GTSE sets the stage for scale with Celigo

About

Manchester-based GTSE is the UK’s leading supplier of cable ties, tapes, and other hardware consumables. The company was founded in 2014 with the sole goal of selling high-quality cable ties; since then, its product portfolio has expanded to include drill bits, fixtures and fastening, tools, gloves and other PPE, and electrical and automotive supplies. Both individual buyers and large corporate accounts purchase their products both directly and via their ecommerce sites. Today, the company employs a small but mighty team of 12.

Background

GTSE’s nearly ten-year ecommerce history included a number of different platforms, from Magento to BigCommerce to Amazon. During the pandemic, they saw their online sales increase significantly, and when they opened an Amazon US storefront, their transaction volume exploded.

As a result, they decided to implement NetSuite as their ERP solution. Freddie Miller, GTSE’s managing director, spoke with a family friend about the NetSuite implementation. He said something that would change — and improve — their ecommerce journey: “You need to get Celigo.”

As it turns out, that friend was a Celigo customer. When GTSE’s partners at Catalyst ERP also recommended Celigo as a way to manage their growing number of implementations, particularly with NetSuite now onboard, Freddie knew it was something they should seriously consider.

The challenge

Prior to implementing NetSuite, the majority of GTSE’s business processes, including stock management, marketing, and data analysis, were tracked in Excel. They relied on Xero as an accounting software package and were using A2X to bring Amazon data into the Xero system. However, maintaining all the various spreadsheets remained a huge job. Basically, every employee was spending at least some of their time in Excel, verifying data and extracting the information necessary to operate the business.

Plus, there was no way to check inventory status with real-time accuracy. “There was a lack of visibility with regard to inventory,” says Freddie. “That was one of my biggest issues with the whole existing setup.”

Another major problem was closing their books. “We didn’t really do full hard month closes and things like that. That was just not possible. And so, from a financial perspective, it was very hard. While we had no concerns that there were any errors, it wasn’t as diligent as I would want it to be in terms of closing each month,” Freddie says. “And producing reporting was almost impossible.”

Without accurate financial reports, the team struggled to make strategic decisions and plan for the future of the company. That’s when Freddie decided it was time to make a change. He listened to the many recommendations he’d received and brought Celigo on board.

The solution

July 1, 2022, was GTSE’s first day with Celigo, and they immediately got started with several pre-built connections, including six Amazon stores, eBay, BigCommerce, and API and FTP integrations with 3PL for warehousing and fulfillment.

Right away, the team was impressed by how intuitive the platform was and how well everything worked together. Today, 10 out of 12 total employees use NetSuite daily, and four are proficient with Celigo. One GTSE even functions as their “Celigo guru.” He’s done about half of the Celigo University courses and manages all daily troubleshooting and error management. “If something does go wrong, you can kind of work out yourself without having to engage with developers or someone technically capable within the system,” Freddie says.

Given the relatively small size of its team, one of GTSE’s overarching company goals is to leverage automation to its fullest potential. Celigo is helping them do just that by eliminating their former reliance on spreadsheets and manual data entry. “It’s allowing people to free up their day jobs to focus on the bigger picture growth projects rather than be stuck in the details and buried in spreadsheets all day long,” says Freddie. They can also produce the level of reporting they need to make strategic decisions and plan for the future.

Bottom line

After just nine months of having Celigo in their tech stack, GTSE is already looking to add two more website integrations within the next six months, along with additional 3PL warehouses. And their business has grown so much that they’re in acquisition talks with three companies.

According to Freddie, the combination of Celigo and NetSuite represents a significant turning point for their firm, and he sees both as long-term partners for their upcoming expansion efforts. “We’ve held back on scaling over the past 12 months because we were waiting on our ERP implementation to complete. And now we’ve got all the system integrations in place. We’ve got the people in place, and that now for me is the ‘This is where we scale’ moment,” he says.

As the company grows, Freddie looks forward to learning more about what Celigo can do for them. Future initiatives include Hubspot and Stripe integrations. In addition, Freddie is working with Catalyst ERP as a resource for other organizations considering Celigo.

His advice is “not to build anything halfway” and not to think just in terms of immediate costs. “Yes, it’s not a cheap piece of software, but again, speaking to other people who’ve got big NetSuite implementations, they said Celigo was actually a superior solution to their existing setups. Originally, they’d been doing everything manually or requiring lots of in-house dev time — fixes and workarounds — and this is actually a much more seamless solution.” For him and the rest of the GTSE team, the investment in Celigo has been well worth it.