MOTIS Brands grows from one brand to 15 brands while using Celigo for process automation

About

MOTIS Brands is the leader in the loading, hauling, and accessibility industries. Headquartered in Germantown, WI, MOTIS Brands designs, develops, and distributes a collection of industry-leading brands including Race Ramps, Silver Spring Mobility, Heavy Duty Ramps, Black Widow, Rage Powersports, Guardian Industrial Products, Kill Shot, Tilt-a-Rack, and Harbor-Mate.

Background

MOTIS Brands began as Discount Ramps, a small eBay seller of ramps, and quickly grew to offer additional loading, hauling, and accessibility products across the omnichannel. With the quick growth, the company began acquiring additional brands, with the goal of standardizing operations to improve efficiencies and achieve scale.

Today, the MOTIS Brands umbrella comprises 15 leading brands, with four more manufacturing brands being brought into the fold.

The challenge

As MOTIS increased its product offerings and expanded from eBay into new channels, including Amazon, Walmart, and eBay, the growing volume of transactions became increasingly difficult to manage, particularly with a tiny operational team. Product, order, inventory, and pricing information had to be manually uploaded from one system to another. Hours were spent on low-value work, including time spent on correcting errors due to manual processes.

“When I first started, there was no automation. At all. We had a couple of people who were filling out a spreadsheet and loading the data,” said Jeremy Vandenberg, MOTIS Brand’s IT and Information Analyst.

In addition, the company also tried to leverage unmanaged solutions for Amazon, but ran into maintenance issues, particularly when taxonomies were not updated. The company, however, needed to keep pushing on its growth. Vandenberg, who personally came from a background of process automation, knew the company needed a different approach.

“Since we have several different types of systems to communicate with, we required software capable of handling a variety of methods all within the same dashboard,” said Vandenberg.

The solution

Discount Ramps, MOTIS’s original brand, chose Celigo to thoroughly integrate NetSuite and online marketplaces using Celigo’s prebuilt automations for Amazon, Walmart, and eBay. These products ensured accurate inventory levels were available across all channels, in a way that continuously improved over time.

“We were able to free up a portion of the team who couldn’t focus on tasks,” said Vandenberg. “So taking that off our plate gave us time to work on a lot of other things.”

During the deployment of those prebuilt solutions, Vandeberg discovered the extensive capabilities of Celigo’s underlying iPaaS, and went on to address other enterprise-wide automation challenges.

Within the Order-to-Cash processes, Vandenberg automated processes around Amazon FBA, MFN, Vendor Central, 1P, and Google Shopping across multiple brands.

Then Vandenberg worked with the marketing team on a collection of marketing automations around applications such as Listrack, Power Reviews, Criteo, Avantlink, Google, and Facebook. In implementing transactional and marketing emails between NetSuite and Listrack, Vanderberg leveraged Celigo’s professional services expertise to learn how to build future workflows himself.

“I had no idea how to do it,” said Vandenberg. “So Celigo helped us develop it in-house, and we learned from that moving forward without going to any outside resource. I was a big fan of that.”

The automations grew as the company acquired new brands. With so many SKUs, the content team constantly needed to upload new product pictures to the different websites. The company procured Brandfolder for Digital Asset Management, and leveraged Celigo’s event lister to automatically update listings across all the relevant channels automatically.

In addition, Vandenberg implemented complex, enterprise-wide automations across supplemental data in order feeds, extended warranty programs, transportation management systems, credit checking, and much more.

“As you can imagine, we have some pretty sophisticated workflows we have automated,” said Vandenberg.

Bottom line

Celigo has been a critical piece in helping MOTIS scale operations as the business grows into a powerhouse of 15 brands. During this time frame, MOTIS grew its customer base 400% while the number of sessions increased to over 10 million annually. Celigo has made it possible to ensure accurate inventory levels are available across all channels. Inventory management and replenishment have become easier, faster, and less prone to errors. The buying experience for customers is enhanced with timely order fulfillment and real-time order statuses.

“Celigo has helped our company excel at system communications efficiently and quickly, leading to agile growth within our market and further our expansion,” said Vandenberg. “They give us consistency and efficiency, ensuring that wherever we are setting our data, it is the same everywhere it goes. That’s a big deal for us, especially in the omnichannel. It helps us focus on more strategic projects as opposed to trying to keep our neck above water wrangling data.”

Vandenberg adds that Celigo has also given a foundation of clean data that has rippled across all areas of the organization.

“Now that we have the data, we can use it anywhere else it’s applicable,” says Vandenberg. “We ambitiously just acquired four more manufacturers we need to be brought into the fold. With Celigo, we have a foundation to automate data everywhere.”