Velosio Successfully Accelerates Development and Deployment of its AutoQuotes RED ONE Bundle with Celigo

About

Velosio offers licensing, implementation, consulting, and support for cloud-based and on-premise software solutions. For over 30 years, Velosio has been a recognized leader in ERP, CRM, Cloud productivity, and business intelligence solutions. Velosio has earned recognition by Microsoft as a Top 1% performing partner worldwide and by NetSuite as a leading solutions provider. The company serves distribution, manufacturing, technology, services, and non-profit companies.

Background

As an expert in distribution and supply chain, Velosio has built a micro-vertical practice around restaurant equipment distribution companies. The dominant Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) tool of that industry is AutoQuotes. Within AutoQuotes, food equipment suppliers can easily help restaurants buy the equipment and tools they need including understanding the important specifications and options of products.

In servicing these companies, Velosio developed a unique solution to integrate and automate business processes between AutoQuotes and NetSuite. It ties customers, manufacturers, products and projects between AutoQuotes and NetSuite to eliminate manual work and maintenance. Velosio’s RED ONE bundle also provides capabilities for PO consolidation, split quotes and distribution dashboards.

“If our clients are working with a restaurant who’s opening a new location, the quote in AutoQuotes may have 150 or more line items — everything from tables and carts to ovens and blenders,” said Jeff Andrews, NetSuite Practice Director at Velosio. “Once the quote is sent out and the client approves it, they have to re-key that into whatever system they’re using for sales and ERP. So one of the biggest benefits is that our solution eliminates redundant and time consuming re-work.”

Because AutoQuotes is the primary CPQ solution in this market, Velosio found a way to bring much needed optimization for their clients. This optimization extends beyond AutoQuotes to marketing automation, upselling, demand planning, e-commerce integration, cycle counting and much more.

The challenge

For their first client in the restaurant equipment market more than five years ago, Velosio spent many hours designing and developing a SQL Server based solution using NetSuite APIs and temporary SQL tables to store data as it passed from AutoQuotes to NetSuite. This initial design and deployment proved beneficial in understanding the client’s needs and the AutoQuotes framework. However, it became apparent to Velosio that in order to rapidly deploy and support additional clients, they would need to re-think the core architecture and technology stack.

“When we tried to redeploy our solution, it was challenging,” said Andrews. “It was more time consuming to redeploy the SQL version than we desired. It also required the client to license and run a local server,” said Andrews. “Some clients don’t have an IT team, nor do they have SQL Server licenses and servers sitting around.”

“I wanted our team to be able to deploy our NetSuite-AutoQuotes integration quickly and make the entire process easier for our client,” he added. “And we wanted to have the ability to develop and maintain the integration using modern-day toolsets.”

The solution

Having had a great relationship and familiarity with Celigo on the service delivery side of their business, Velosio decided to use the Celigo platform to build the new version of their integration.

Andrews’ team was able to rebuild the application from the bottom-up with significantly fewer technical resources than the original application required.

“Part of this is a credit to the great team members we have. And part of it is because of Celigo. The team was able to jump into the platform, learn it, and get assistance from some team members when we were trying to do something complex. Since we could develop faster, we could use more of our time to add desired features to extend the integration.”

Bottom line

Now that Velosio has rebuilt their AutoQuotes Integration leveraging the Celigo platform, they have started rolling it out to new customers.

“We needed the flexibility to build some very specific automation native to NetSuite and we needed rapid deployment,” said Andrews. “The Celigo platform gives us the ability to go from vision to execution really fast. And along the way, we can do some amazing things to optimize and automate client processes.”

Since first rolling out the solution, Velosio has been able to steadily improve the AutoQuotes integration with additional integration capabilities built on Celigo.

With the success of their first integration product with Celigo, the company has already started to leverage the subject-matter expertise and IP they have developed in their services work into new applications, including e-commerce and HR/Payroll integrations.

“We like this model,” said Andrews. “It gives us a lead into the market, it gives us a unique offering, and it serves our clients.”