Customer Success Story

CallOne, Inc. automates product feeds and does more with less using Celigo

“Previously, there was four of us at the time just inputting products every day. It would take us between 12 to 20 minutes per product for thousands of products. It took us weeks to do. We were able to automate the product feed for approximately 70 different customer sites. This is now managed by the ecommerce team of three people.”

Elizabeth Fisher

Ecommerce Manager,

Call One

Customer
Industry

eCommerce & Retail Distribution / Telecommunications

Headquarters

Cape Canaveral, FL

About

Call One, Inc. provides business communications and collaboration technologies to thousands of organizations in multiple industries. They include contact centers, financial, insurance, cable/media/tv, telecommunications, hospitality, transportation/shipping, healthcare, pharmaceutical, education and government agencies (federal, state, local) all across the United States.

Background

Call One, Inc. had been using an older ERP system to manage their financials for the business, including information and transactions for order fulfilment. The data entry work was done manually by employees, but due to a high volume of orders from many clients, Call One, Inc. employees had to extend their work hours in order to complete the manual work. Several years back, they added SAP Ariba, a procurement software program and later, NetSuite to improve workflows. But there was still a need for an easy way to connect NetSuite with SAP Ariba, along with other productivity applications, and enable them to interchange data automatically.

The challenge

Call One, Inc. had several clients that often placed several hundred orders every day via SAP Ariba. These were bigger clients that were placing up to 200 orders daily, and the team had to sort through them all manually. According to Elizabeth “Liz” Fisher, eCommerce Manager at Call One, Inc., employees were working overtime and through lunches – just to keep up with all the complex orders that had different requirements. “When we were using Wells Fargo’s system, we needed 16 account executives managing all the manual activities,” said Elizabeth. “We actually needed an extra person to input the orders and such for Wells Fargo when we were not automated.

They also faced challenged managing and updating product information for thousands of products into the Call One, Inc. website. “It was a lot of information to show on the web,” said Fisher. “There was four of us at the time just inputting products every day. It took us weeks to do.”

The solution

Call One, Inc. by implementing an integration between NetSuite and Ariba with Celigo to manage the manual processes between different applications and it was not difficult to set up. Now, the staff count is down to just seven account executives to manage complex orders.

“In terms of using Celigo, even though I was unfamiliar with integration platforms prior, I was able to jump in and pick it up pretty easily,” she said. With Celigo’s ease-of-use, she set up integrations for ServiceNow, Ariba, Etilize and ScanSource with NetSuite — applications that manage critical business processes related to digital workflow, order fulfilment, pricing, product cataloging and more.

Additionally, Celigo also allowed for the integration of approximately 70 customer sites between Etilize and NetSuite, automating how the product feeds are updated on the website. This enabled all of the sites to be entirely managed by within NetSuite by just three members of Call One’s ecommerce team.

Bottom line

One of Celigo’s biggest impacts on Call One, Inc. can be seen in their staffing allocation. ‘We went from six account executives per one big account to just one,” said Fisher. Since many processes were now automated, that meant that they had extra resources to help serve other customers better. “Our biggest thing at Call One, Inc. is actually phone calls. If anybody has issues, we’re here to talk to them. We’re not just behind the scenes.”

They also noted a significant reduction in the need for hours and headcount to manage complex products and pricing unique to each individual customer for the thousands of products that they offered across 70 different customers sites. Considering that it took one person up to 20 minutes to input all the information for just one product, automating this process was tremendously helpful.

Without Celigo, the management of all the websites would be overwhelming for Call One’s very lean ecommerce team of three, but now problems can be solved in a matter of minutes. “An account executive will contact me and tell me, “Oh, this order didn’t go through. Can you find out what’s going on with it?”

“I’ll log into Celigo and check it out. There may be an order that didn’t flow through out of the hundreds that we got all day long.” Fisher explains. Whenever these errors come up, it’s easy to make the corrections, hit save and update sans errors.”

“That’s pretty much it. I do keep an eye on it, but I’m not spending a whole lot of time there all day long!”

Before, we had 16 account executives managing orders manually and we had to extend operation hours just to process it all. Today, we we can easily handle more volume and complexity just 7 account executives. My account executives are happy – thanks to Celigo.

Elizabeth Fisher,

 

Ecommerce Manager,

 

CallOne