Amigo Mobility’s order-to-cash automation via Celigo delivers 10x ROI, greater efficiency, and customer satisfaction

About

Amigo Mobility International, Inc. is a manufacturer and direct seller of motorized shopping carts, material handling equipment, and parts and accessories for mobility vehicles.

Founded by Al Thieme in 1968, Amigo Mobility is an intricate company with over a 100 employees, supplying mobility solutions all over the world, in a variety of sectors, including healthcare, grocery, retail, material handling, and hospitals.

Background

Amigo’s biggest frustration revolved around their order entry process from many of their largest customers. Some of Amigo’s biggest customers like Kroger, Target and Walmart use SAP Ariba to issue purchase orders and accept invoices, but the lack of an intuitive and reliable way to sync Amigo’s internal system with SAP Ariba meant that Amigo had to enter and handle a large volume of orders manually.

Customers would send PDF purchase orders to Amigo via email, which would have to be hand-transferred and processed. Ryan Maher, Amigo’s Director of Administration explained that human errors would inevitably happen. “We had data alignment issues and missed orders. Between all of us involved, we had two-thirds of an FTE involved in running this particular task.”

Additionally, the company also needed to streamline service repair orders, custom pricing management, and cash application. Thus, the solution had to be one that enabled them to go beyond just improving their order entry system and financial visibility. Ideally, it would also help to save costs on headcount and operations.

The challenge

After trying unsuccessfully for more than one year to build an integration between their EDI system and Ariba with internal resources, Maher needed to find a another solution that would fit as many of Amigo’s order process requirements as possible, while simultaneously saving on costs.

Amigo moved away from a home-grown system and adopted NetSuite as their financial system of record, but they still needed to automate its processes around Ariba. The staff was under increasing pressure to ensure that they didn’t miss any orders from key customers. “Our order-entry person spent two-thirds of their day dealing with manual orders from Ariba,” said Maher. “This is a sizable portion of our business, with a significant percent of our total sales flowing in through that platform.”

The solution

Maher learned about Celigo while attending SuiteWorld and saw the Ariba-NetSuite integration in action. “It was the Ariba integration that drove me to Celigo. I could control things within Celigo. I didn’t really need external help to do anything, and it did not take me 14 months and counting, like the (prior) project was taking us. I’m an accountant by trade, but with Celigo, I myself got the integration to work within a month.”

Once the Celigo integration went live, order accuracy immediately improved by 100 percent and the employees on order-entry duty could be reallocated to other important activities. “To us, this was huge,” said Maher. “Now these folks are doing more strategic, rewarding work.”

Encouraged by the success of the Ariba integration, Maher then turned to the Cash Application Manager (CAM) to improve the cash application process. “We were going off remittance spreadsheets from the customer, and we needed to match this up in NetSuite for the invoices that were being paid. Because all of this was manual and every customer had a different format, it was too difficult. The big thing we gained was control of our inbound cash.”

Apart from products, a significant portion of Amigo’s business comes from service and repair work orders. Amigo receives approximately 3,500 work orders per month via ServiceChannel, and two full-time employees would be required to manually handle repair service orders. “We were doing 60 hours a week in our customer service department just on copying and pasting data, and forwarding emails that we got from ServiceChannel,” said Maher. “By integrating ServiceChannel and NetSuite with Celigo, this has been eliminated. Service work is a big portion of our business, so this benefit is very meaningful to us.”

With Celigo, they’ve also been able to streamline document and email order flows with DocParser and MailParser integrations. “This is another great cost savings integration for us, as we used to have a person keying in 400-500 of those service orders manually,” said Ryan.

Beyond order processing, Maher uses Celigo for pricing management. In NetSuite, if a customer is given a hard-coded specific price for that customer’s purchased item, that ‘custom price’ has to be maintained on the customer record. “So if I have a big parent customer like Kroger, they might have 2,500 sub-customers, I would have to maintain that item and that price on all 2,500 sub-customers. Celigo allows me to update all the sub-customers at once. When I change the price on the parent, it pushes it back into all the subs.”

Bottom line

Now, Maher has other integration plans in the works: Corrigo service platform to streamline facilities operations management,SugarCRM, Paycor, and Amigo’s payroll system. But one of most notable aspects of Amigo’s integration initiatives using Celigo, lies in the significant savings and ROI they’ve achieved so far.

For the successful Ariba and ServiceChannel integrations alone, the estimated savings in hard costs is about $85,000 a year, and the reallocation of employees meant that they didn’t have to hire more people for other important tasks.

“Overall, we are seeing a 10X ROI from Celigo,” said Maher. His plan is to automate the entirety of Amigo’s order entry system. Maher says they are more than 75 percent of the way there.