OZNaturals Migrates Ecommerce Automations to Dynamics 365 in Record Time with Celigo

About

OZNaturals is the first skincare company to utilize Cold Processed manufacturing to produce natural, clean, anti-aging products for healthy skin, skin repair and for prevention against future skin damage. Founded in Florida by licensed aesthetician Angela Irish, products from OZNaturals are produced in an FDA-certified lab in Canada producing its own proprietary products.

Background

Initially launched as a white-label product sold only on Amazon, OZNaturals quickly became a top-selling item on Amazon. The company quickly grew to thousands of transactions and units demanded, generating millions in annual sales, and enjoying brand recognition in 80 countries.

Ownership saw the demand was far greater than just Amazon and needed to build a business to expand growth with its own unique products. When Mike Small, Chief Financial Officer at OZNaturals, with an extensive background in supply chain logistics joined the company, his task was to professionalize and automate operations in a way that met OZNaturals’ high standards. He would also be responsible for expanding the company’s offerings beyond Amazon.

The challenge

OZNaturals had been operating like any other small business would, keeping track of financials using basic accounting solutions that required manual data entry. “We had over a million dollars in inventory, and we were not tracking our inventory,” Small said. To successfully implement OZNaturals’s plan, they would soon require more sophisticated infrastructure to manage and sustain that growth.

In order for OZNaturals to diversify from Amazon, they needed to expand their ecommerce activities onto their own Shopify-enabled website, backed up by 3PL warehouses. With the additional infrastructure in place, the team needed to find a way to automate the processes across the entire supply chain to pull orders from multiple channels, maintain service-level requirements in multiple Amazon markets, ensure sufficient inventory is in the correct warehouses, and respond to a rapidly-changing market.

The solution

Small knew that it was critical to leverage an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution like Celigo from the very start to do this with few internal resources. “I wanted something that was more straightforward to do this,” said Small. “I understand logistics, and that’s how I got involved with Celigo. I have brought Celigo to multiple companies over the last 10 years.”

First, Small integrated Amazon orders with their ERP with Celigo. Then, after building their own ecommerce website Shopify and integrating the ERP as well, along with custom 3PL integrations to two warehouses–one in the US and another in Canada.

Once those integrations with the 3PL warehouses were in place, it gave them another advantage with Amazon: the ability to automate standard transactions, while managing unusual processes. “If Amazon took down their FBA listing to do a BIN check, we would flip it to Fulfilled by Merchant to stay in business, without having 10 people teeing orders and babysitting.”

“That is the beauty of it: you build your operations to manage the exceptions, not the minutiae.”

In 2021, the company decided to migrate its ERP to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and change its Amazon operations. Because of how the integrations were set up with Celigo, Small was able to stand up Dynamics and set up the integrations within three months.

“We started with Order to Cash automation from Shopify to Dynamics,” said Small. “Then we did the P.O.s and receiving and all the other transactions.” Because the OZNatural team didn’t yet have subject-matter expertise in Dynamics, they hired Silverware, an expert partner to work closely with the Celigo team.

Small credits an easy-to-use dashboard as being part of the reason why Celigo is the right solution for their business diversification plans. “You can find out when your 3PL has had extra carrier codes very easily because you get an error message. It takes you about five minutes to fix it, and away you go.” The convenience of Celigo’s solutions, says Mike, has opened up the possibility for scale.

Bottom line

Celigo being part of the expansion process from the start enabled OZNaturals to build a highly-scalable operation, needing just a small team to manage orders, inventory, wholesale pricing, and other processes

Celigo iPaaS has allowed OZNaturals to break out of being an Amazon-only e-tailer and move into other target markets, such as B2B spas and retailers, and additional international distributors. “We met demand requirements for international markets, 6 marketplaces, a company website, and an expanding number of retailers,” Small said.

In addition, because the processes are all automated via cloud solutions, OZNaturals has been able to respond to warehouse closures due to COVID-19 without missing any orders, and continue operations as usual during the disruption in the market.

“We made ourselves a lot stronger and able to scale because we’re not dependent on one channel anymore.” The ease of use also made it very easy to replace the ERP with Microsoft Dynamics. “We probably came 30%-40% below what we had estimated it would take to migrate,” said Small. Small says he will continue to use Celigo as OZNaturals expands.

“Other competitors are either not as robust or are way more of a black box, said Small. I have been working with Celigo for more than 10 years. One of the best things about the company is that everyone really cares about the customer. They treat me really well. I think that’s always valuable.”