Ember consolidates SAP Business ByDesign integrations and sets the foundation for automation at scale with Celigo

About

Ember is a design-led temperature control brand and technology platform, whose mission is to revolutionize the way people eat, drink and live. Ember creates, designs, and develops the most advanced temperature control products on the market.

Ember’s temperature control smart mugs are available in over 10,000 retail doors in 27 countries worldwide, including top retailers such as Best Buy, Apple, Williams Sonoma, Bloomingdale’s, and Target.

Background

With Ember Technologies growing at a rate of 100% a year for the past few years, and expected to continue this growth for the foreseeable future, the company had outgrown its previous accounting solutions. Ember replaced these solutions with the SAP Business ByDesign ERP for financial and logistics operations and adopted new best-of-breed technologies in preparation for this growth.

“The system was a little bigger than we needed but that’s quickly going to change,” said Zach Horton, Director of Logistics at Ember Technologies. “The main driver is to get everything into a place that can be automated and accounted for. We’re a bit ahead of the curve in that way.”

The challenge

When Ember originally integrated Shopify with SAP Business ByDesign, the company was artificially limited to relying on a single Shopify store, despite selling in dozens of global markets. A prebuilt point-to-point integration they were using did not support multi-store functionality, causing Ember to struggle to properly serve all its customers in multiple locations with a single Shopify store.

“All the orders were going through the same place. It drove a lot of inefficiencies on the processing side of logistics fulfillment,” said Horton.”We were using IP addresses to guess the location and direct them to a specific SKU set, and that wasn’t always correct. We would see a host of orders that might come from Spain but were boarded with the US SKU.”

“That ultimately required a manual touch,” he added. “Every day we had to look and see what orders were getting stuck, make multiple clicks to edit, and make sure the customers didn’t realize anything had happened.”

Not only did the manual correction effort would take several hours a week, but it could lead to delays and unhappy customers when there wasn’t local inventory available for the products that had been ordered. With hundreds of thousands of orders fueling the company’s rapid growth, coupled with the company’s expansion in critical healthcare applications for its technology, better automation to enable perfect fulfillment was needed across the board.

The solution

Ember Technologies chose to replace their original integration with Celigo’s iPaaS. The Celigo integration platform would allow it to support multiple Shopify stores within a single dashboard.

“We now have Shopify stores for the US, Canada, UK, and the rest of Europe,” said Horton. “They are all live and fulfilling orders, bringing them into the systems, and passing tracking information back to Shopify to inform the customer. And we got it up and working pretty quickly.”

With the success of the launch of the Shopify multi-stores, Ember decided to replace all of its integrations and consolidate them into a single automation platform with Celigo, starting with Amazon orders into byDesign. The company is now currently replacing TechDynamics integration for orders pushed to the warehouse, and will focus on Walmart and Happy Returns next.

“The customer will be able to go online, purchase, get the return label for free and ship the product based on their order,” said Horton. “And Celigo will bring in the returns for our system to track and ultimately give our warehouse a receipt to post against.”

Bottom line

With hundreds of orders processed smoothly across the world, Celigo has eliminated the manual intervention during the processing saving Ember hundreds of hours on hundreds of thousands of orders. It also improved customer satisfaction as errors and delays were cut.

“We strive to give our customers the best service. It’s our mantra,” said Horton. “They expect their orders to be there quickly.”

Because of the platform’s design, Horton was able to architect and implement Ember’s automations on Celigo by himself.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to have done this a few times with different third-party platforms. And Celigo stands highest amongst all of them,” said Horton. “The user experience and interface make it very easy for us. I could do the functional design and implementation without needing a developer. And if I had questions, I had a direct line to the project managers who could respond pretty quickly. I think they’ve done an incredible job.”

Most importantly, the consolidation of all piecemeal integrations into Celigo has given Ember the foundation to automate its processes at scale as it expands into the healthcare market. Even more than the consumer market, healthcare applications require perfect fulfillment for critical uses of Ember’s thermal control products.

“We can’t afford failures. The speed, the efficiency, and the quality of the product have to be tiptop,” said Horton. “With these systems and platforms combined with Celigo, we’ll be ready as the hockey-stick numbers go through the roof.”