Lights4Fun, a family-owned business selling decorative lights, was grappling with the challenge of operating across disparate systems to service and reconcile order fulfillment from its 14 online marketplaces. The company was using different fulfillment and third-party logistics companies to handle inventory in warehouses in the US, UK, and Germany. The existing setup was causing frustration as teams lacked visibility of each other's activities. The sales department was selling out-of-stock items without knowing when they would be replenished, requiring the maintenance of seven different spreadsheets. The company was also unsure if their 3PLs were communicating with their different websites and marketplaces. As the company was growing, they were missing key opportunities due to the time and resources spent on manual processes. To support their aspirations of becoming a scalable and high-growth business, they needed to find a better alternative to the expensive and time-consuming manual effort.

LogMeIn, a leading SaaS company, faced several challenges as it expanded to become one of the largest SaaS companies globally. The company had to manage over a dozen subsidiaries with multiple bank accounts for different currencies, which led to a lack of visibility across its data. To apply customer payments for thousands of invoices daily, LogMeIn relied on weekly CSV uploads, a manual and time-consuming process. Additionally, as the company transitioned its Mexico and Brazil subsidiaries from a legacy ERP to NetSuite, it encountered unique regulatory requirements to register invoices with local governments. Lastly, LogMeIn sought to automate collections based on information in both Salesforce and NetSuite to efficiently track customers at risk of non-payment.

Loot Crate, a subscription box service, was facing a significant challenge in managing the high volume of online orders received daily on its Loot Vault and Sports Vault sites. The number of orders could range from 200 to 1,000 on a typical day and could surge to nearly 7,000 during the holiday season. The company was manually transferring orders and fulfillment information between their e-commerce storefronts, order management system, and warehouse management system. This process was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors and inconsistencies, leading to order fulfillment delays. The situation was particularly critical during the holiday shopping season. The company realized that the manual and ad hoc processes were not sustainable as the company grew. They needed an automated solution that could seamlessly integrate their e-commerce platform, Shopify Plus, their order management system, NetSuite ERP, and their new warehouse management system, Snapfulfill.

Miansai, a global accessories brand, was facing operational challenges due to the lack of integration between their multiple systems used to manage, track, invoice, and ship orders. This resulted in a significant amount of manual work, which was manageable when they were primarily selling wholesale. However, with the decline of retail department stores, Miansai shifted their business operations to support more direct-to-consumer sales through their own retail stores and website. This shift made the manual processes unsustainable. The main challenge was to integrate their new enterprise e-commerce platform, Shopify Plus, with their existing systems - NetSuite for order fulfillment and Square for point-of-sale (POS). They also planned to incorporate Returnly for managing returns. The integration solution needed to be easy-to-use, adaptable, scalable, and cloud-based to accommodate their evolving business needs.

MOTIS Brands, a leader in the loading, hauling, and accessibility industries, began as a small eBay seller of ramps and quickly expanded to offer additional products across various channels. With rapid growth, the company started acquiring additional brands, aiming to standardize operations to improve efficiencies and achieve scale. As MOTIS increased its product offerings and expanded into new channels, including Amazon and Walmart, the growing volume of transactions became increasingly difficult to manage, especially with a small operational team. Product, order, inventory, and pricing information had to be manually uploaded from one system to another, leading to hours spent on low-value work and error correction due to manual processes. The company also faced maintenance issues when trying to leverage unmanaged solutions for Amazon, particularly when taxonomies were not updated.

IslandSurf had selected NetSuite as its software platform and knew that they could not implement NetSuite without a solid 3PL solution. They required a solution that would automate their 3rd party warehouse processes to better serve their customers and be more efficient. As it was, IslandSurf spent much time and energy manually flagging orders that needed to be sent to AtLast Fulfillment, exporting just those orders, canceling any items on the order that shouldn’t be fulfilled at AtLast Fulfillment, and tracking and manually updating the sales orders once they were fulfilled.

Growing pains often come with starting and scaling a business. While the pain is easier to absorb when funding is readily available, scaling a company with limited financial resources is a daunting task, especially for businesses that sell and ship a niche product. What should you do if your sales are growing but your volume is not high enough to warrant maintaining your own warehouse? Despite the obstacles, Mio Global pushed ahead to grow into a multi-million dollar technology company while still keeping costs, time, and effort low. In 2012, Mio ramped up its direct-to-consumer business. Around this time, they developed a new product: a fitness-centric continuous heart-rate monitoring watch that did not use a chest strap via optical blood flow sensors. A user’s heart-rate data was broadcast via bluetooth low energy and was compatible with all smartphones, such as iPhone 4s and Galaxy S3. Outside funding was needed as Mio lacked sufficient funds to develop the product. The company started a Kickstarter campaign, which was a success. The aftermath, on the other hand, was “a complete nightmare” when the time came to fulfill and ship orders to their customers, with costs that went “through the roof” according to Inventory and Forecast Analyst Manager Tim Frazer. They were spending too much time, money and effort on shipping logistics. Their goal was to expand sales globally, and they needed a better way to handle the supply chain and logistics aspect of their business. Unfortunately, when Mio researched third-party logistics solutions, they found that most providers were far too expensive and required higher volumes than their needs allowed. Freight forwarding services were too cumbersome when issues like change orders arose, which would result in an unhappy customer who would post to social media blasting the company. While Amazon looked like a viable option, Mio wanted to be able to sell and ship from various international locations with a single point of contact on their end.

Lumens Light + Living needed a way to get accurate, consistent feedback from customers on their level of satisfaction. They lacked a solid gauge of their performance and needed to improve certain areas. Customers came from various points of entry, and Lumens needed a way to ask questions specific to each point of entry and weight what’s more important if a customer purchases in-store versus over the web. They had recently implemented NetSuite and wanted a customer satisfaction survey integrated with NetSuite and transaction-based. Most survey solutions they looked at were not based on transactional events, so they turned to Celigo to extend NetSuite and build a solution within NetSuite’s inherent customization capabilities.

Cellebrite needed to tightly integrate its CRM and ERP systems to ensure they 'speak the same language' and are aligned at all times. The integration had to be cloud-based to align with the company's strategy of managing all business applications through the cloud. Additionally, the integration had to be implemented simultaneously with the launch of Salesforce and NetSuite, adding complexity to the project. The company also faced the decision of whether to build a custom integration or use a prebuilt solution.

With booming business comes growing pains. Businesses that accept various forms of payments from their customers need to be efficient in managing their finances. A lack of visibility leads to various issues and redundancies. About 7 years ago, Spectrio was entering each receivable manually and using a check scanner. This resulted in countless errors and double-entry work, which prompted them to secure a bank lockbox 4 years ago. This allowed them to print out lockbox reports and manually reconcile those numbers. Still, they encountered issues due to the company doubling in size since 2011, requiring one full-time employee to spend about 30 hours per month on data entry, which was not an efficient use of company resources.

Similar to many companies, Spectrio manually processed cash application. With a monthly subscription business model, Spectrio processed about 3,000 check payments per month. Even after setting up a lockbox account with their bank, a full-time employee spent 30+ hours per week on data entry to manually reconcile lockbox reports against invoices in NetSuite. This was in addition to hours spent in investigating discrepancies and correcting data entry errors. Furthermore, Spectrio had to wait until close of business to view cash flow and payment statuses. These challenges were at a time when the company was facing rapid growth.

Today, a cadre of ‘old school’ suppliers of graduation gowns and services have a predictable business model that includes high costs for struggling schools and students. Every September an army of 1099 sales reps go from school to school, meeting with graduation coordinators to get the May-June commencement order. They place the order with the manufacturer, sit back, and watch the money roll in. GraduationSource was determined to disrupt this model, going direct to the schools and the students and passing the saving back to the schools, PTA and students. But each school has unique pricing and packages, so to do this, they needed to transform into a more modern, eCommerce-like business, with custom online stores for each store, where ordering, customization and fulfillment could all run in a smooth, efficient and automated manner. Being able to transfer order data in real-time is critical to maintaining success in an online retail environment. GraduationSource previously used another integration solutions provider, but found it lacking in enabling the company to fulfill orders quickly and correctly. With their previous system, orders were delayed up to an hour and mapping was not efficient. GraduationSource wanted to have real-time data transfer between their Magento store and NetSuite, and to have a streamline ordering and fulfillment process.