Name: Ditch the Legacy: How Top Brands are Modernizing their Commerce Infrastructure
Uploaded: 2025-04-29T18:11:06.012Z
Duration: 29 min 4 s
Description: Ditch the Legacy: How Top Brands are Modernizing their Commerce Infrastructure

Transcript for "Ditch the Legacy: How Top Brands are Modernizing their Commerce Infrastructure": Welcome, everyone. This session is sponsored by our partners, Bryant Park Consulting. We're excited for this first session, of the day here. Ditch the Legacy, How Top Brands are Modernizing Their Their ecommerce Infrastructure. And today, I'm excited because we've got a great, set of panelists for this discussion. And, Daniel, do you wanna go ahead and tell us a little bit about about, yourself, and your company? Yeah. Sure thing. Hi. I'm Daniel Barros. I'm director VRP for ~Pourri. You may have heard of our product before. The product we're most known for is our toilet spray, but we're an odor elimination brand across categories. We sell into home, air care, and pet products as well as one of our recent line expansions. And my role at the company is everything to do with ERP, API, and EDI. So I manage connections between our systems and the team behind that as well. Fantastic. How about, Chris, Huovinen, why don't you go next? Alright. Yeah. I'm Chris Huovinen, VP of information systems at Groove Life. We are an adventure lifestyle brand. We have products from silicone rings to belts and wallets and, a lot more coming down pipe. So, yeah, you can find our products on our website and in retail stores across The US. And so I'm I'm managing all of our information systems from our ERP to, Shopify and and the integrations that that flow in between all of those, platforms. So, happy to be here. Awesome. Fantastic. And then, finally, Chris Mark. Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Mark. I work at PeakDesign. If you don't know our company, we sell action photography accessories, backpacks, bags, and mobile accessories. We've kind of expanded into all these different verticals. We're entirely funded on Kickstarter, kind of a a interesting tidbit. We just finished our roller Kickstarter, but, what what I do is I manage all of our back end infrastructure, our systems team, and then also our back end engineering team. And so anything to do with APIs, building out custom applications, my team, will will handle yeah. We have a lot of different third party services that are connected through Celigo. Fantastic. Thank you, Chris. Well, clearly, all three of you have, key roles that it it your company is experiencing high growth and a lot a lot to look after, and you've been through quite a bit through those journeys. Starting out here for for the for the first question, I'd like to ask you ask you guys, what have you seen that's that's holding commerce back from a from an infrastructure, integration, automation standpoint? What's been what's been what's blocked your your organizations, and what are what are the broader trends that you're seeing, around that? And and let's go, we'll start off with you, Chris Huovinen. You're you're at the top of my screen, so so we'll start off with you. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I think some of the challenges we have data silos and act and and inaccuracy where our data sits in, systems that are isolated and not connected and talking to each other. And and with that, there's a lot of manual processes of, reconciling data in different spots and and making sure everything is synced up. And then I feel like that, brings you to a place where there's really a lack of of scalability where if you're a fast growing and fast moving business, those manual processes and data inaccuracies are just gonna hold you back from growth and really, being able to meet your demands and and, satisfy your customers and all that. So that's that's what I see. Makes sense. I think, you know, within that scalability struggles that you had, is there something specific there that ends up blocked? What was the biggest impact to the business as far as not being able to scale effectively? For us, I mean, we, it's probably during our peak holiday season. I mean, in q four, our order volume is 10 to 20 times higher than than our than throughout the year, you you know, and we have a lot of sales that are packed into a very small, time frame. And to be able to, meet that demand, to meet our SLAs and our fulfillment requirements, not having that scalability, I mean, it just it just makes that really challenging and, and kinda kinda brings some depression to the holidays. You know? Yeah. It it's it's a tough time for a lot of businesses. It really that's the it's it's valuable because it's it's very often the biggest revenue time of the year for for commerce companies, but it increases the stress and the workload on everybody in the organization. And coming coming out of some of that, what was there a particular tipping point that led you to think about or prioritize modern modernization differently? I just think in general, when you're stuck with with those manual processes and, I mean, it just creates a lot of bottlenecks, and and we're seeing labor and, wasted labor or loss of of sales or losing customers because of of their poor experience, due to those those bottlenecks. And, yeah, it it hinders your growth potential in, areas of expansion that you're wanting to do, whether you're looking at international or bringing on new marketplaces. And so, you know, as you're adding that, it just creates more and more of a a burden on those manual processes that, just just makes it really hard to to overcome and and and continue your your growth trajectory. Exactly. Yeah. Some of those things. Yeah. Not not getting you're not getting the the return on those investments you're making in into customers, acquiring new customers, etcetera. Alright. Thanks thanks, Chris. Let's, let's hop over to, Daniel. So, you know, again, you know, what's what's been your perspective on what's holding, commerce and employee back, in in in growth from that from that infrastructure and and system scalability? Yeah. I would agree with what Chris was saying about manual processes. Like, that is the number one thing that we are always tackling. At least I can say that our tipping point was we had a holiday season where, you know, again, our our peak volume is also in q four as well. So we we do get that ten, twenty x influx of orders. And, you know, when you get a thousand orders in manually, you can just throw more bodies at it. But when you get 20,000 orders, 30,000 orders, all of a sudden, you know, I mean, you you'd have to go hiring out on the street temps to to come in and just literally type an order. So as as we grew on Shopify, it just became increasingly clear that there was no way that we could just bring in more people to solve this problem. As we run a lean team as it is, right, like, we can't that that I that I would say is the number one thing that holds companies back is the scaling. Right? Like, you you absolutely cannot, as far as d two c goes, get to a point where, you know, you're just bringing in more and more people to handle order volume. You have to get to a point where it's mostly automated. And for us, it was twofold. Right? It was getting the orders in from Shopify and then also passing it over to our three p l to meet our SLAs as Chris was mentioning. Exactly. That's that that's, that's a big challenge. You you can't you can't just focus on getting the orders in, but you have to make sure you're doing that full circuit, getting the full order cash process. You're getting the fulfillment tied in as well, in automating that. You you mentioned there that that tendency to add more bodies and realizing that, hey. You can't just keeping keep adding more. How did you how did you and your team make that decision to invest in integration and automation instead of adding more people? Was there a particular inflection point or certain way you you came to that decision? Yeah. I think I think for most companies, it takes especially if you have volume like we do during peak seasons, it takes a incredibly chaotic peak season for you to say never again. Right? Like, I never want to go through that again with my team where we're just drowning for weeks on end. We we had a particularly viral moment some I think it was eight, nine years ago, something like that, where the order volume just blew up completely. So at that point, it was unexpected. So all of a sudden, you, you know, you have to work with the resources you have, but it very quickly pivoted to a conversation about what can we do to make sure that this isn't how we're handling this going forward. And lucky for us, right, I I think as, especially since the peak is so cyclical, we get to say, okay. Well, let's take the next six to eight months and really plan out how is this gonna look so that we don't hit this again come next November, say. Yeah. That that I think your comment there about a viral moment, that's what everybody wants. Right? That's what every every commerce company is is a viral moment or as many viral moments as they can get. And a good question is are you are you ready for that? And if you're not ready for that and you hit it, then it becomes, scarring, so to speak. Yeah. That's the point. Carries the scars from those. Great. Well well, thank you, Daniel. Let's let's switch over. Chris, Mark, I'd love to get your perspective on this and and on on, you know, commerce being held back. Yeah. Basically, I think when we were looking into Celigo and iPaaS, we had a, a kind of a different problem to where we were managing our own servers, kinda managing our own website, and it became very infrastructure heavy especially during during peak time where at the time, it was only myself and, my manager, Mark. And so, like, every single time we had a Black Friday sale that came around, I'd have to be on call and basically manage our service, make sure there's no SQL locks and then whatnot. It just became very tiring to go through that during the holidays. And so as we scaled up, you kinda have two options. Right? You can hire more developers, which is very hard for, a smaller team like us. I mean, we're not as small as we used to be, or you can invest in kind of, like, an all in one integration platform to where we're able to see all points of pain. And then an iPaaS can help you take off kind of that infrastructure management and let you focus on just getting the orders to the customers, making sure, like, we're getting it down to the three p l and we're shipping it out in a in a timely manner so that our customer service queue isn't blowing up and then everyone's getting getting getting mad at us. Yeah. The the the the customers get getting mad at you. What were some of the the cost and impact of that that customer dissatisfaction on on the business? Yeah. I think it was like, it kind of cost us during those Black Friday sales or even any sales that we run, we'd have to kind of contract out to another firm to upscale our customer service agents. So we're making sure we are responding to tickets in a in a in a timely manner. I think we have, like, a two day or it's a twenty four hour SLA to make sure we are responding to them. And ever since, we've kind of migrated over to Celigo. We haven't had to do that for the, peak season anymore. And so it's made our employees a lot more happier more happier than the customers, a lot more happier. So it's kind of a two fold solution that helped us out a bit. And then but if there are any errors during Black Friday or we we see a bottleneck, then it's actually pretty easy to see on the platform, where where things are going wrong and we can go ahead and easily diagnose instead of looking through a few server logs and scanning through them and having all these alerts, to so that we are diagnosing the the problem problem. I think yeah. Diagnosing problems have become a lot easier, and also a lot faster for us. That that that makes a lot of sense. Now now, Chris, I I hear this a dig in I wanna dig in that a little bit because I hear this a lot when I talk to companies out there, and we spend a lot of time talking about, error management, how to manage integrations. But a lot of people are are really unfamiliar or when when they hear, oh, there was an error with an integration, they're like, why was why was there why why would there be an error in in in the integration? When when you talk about that, where are where where what's typically the source of those those errors, those integration errors that you're seeing, order processing errors? What's typically the source of those? Is it the the technology side, or is it elsewhere in the business? Yeah. Sometime, are we talking about this legal side or just maybe before we moved over? Before and after, I think, is is is our our audience would be interested in. Yeah. Yeah. I think that before and after, it was just more of, like, a kinda kinda technology side, like Yep. Making sure we scale up, have the correct load balancing set up, and then making sure we're we have the correct server side or database side, loaded up. But these days, it's, the errors are a lot more easy to handle. Right? It's usually I don't know. A customer didn't enter their address right. And when we go over to three p l, they have, like, an address verification and I don't know. Maybe it was we we are an international company, so maybe, like, they didn't put it in, like, their their their postal code or or something incorrectly. And so we'll see that. We can kind of go into the error management tool in Celigo, which has a pretty very nice one. And, one of our systems engineer can go ahead and just kind of fix it on the fly or or either fix it on our ERP system, and then it will flow through properly. Excellent. Yeah. And and that and and that's, I think what you made there is a is an important point when you're looking at your infrastructure, picking the right tools for integration and automation is is the being able to shift from, technology problems to then focusing on the on the business problems. The most a lot of a lot of those problems are actually caused by that that entry of those. And you you mentioned something there at the end, Chris. I think it's really important. You mentioned system engineers. So sounds like you're resolving those issues and those problems with not necessarily developers or software engineers, but system resources that that have a different skill set. Is that correct? That is correct. Yes. Yeah. And did did being able to shift to to that and leverage, less technical resources, has that had an impact on your your turnaround time, your your resource cost, etcetera? Definitely. Yeah. Before we move us to legal, any integration we built out would have to be on our development side. Right? It's like my team, my back end team, or Bill's team would have to basically scope out the integration. That was it. We'd take two months or three months to build this out, make sure we got our testing bulletproof, you know, making sure we're not dealing with security leaks and and whatnot. And now when we since we've done so many integrations, custom integrations on Celigo, if we have, let's say, a new three p l that's coming into the fold or a new EDI process that we're bringing in, we can now bring it over to our systems team and kind of use the experience that we have on our different custom integrations and then shorten that development time, because we don't have to worry about the other, let's just say, software engineering things that that you typically have to worry about, and build out a new integration in a month and a half. So I think we cut down our development time in in half, and then our other developers can focus on building custom applications that might make the customer a bit happier or something that Shopify doesn't provide right out of the box. Fantastic. That's great. And and that's a that's a great story there. Cutting your cutting your development time in half and then shifting to the type of resource, being able to shift and use less expensive resources for that, that's a that sounds like a a a really big win there through through the right integration approach. Definitely. Awesome. Thanks, Chris. And and, we've kind of segued from from our first first line of questioning around holding commerce back and then that tipping point, how do you know when to take action into, really, our next question here with with Chris? What's the IT case for centralizing integrations on a modern platform? But I'd love to to circle back. Chris Huovinen, what's your perspective on that, the impact of the business of moving to a a more modern and centralized integration approach? I'll kinda share a little bit from a accounting finance perspective because that that's my background. When you're spending the time, trying to reconcile errors, inconsistencies between systems, it creates a longer window for closing the month and providing financial reporting to the execs and just being able to see how the business is performing, especially in those peak, those peak volume times. So, yeah, I'd say that being able to, to shorten the the load and the burden on the finance team by having accurate data, having, systems that are talking to each other and that are in sync so they're not spending, you know, extra days trying to reconcile the numbers so that the reports and the financial reports are accurate and and timely. Fantastic. That makes sense. It sounds like that impacted your time to close, your your ability to close the books in a timely manner. I was just gonna quantify. Like, it used to take us ten to fifteen days to to close the books, and and now we're, like, three days into the new month, we're at least able to provide a, 90% accurate view of of the previous month and then a couple of days, maybe another two or three days to to reconcile and and get all the monthly adjustments in. And so, I mean, we're so we're talking about five to six days we're able to to to turn around and and close the month versus two to sometimes three weeks. Fantastic. That's a huge win. Awesome. Well, thanks, Chris. Over to you, Daniel. Any any perspective on the the benefits and and the case for for centralizing the integrations and and going with a modern solution? Yeah. For sure. I think I'd echo what Chris Huovinen was saying about the error management. That has been the real game changer for us. Right? Like, not having to dig into like, what I think in iPaaS is specifically as Celigo makes so great as a platform is this ability to parse exactly where in the issue like, where in the API you're having the problem or where like, you're not having to go through a ton of documentation to figure out, okay, where am I having and you're not having to log in. You know? The rest of my team has to log in to a variety of different portals at times to figure out, okay, like, what exactly is happening here. Right? But I don't have that problem specifically with the integrations that we have with Celigo because I know exactly where my problems are. Right? They're they're given to me by the platform. That's that's why I think the centralization is so key because we have, three or four different Shopify instances, if you will. Right? So I I have one location that I can look at and immediately say, okay. I'm having a problem with the order flow. I'm having a problem with the product flow. I'm having a problem with this. And then on top of that, it makes it very clear in, you know, human decipherable language, like, okay. This is specifically that aspect that's having a problem. So I think I think that's where the centralization is key. I'm not having to jump into disparate systems to say, like, what e what even is the problem I'm having? I'm just immediately diagnosing and fixing it right there right there. That has to be saving us a ton of time in the aggregate. Fantastic. That single pane of glass, you're seeing the benefits of. And are you needing to use, engineers to to get those insights and and be able to diagnose and resolve those those, process issues, or are you able to use other resources in the organization? No. We we run a pretty lean team here. So, like, it's it's down to most of the time, I'm the one that's resolving the problem. Like, they're so simple most of the time now that we've gotten the integrations dialed in. Right? Like, we we did have some growing pains as far as certain errors that we saw repeatedly, but the nice thing about the centralization is you know that as soon as you fix those problems, you're not dealing with them ever again. Right? So they're so easy to parse and solve that, you know, I say anybody could basically do it as long as they have some level of computer literacy. Fantastic. That's that's a huge benefit. Awesome. Well, thank you, Daniel. Kinda moving in. We're getting towards the end of, our session here. So, need to be mindful of time, but I'd like to do a little bit, let let's call it a a lightning round, so to speak, where, go through the three of you and and each take a minute maybe just to to answer, what you're doing from from a future proofing standpoint, how you're looking at your systems, your automations, your integrations, and how you're looking towards the the future, and setting you up setting yourself up for success. Let's let's start off with Chris. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Basically, future proofing any of our integrations, I think any new integrations. Our first thought is definitely to bring it on to, Celigo. So I think right now, we're thinking about taking on a new three p l. We already are managing two three p l's, which means two different endpoints and two different processes. But since we have two different, three p l's and then we're gonna move to a third one, the process has been relatively pain free. And so I think having a platform like Celigo where we can we've where where we've done the process before, where we understand what the different pain points are and have learned from the past, I think that's a great win. And, like, quote, quote, future proofing, ecommerce, and I've always thought, you know, never try to reinvent the wheel if, of course, there are things you can there are ways you can do things or pick your integration through in house. But if you if if the legal is, you know, managing the authentication, managing all the errors, it's a great win, so that you'd it takes kind of, like, a burden off of of the team and, you know, when maybe not the technical business stakeholders come to me. I can give them, like, a more concrete timeline. Say, yeah. I can do this in a month and a half. Maybe give me, like, a two week buffer time just in case, you know, some other things, come arrive come come up. But, yeah, I think that's for me, that's what building future ecommerce looks like. Awesome. Fantastic. Really leveraging that agility there, from the investments. Fantastic. Let's go over to you, Chris Huovinen. Yeah. Sure. When I think of future proofing, I think about adaptability. I think we can all agree the current business landscape is has been very unpredictable and a lot of things on the horizon that we we don't know what's coming. And so, I think from a IT perspective, I mean, you have to have a a tech stack that helps you adapt to change, change in market conditions or, you know, adding new sales channels or, customer expectations ever changing and new technologies, AI. And I think the for me, the the centerpiece of that tech stack is an integration platform that helps you adapt and and keep all those systems running in sync and just giving you a framework that allows you to, you know, to adapt up all your systems to the changes that that you're experiencing. Fantastic. Thank you, Chris. And then, fine finally to you, Daniel. Yeah. I'll keep it brief. I I think I've been surprised with especially conversations, as Chris was saying, with less technical people, like, how API driven, like, these conversations have gotten. Right? Like, anytime we're talking about a new platform, you know, I think we've we've gone through a period here where we we've looked into drop shipping this sort of thing, like, from different like, very disparate platforms. But it always starts with a conversation about what is the API? How are they going to connect to our system? So, like, I think the future there is the rest of the, you know, the rest of your company starts to get into conversation with your IT department at a much earlier stage. Like, it's been it's been great to see. So I I would expect that in the future, that's that's where we're we're leading, where everything is managed to be connected one endpoint to another through something like Celigo. Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you, Daniel. Adopting that automation first mentality, IT becoming more of a business partner to the to the other departments. And then we also heard heard about agility from from both of the Chrises. So, fantastic. Well, that wraps up our our session. So we really appreciate, everybody attending here. Thank you, Chris, Chris, and Daniel for, your insights in into how you're working to to build a future proof commerce infrastructure. And, as I know some questions came in. We'll be answering those, offline if you ask, but thank you and, enjoy the rest of the summit.