THE CHALLENGE

An eCommerce leader in educational play products had built a thriving business on the back of a subscription model enabling parents to receive kits designed for each of their child’s specific stages of development. Rapid growth, however, came with operational scaling challenges. The client needed to implement a cloud-based enterprise resource planning ("ERP") system—in part, to allow for globally centralized management of its financials—while at the same time attempting to onboard a new third-party logistics (“3PL”) vendor that would support faster growth in its core US business.

These strategic changes risked resulting in a complicated weave of point-to-point integrations between the ERP system (NetSuite), the company’s eCommerce platform (Shopify), and the new 3PL provider’s system. Locking in such an architecture would significantly increase the cost and effort of all future changes, which could prevent the company from meeting its customers’ evolving needs and from staying ahead of its competitors—several of them very large and sophisticated enterprises.

THE SOLUTION

Fortunately, Boomi had been selected as the client’s strategic Integration Platform as a Service ("IPaaS")—more commonly known as middleware—to drive data agility and flows. Big Compass was engaged to lead this implementation based on our deep technical expertise in Data Agility leveraging Boomi, and on our collective experience in enabling order-to-cash and inventory management processes through integrations.

Our team’s focus was on building a set of re-usable, modular integrations shared by business units in the US, the UK, and Europe. Big Compass collaborated closely throughout the project with the client’s development, IT operations, and accounting teams, and with a global NetSuite consulting services provider. 

THE RESULTS

Within 90 days, Big Compass enabled the client to go live in its US region with end-to-end integrations of its eCommerce, ERP, and 3PL systems. Note that this was no soft launch: the system had to ingest 60,000 orders as part of the cutover procedure. Our team took full advantage of Boomi's platform, leveraging its cloud-based runtimes and implementing multithreading to enable much more rapid order ingestion.

During the stabilization period after US go-live, Big Compass worked closely with the client to design and deploy similar end-to-end integrations for its UK and EU regions, which went live only sixty days after the US launch. Today, the client’s ERP, eCommerce, and logistics systems are allowing the company to manage its global business in a fully integrated and consistent way while continuing to serve its many loyal customers.

‍What’s more, the modern API-driven foundation now connecting these systems will allow the company to easily and efficiently scale its business into new regions, growing both revenue and its bottom line.