left-hand corner there. So there’s a multidimensional reporting system– perhaps wouldn’t go as far as calling it full-blown data warehouse but what it gives us– the data is able to direct connect between our local NetSuite and Focus so there’s no Celigo integration there. It’s a direct connect. They run their jobs, scripts, which they run within NetSuite, pulls the data out once a day, drops it into the FocusBI tool which gives us the ability to do multidimensional reporting. When I say that NetSuite’s reporting is pretty complex and comprehensive and building safe searches are a piece of cake– and so from a reporting point of view, it’s very good that way but when you want to start getting into slicing and dicing and build a report on all store sales for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and that’s fine. You build that report. But if you said, “Well, I only want six of these stores and I don’t want X, Y, and Z brands involved in that report–” so, yes, you can build a report saying, “Okay, I only want it for these brands. I only want it for these stores,” so, now, build another report or use a bunch of filters. It’s not quick and easy to use, so. In Focus, however, it is just that. It’s clip and view and you zoom into these particular things you can select a bunch of stores, a bunch of brands, and [inaudible] data ranges, etc. and almost instantly this delivers results to you and, interesting enough, does a great job of doing comparisons this year versus last year or this period versus the previous period where in NetSuite, again, can be built but it’s fairly static and each time you want to change that, well, then go and change the setup with that saved search. So if you want to call it a data warehouse– it’s a reporting tool. It’s a multidimensional reporting tool is what we used. And interesting, just to answer that, we also pulled all of our data from our previous point of sale system dating back years before we even went onto the Oracle system back in 2016, we pulled all of our sales data out of the old system, formatted it correctly, and we put into Focus, and we still have that data today. We can still compare back to 2011, 2012 if we really wanted to. I don’t suppose we do anymore but at the time– you remember I spoke about this nine-months transition from one system to the other. Well, we used Focus to pull the data from NetSuite and from the old system and in one system, the business could still continue to do their daily reporting this week versus last week and by brand and by store etc. So yep, that’s been our version of a data warehouse and it’s worked pretty well for us a couple more, I think. At what stage in your growth did you realize you have to start automating key business processes with integration? Okay. Pretty much off the bat, right upfront, we never had the resources or the manpower to consider or contemplate doing things manually in any form. We just don’t have the people to do that. So as a founding principle for the roll out of all of these systems, which we’ve spoken about today, all of those were built originally as part of the first integration. So if you go to the next slide, just have a look at that, so people process was done after the initial [inaudible] light of the east or one was a no-brainer. We had to do that straight out of the– we had to have them. There’s no way to be doing anything manual. [inaudible] looking at the latest shortcuts was a journey, really. From day one we started synchronizing process, but after then, step at a time we went further and further in the course. The product feeds that we speak about Facebook, etc., those came over time. But there was never any consideration for us not to do integration right from the word go. Do you have any advice for the companies that are struggling to adjust to the changes in the market right now? Yeah, so a lot depends on the current platforms that you might be running. What I’ve not covered in this station was the ability to do data transformations out of the same system. So if you got a platform, whatever it is, it might be next week, it might be any other platform, pulling [data up?], doing some data manipulation, pushing it back in, as opposed to writing some form of script or code process of modifying data within the system to pull it up, modify it and then push it back. So it’s a difficult question to ask in the format of how do you, shall we say, stay up to date and current with the current market requirements. Our journey was a difficult one because you are competing with our franchisees. But as you’ve seen, we actually got around that because we’ve made good use of all of the data that we’ve got available to us. We can keep everybody happy. So I would just be conscious if anyone is facing challenges in terms of how to maintain pace with the current changes as the more integrated and the more integrity that you’ve got in the data that you can use is the better it’s going to be. I’m sure there’s lots of people out there, lots of companies that will have a problem saying, “Oh, I got customer data in this system and that system and the next system.” Well, you kind of have to get to a point where you say, “This data, we have to have faith in this. So either we centralize that one way, or just decide where you are going to keep the integrity of the data, which is the single version of truth and manage it around it.” We chose NetSuite, which is quite logical because it is the central courses to– but not everybody has got this level of single system. So I’m pretty sure Celigo will be able to help do exactly that in terms of making sure the data integrity is kept to the very high standard. Well, thank you so much. If any more questions come in, we’ll take it but in the meantime, I just wanted to thank you so much, [Biv?], for all the information you shared. And if anyone has any questions, please reach out directly and send an email to Celigo.com, [email protected] or just go on Celigo.com, log in and see if you need help getting started, and we’ll be there to help you. But thank you so much for your time, [Biv?]. We really appreciate the insights. And thank you everyone for joining. We’ll stay here for another minute or so in case there’s any more questions, and then we will end the webinar. But thanks again. Thanks, Rico. Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure

About The Speaker

Rico Andrade

VP of Marketing
Celigo

Rico oversees Celigo’s marketing organization, where is he is responsible for the company’s brand, messaging, demand generation, outreach programs, events, and communications. Prior to joining Celigo, Rico was VP of Marketing at iCharts, significantly enhancing the company’s visibility and reputation inside the NetSuite ecosystem. He spent 13 years as the Executive Producer at Transvideo Studios, where he worked closely on marketing strategy with some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. In addition, Rico also ran his own consulting company, traveled the world teaching innovation and design as part of the Stanford d.school’s d.global initiative, and helped launch Unreasonable at Sea with the Unreasonable Group. Rico holds degrees in Computer Science and Communication from Stanford University.

Viv Paverd

National ICT Manager
HAIRHOUSE

Viv Paverd, National ICT Manager for Hairhouse with more than 30 years of Information Systems experience will share how Hairhouse leverages integrations between key applications such as Keplers, Shortcuts, PeoplePulse, BazaarVoice, 3PLs, and NetSuite to reduce cost, provide a superior customer experience, and scale.

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.

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