Vertex Wireless Builds a Custom 3PL Empire With Scalable, Hands-Off Integrations

About

Founded in 2006, Vertex Wireless is a wholesale distributor of mobile devices, smartphones, tablets, wearables, and IoT hardware. As the business evolved, Vertex began to provide 3PL solutions and founded a sister company to develop and distribute mobility tech of their own.

Background

Martin Lund, Vertex Wireless’ Director of IT, manages and oversees all of Vertex’s technical infrastructure. NetSuite is the center of Vertex’s supply chain, acting as the main conduit through which order, finance, and other fulfillment data flows through to the rest of their systems. In addition to NetSuite, Vertex utilizes an on-prem warehouse management system (WMS) from which SQL queries are used to parse serialized data. Before adopting an iPaaS, Vertex had been using an eCommerce connector solution to automate order entry and perform limited data migration.

The challenge

Vertex prides itself as a nimble company with the ability to move quickly and adapt the business. However, their previous eCommerce connector was the antithesis of what had made Vertex successful. Not only had the connector become costly, but its basic functionality couldn’t accommodate the full extent of its data migration needs, nor their custom 3PL offerings to their customers.

As business changed, Martin decided to change their development direction altogether. “We wanted to culturally shift out of building custom APIs into having JSON or flat files that we can parse through an iPaaS. Our overhead was pretty high because we were essentially recreating the wheel every single time,” he explained. Instead of an expensive point-to-point connector with limited use-cases that only created more work for Martin’s team, Vertex needed to graduate to an iPaaS that could support the sheer volume of fulfillments they were doing, scalable custom 3PL implementations for their customers, and hybrid integrations between NetSuite and their on-prem WMS.

The solution

After mulling over multiple potential options, Martin selected Celigo’s iPaaS, integrator.io. In his words: “The feature set was most inline with what we were looking for. The great thing about it was that Celigo worked with us as a company to help us ramp up from our previous solution given how limited it was. They helped us fit it into our budget and make everything right.”

The first stage of the implementation was automating order entry and data migration between systems. To obtain serialized inventory data from the onprem WMS, the integration workflow connects to SQL to execute a query that exports said data to integrator.io. From the iPaaS, that inventory data syncs with NetSuite and onto their customers’ storefronts on Amazon and eBay. Martin is a technical user who visualizes how systems work in advance; he found it very easy to set up this initial workflow because the Flow Builder on integrator.io is also visual, letting him easily put his vision into practice.

Because it was so easy to get on board, Martin started looking for ways to build more complex systems with integrator.io. With some help from Celigo’s team, he configured integrator.io to act as an inbound API that can parse data from JSON. “I’m also getting into the weeds of webhooks,” he said. “I love the new developer sandbox. If you’re writing Javascript, you’re able to see how that data is being manipulated in the backend. We’re going to continue using more of those tools so it’s great to have that there.”

Almost immediately after implementation, Vertex was ready to offer custom 3PL solutions to their customers. When an existing customer selected Vertex as their 3PL provider in the middle of peak holiday shopping season, Vertex responded quickly. Within two weeks, Martin built and deployed a custom 3PL integration on integrator.io for that customer; the entire inventory transfer was complete by the next month. In the past year, Vertex processed 91,000 orders with 187,000 items picked for that customer they secured with Celigo’s help.

Bottom line

With Celigo, Martin is able to manage a system that processes anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 fulfillments per day with little effort on his part. Building, testing, and implementing an integration for a new customer now takes a few hours a day, a stark reduction from 6-8 months it took to create and integrate with custom APIs from scratch. Martin troubleshoots data issues for customers after deployment, but the reliability of integrator.io means that those issues tend to be minor and few in number.

With all the time that’s been freed up, Martin continues to delve deeper into Celigo’s platform to push the boundaries of his integrated workflows. “We’re making more complex systems in integrator.io every day and finding more ways to utilize it,” he explained. “We primarily purchased it for NetSuite, but we found that we could do cool things with website data, connecting to this email, or sending out text messages. We’re looking at all these potential ways that we can actually use this solution as a true iPaaS and not necessarily solely around NetSuite.