Outdoor Research leaps towards operational excellence and expansion with Celigo

About

Outdoor Research, founded in 1981 by Ron Gregg in Seattle, designs and manufactures high-performance technical gear and apparel for outdoor sports like climbing, skiing, and backpacking. Known for its innovation and quality, the company leverages feedback from a community of professional athletes to enhance product functionality and durability.

Challenge

As Outdoor Research grew, their older systems struggled to handle increased volumes efficiently, especially between Magento and Dynamics Finance & Operations, their ERP. The system’s inability to process large volumes of orders during peak sales periods like Black Friday quickly exacerbated the scalability challenges, leading to major order backlogs.

“With our old system, it took 20 seconds to get an order from Magento to Dynamics, and it was done sequentially,” said Eric Leung, Director of Enterprise Applications at Outdoor Research. “Black Fridays would kill us because we would be so far behind even ingesting orders that our inventory would get thrown into a loop. There’s no way you could hire enough people to be able to handle the high volume of orders a day. It was horrible.”

Outdoor Research started looking at integration solutions when they decided to switch their ecommerce platform from Magento to Shopify, which highlighted the inadequacies of their existing integration tools. Recognizing the need for a system that could better manage their ecommerce and ERP integration with improved automation and scalability, they began exploring alternatives that could offer these capabilities.

Solution

Outdoor Research underwent a detailed and thorough process to select an integration vendor. Celigo emerged as a strong candidate due to its ability to support complex integrations intuitively, prompting Outdoor Research to evaluate it thoroughly during a trial period before making a final decision.

“We built out a lot of things during our trial period just to make sure that we were comfortable that Celigo was going to work for us,” said Leung. “Celigo was more intuitive, more user-friendly. I know that developer tools don’t tend to be user-friendly, but even a functional user could still get in there and get work done.”

The team considered using the Microsoft integration solution, but realized that while it was possible to set up the necessary integrations, the process was more complicated and less intuitive compared to Celigo. The Microsoft tools required a more in-depth technical understanding, which could potentially limit wider adoption within the team.

In addition, the consumption-based pricing model for Microsoft’s integration solutions, which could potentially become costly depending on the volume of data being processed and the number of transactions, was also a factor in the team’s decision.

With Celigo in their tool chest, Outdoor Research focused on first integrating the mission-critical order-to-cash processes between their Shopify ecommerce store and Dynamics ERP.

“With Celigo, we can place a high volume of orders into the system within seconds. Now our data isn’t any more than 15 minutes old, which is amazing,” said Leung.

After successfully implementing the first order-to-cash processes, the team moved on to a series of other integrations, many centered around their Dynamics ERP.

The first Narvar integration for handling returns helped manage reverse logistics and customer service, enhancing customer satisfaction. Then they further automated the management of warranty returns by integrating Zendesk to create support tickets when warranty issues were reported, facilitating better customer service and issue tracking.

As the business and its needs grew, Outdoor Research expanded its use of Celigo to include integrations with other retail systems and EDI for handling more complex transactions and communications with other business partners. They also set up integrations with Elastic to streamline wholesale order processing, significantly reducing manual entry, and improving accuracy.

Finally, Outdoor Research used Celigo to automate the export of various system data to Azure Storage, which supports their business intelligence and analytics to give the team better visibility into their operations.

Moving forward, the team plans to automate additional processes, leverage data insights, and are specially keen on adding enhanced EDI capabilities from Celigo.

Results

Outdoor Research’s experience with Celigo has been transformative. By choosing Celigo, a small team was able to tackle its immediate mission-critical challenge while setting themselves up for future today. The team has gained a level of flexibility, scalability, and efficiency that they never had before.

More importantly, they have the confidence and control they need to scale their operations, allowing them to focus on strategic growth initiative, such as entering new markets or launching new product lines, with the confidence that their backend operations are solidly supported by Celigo.

“We’ve gone from a department of saying ‘no’ to a department of saying, ‘I know we can’,” said Leung. “Celigo is always top of mind for us. If there is an API involved or we’re moving files around, we can use Celigo.”

“It has been very good for us,” he said.