Adventure Gear Retailer Cuts Trading Partner Onboarding from 2-3 Months to 1 Day with Jitterbit

Challenge

Since 1975, an adventure gear retailer and ecommerce customer has been committed to offering responsibly designed and durable travel bags, luggage and gear. This range of offerings requires a robust supply chain consisting of manufacturers, freight logistics and more. And the wholesale relationships with nearly 1,000 stores across the U.S., Canada and Europe demand an equally robust EDI platform — one with the agility to keep up with the modern pace of retail.

When the company implemented NetSuite, they contracted with a well-known full-service EDI provider. But it soon proved a poor fit for the growing company.

“It was a nightmare,” said the company’s Director of Information Systems.

The company had no visibility into the onboarding of new trading partners — a process that took two to three months. After that, orders were dropped directly from its FTP site to the 3PL warehouses that managed shipping, cutting the company completely out of the loop.

Worse, fixing incorrect information on EDI documents required opening a ticket with the EDI provider, attempting to explain what went wrong in a process they had no visibility into, waiting for the correction, then enduring a lengthy testing cycle. The entire process took at least a month, but could take much longer: By the time a minor error between the Jitterbit customer and its largest retail partner was corrected, seven months later, the retailer had racked up over $40,000 in chargebacks.

Solution

With their EDI contract coming up for renewal, the Information Systems director knew it was time for a change. While it was also more cost-effective, she said, the deciding factor in favor of Jitterbit was self-service.

Despite the complexity of the existing setup, it only took a couple of months to migrate existing trading partners and get Jitterbit EDI and iPaaS fully up and running. To ensure they beat their contract expiration, the customer teamed up with Jitterbit Professional Services to set up their largest trading partner.

“Our experience with Professional Services was great. The guy that was assigned to us was awesome — he would regularly check in and show me progress, and he was super responsive. It was great,” the Information Systems director said.

Results

“It used to take two to three months to onboard a single trading partner. Now it’s down to one day with Jitterbit EDI,” she explained. And she was able to do the work on her own: once the first trading partner was set up, she simply used it as a model to copy over the others. Part of this agility comes from Jitterbit EDI’s strong template set.

“The basis of every single EDI document has already been created,” she said. “There’s no learning curve when it comes to mapping one trading partner to another. You don’t need anything special, because everything you could possibly need is already in there.”

Better yet, this translates from one trading partner to another — making it easy to map all the documents, for example, between NetSuite and the 3PL.

Being able to keep an eye on transactions has also been huge. “I have visibility of everything that’s coming in and everything going out on one screen. It’s just so, so easy,” the Information Systems director said.

And the increase in visibility extends beyond just EDI documents. For example, the communication between NetSuite and the 3PL isn’t via EDI — it’s all through API.

“We can see what we’re sending, the results, and all the information on their API site. We’ve never had that visibility before,” she said. If the 3PL doesn’t receive what the company sends, it can be immediately resent — no need to involve a third party or go through a lengthy process.

And if something’s incorrect, she said, “I can just go into Jitterbit and change it, then send it down correctly.”

This agility has allowed this retailer to avoid tens of thousands of dollars in chargebacks: Earlier this year, a glitch resulted in chargebacks. But with Jitterbit, they were able to react quickly and correct the documents, then file to get the chargebacks reversed — an outcome impossible with the previous vendor’s lengthy turnaround times.

While the Information Systems director spends significantly less time engaging with support at Jitterbit, the times she did reach out were all positive experiences.

“Jitterbit support is amazing. If I have a problem, I put in the support case and get a meeting with someone who’s brilliant and not only solves my problems, but also teaches me along the way — so I can avoid it, or if it happens again, I know how to fix it,” she said.

“I’m able to do all the EDI and integration automation on my own. It speaks highly of Jitterbit that I can do that,” she concluded. “It’s already a business-critical software.”