Client Background
An industry-leading promotional products distributor offers a unique mix of services to their corporate clients. With factory direct capabilities, they can bypass conventional levels of distribution. They are experts in brand awareness and committed to the highest level of customer service and on-time delivery, combining innovation, creativity and functionality while exceeding their customer’s expectations but not their budgets.
Client Challenge
With multiple suppliers of varying sizes, it became cumbersome and time consuming to fulfill orders. Their highly customized orders often contained materials from numerous suppliers and ensuring the details were accurately communicated was becoming increasingly challenging. Large suppliers required automated integrations using different protocols such as web services, API and file drops. The smaller suppliers were low-tech and wanted email and Excel file capabilities. The client needed a single platform that could support multiple types of integrations by product supplier.
Our Solution
We partnered with the client to develop a solution that seamlessly facilitates communication among multiple suppliers and other third-party logistics companies. We integrated Envalo’s Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for warehouses and carriers in multiple countries with two currencies to support a single-cart, order and checkout process. Inventory could be tracked separately by supplier and by warehouse.
Behind the scenes, orders were split into multiple sub-orders representing shipments by supplier or warehouse. Each ‘sub-order’ leveraged different integration technologies to communicate with external organizations for inventory, order creation and shipping updates.
Envalo’s ESB ECIP was also integrated with the client’s ERP system account module at the sales order and supplier level allowing the ERP to maintain the source of record for management and executive level reporting.
Business Impact
Our client achieved an enterprise-level solution, leveraging lower-cost, open-source solutions which give them a significant competitive advantage in their space. Our solution allows them to effectively serve a large Fortune 500 client, exceeding expectations and meeting tight deadlines.
More benefits allowed for our customer to:
- land a single contract that doubled their business,
- expand their business model by supporting more warehouses and dropship suppliers.
- ~ continuing your thoughts above ~…..a competitive advantage in their space to land more larger, enterprise size clients
Interested in learning more about how our mid-market solutions can help your company grow? Contact us to learn more.
