After doubling its sales from $22.3 million in 2013 to $45.6 million in 2015, and building a valuable partnership with Lowe’s, sustainable flooring manufacturer Cali Bamboo needed to scale up its electronic order tracking operations to match its rapid growth.
By selecting an electronic data interchange (EDI) system from TrueCommerce in early 2015, Cali Bamboo sought to eliminate any bottlenecking potentially caused by the company’s increasing sales volume. The solution also helped Cali Bamboo adhere to diverse technical requirements of its retail partners and third-party logistics (3PL) providers.
With the TrueCommerce EDI platform, Cali Bamboo was able to:
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Grow sales 120% year-over-year in Q1;
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Project total sales growth of 90% in 2016; and
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Track product purchases from order to billing.
When it began its partnership with Lowe’s in 2013, Cali Bamboo was still communicating order transactions by fax. Given that the materials provider wanted to track orders through many types of retailers, five freight vendors, two 3PL fulfillment centers and contractors that all required systems integration with different transaction types, the manufacturer needed a partner platform that could meet these requirements.
“A few years ago around 2010 when we started selling flooring, our transaction volumes and sales started to pick up fairly rapidly,” said Mitch West, Business Systems Specialist at Cali Bamboo. “At that time we were transacting files over an FTP server and it just wasn’t a viable option. There was too much growth and too many transactions to keep up with, so we decided we needed to integrate with EDI.”
Cali Bamboo was able to integrate the TrueCommerce platform with Lowe’s within one month of selecting the data supplier, and West noted that the platform has been running smoothly ever since.
“Lowe’s is one of the more rigorous big-box retailers to integrate EDI with,” West said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “They have so many requirements and different transactions that they need at a specific point in time through the order cycle, which can make it such a challenge.”
TrueCommerce Integrates With NetSuite
Additionally, the TrueCommerce EDI solution integrates with Cali Bamboo’s NetSuite platform, enabling the manufacturer’s team members to navigate through an interface where they can pull reports, set up automated processes or read data maps.
“The HighJump TrueCommerce implementation team has a full understanding of our NetSuite ERP system,” West explained. “They understand how it all works — from the searches, to the reports you can build, to the transactions that are involved and the statuses within those transactions. Since they have a strong understanding, it’s a huge pickup for us because they know the mapping that’s involved and it helps us further build out the reports and searches that we need when we receive the data from our trading partners.”
As part of the partnership, Cali Bamboo was assigned two specialists, for integration and implementation. The integration specialist was focused on the details of the NetSuite and TrueCommerce platforms as well as the transactions involved, so that the Cali Bamboo team understood how each EDI transaction would affect the ERP system. The implementation specialist served as a project manager, gathering data, transaction information and mapping specs from trading partners.
“That was a big pickup for us as far as getting all the pieces glued together,” West stated. “We have someone actually managing the project and then we have a technical person running parallel who has a deeper understanding of all the systems involved.”
