Groove Life achieves efficiency and scale by integrating Dynamics via Celigo

About Groove Life

Groove Life is an adventure lifestyle brand offering everyday carry accessories like belts, wallets, and silicone rings, designed for active men and women. Based in Tennessee, they cater to outdoor enthusiasts, with over 6 million direct-to-consumer customers and 2,500 retail partners, Groove Life continues to grow both in the U.S. and internationally. Known for product innovation, they focus on durability and comfort, making their products popular with those who enjoy outdoor activities and sports.

Challenges

In its early years, Groove Life experienced rapid growth, consistently growing 100% year-over-year. By the time they had grown to $30M in revenue, their operational systems struggled to keep up with this growth, especially as they scaled their ecommerce and wholesale operations. Their reliance on a desktop accounting application with a custom-built integration for ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Amazon led to constant synchronization errors. These errors caused data discrepancies, particularly in inventory management, resulting in overselling and stockouts that disrupted customer satisfaction. The manual intervention required to troubleshoot and correct these issues took significant time and resources, putting strain on their team and slowing down operations.

Additionally, Groove Life’s attempt to resolve these issues by switching to eBridge, another integration vendor, did not meet their expectations. Delays and unreliable support from eBridge exacerbated the problem, causing missed deadlines and adding operational bottlenecks that hindered growth potential during a critical period of the company’s expansion.

“It was frustrating to constantly deal with synchronization errors,” said Chris Huovinen, Groove Life’s VP of Information Systems. “You’re basically having to manually compare the two systems and figure out where things are off. It was tedious and took a lot of time.”

As their business grew, these inefficiencies became increasingly unsustainable. It became clear that without a better integration solution, Groove Life would face major operational bottlenecks that could limit its growth potential.

Solution

To address these challenges, Groove Life adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as their ERP and chose Celigo after evaluating several integration solutions. The team was impressed by its user-friendly interface, scalability, advanced error management features, and how well it worked with Dynamics. The platform allowed them to visualize workflows, manage integrations internally, and quickly address any issues. Huovinen, who came from a finance background, was able to learn the platform to drive the integration effort.

The team started by automating the flow of ecommerce orders from Shopify and Amazon directly into Dynamics for processing, inventory management, and fulfillment. With the success of that implementation, the team began to see new possibilities for automation.

“The more I worked with Celigo, the more I realized its capabilities,” said Huovinen. “It became a core application, and I started suggesting Celigo-based solutions to internal problems.”

They next automated the exchange of inventory and order data between Dynamics and their 3PL (WCO) and wholesale platform (Elastic) via FTP uploads and downloads.

Then, they automated financial reporting by syncing data from Dynamics to Google Sheets. They also used Google Sheets flows to create CSV files for FTP uploads, as well as Slack notifications for integration errors. This allows Chris and his team to quickly identify and address issues. They are also working on adding interactive buttons to retry or resolve errors directly from Slack.

Most recently, the team added a backup flow for TikTok Shop orders directly into Dynamics.

This team isn’t stopping there, though. Next up with Celigo will be improvements in their payment reconciliation process, expanded Slack and Google Apps integrations that include interactive actions, exploring the addition of a data warehouse, and leveraging AI to further automate tasks.

Most importantly, Huovinen plans to train additional team members on using Celigo, particularly to help manage errors and build new flows. He aims to have more employees go through Celigo University to become proficient with the platform and assist with integration tasks.

Results

After implementing Celigo, Groove Life experienced a significant transformation in their operations, starting with improved efficiency and automation. By implementing Microsoft Dynamics with other key applications, they were able to automate key processes such as order-to-cash workflows and inventory syncing. This eliminated the need for manual data entry and troubleshooting, allowing the team to focus on more strategic tasks. They also benefited from being able to customize flows and manage integrations without relying on third-party developers. This level of control reduced operational bottlenecks and allowed for quicker adjustments, speeding up overall processes.

One of the most impactful results was the dramatic reduction in time managing errors. Before Celigo, Groove Life faced synchronization errors that led to overselling, stockouts, and costly fulfillment mistakes. The transition to Dynamics ERP and the removal of third party integrations with Celigo led to a 99% on-time fulfillment rate and reduced fulfillment errors by over 80%. Orders placed on their website or through Amazon were processed and shipped by the next business day, and express orders were shipped the same day. This operational accuracy saved time and money and greatly improved customer satisfaction, as orders were fulfilled quickly and correctly.

Additionally, Celigo enabled better financial management for Groove Life. Improved automated reporting with data synchronization between their systems contributed to reducing the company’s monthly financial close time from 5-7 business days to just 3 days. This gave the leadership team timely access to accurate financial data, which improved decision-making. The ability to automate repetitive tasks, like payment reconciliations and inventory management, further optimized resource allocation. Overall, Celigo allowed Groove Life to streamline its operations, improve accuracy, and support the company’s continued growth and scalability.

The adoption of Celigo has had a transformative impact on Groove Life. “Celigo has played a critical role in our tech stack. It has helped us scale and become more agile and efficient across many business processes,” said Huovinen. “With Celigo, we can make quick changes that used to take weeks. That agility has been a game-changer for us. It gives us flexibility and ways to scale and grow our business.”