About
Free Fly is a family-owned outdoor apparel company dedicated to creating comfortable gear with sustainability in mind. Designed in the US and responsibly made in China, Vietnam and select areas around the world, their bamboo wear enhances both the outdoor performance and the outdoor experience. Free Fly apparel is cut and sewn in Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP) certified facilities.
Website
Headquarters
Charleston, SC
Industry
Ecommerce, Apparel
Integrations
The Business Challenge
A number of disparate systems caused excessive and redundant manual work for critical data to be optimized and interpretable.
“Now that everything steadily comes into a single source of truth through our integrations, we’ve seen a 60-75% reduction in the time it takes us to close our accounting periods each month.”
- Austin
Free Fly Controller
Key Results
- 60-75% reduction in manual high-touch accounting efforts between disparate systems
- 20-30% increase in overall data confidence
- Client’s full self-sufficiency post-integration
The Key Issues
The client had migrated their data to NetSuite in order to resolve a number of operational issues, attributed to the big disparity between their systems (Amazon, Shopfiy, PayPal, Loop Returns, Whiplash). The client had also planned to integrate those systems to NetSuite via Celigo – with the Celigo configuration occurring in-tandem with the NetSuite configuration. They managed to get some assistance from the Celigo support team, but it proved insufficient to cover all of their technical needs.
“Free Fly identified the opportunity to consolidate disparate systems, so the decision was made to move our financial source of truth to NetSuite. And we know that for it to work, all the systems needed to talk to each other seamlessly.”
- Allen
Free Fly ERP Implementation Project Manager
Namely, the main three issues could be summed up as:
Issue 1. Accounting Issue:
The data on daily, weekly and monthly sales used to arrive from different places and wasn’t optimally organized. To make the data interpretable and cohesive, many departments – from finance and accounting to operations and planning – would spend many hours working with data manually. On top of that, this would also often result in the data being out of date by the time the optimization was complete.
Issue 2. Inventory Issue
During the pre-booking period for their wholesale customers, the client would often spend a lot of time manually checking the inventory data. Considering the amount of large orders the client would get, that meant allocating a lot of resources to track what they had in stock, what had already been shipped out, etc.
Issue 3. Customer Service Issue
The client felt that the disparity between their internal systems limited their customer service team. The client stressed that their customer support agents were top-notch, but removing a lot of manual work and automating key workflows would elevate their performance to new levels.
The Solution
The client aimed to fix the disparity with the help of Celigo, but knew that prior experience and expertise with this tool may not necessarily be enough to address all of the anticipated technical nuances. In a conversation with a Celigo representative, the client was referred to Hairball as one of the top integration experts.
In January 2023, our team had the first conversation with the client and started to gather knowledge about their processes; in March 2023, we kicked off the integration process.
It was very important for us that the project team on the client’s side didn’t exclusively consist of technical experts – we also worked together with the client’s inventory, accounting and business operations managers.
Our team had 2-4 weekly calls with the client to keep our work in sync as we integrated 5 systems (Amazon, Shopfiy, PayPal, Loop Returns, Whiplash) with NetSuite over the course of 7 months.
The biggest challenge in that process was the customized integration for Whiplash, a niche 3PL system – their API wasn’t the most up-to-date and required creative solutions to get it connected seamlessly.
The Outcome
In October 2023, the client went live with all the implementation and has since reported a massive increase in operational efficiency and data confidence.
“We can now make critical business decisions very quickly and accurately - as opposed to the past, when there was a lot of guessing and checking. We used to have data in which we felt 70-80% secure, but now we’re closer to 95-100% in terms of data confidence.”
- Julio
Free Fly System Administrator
The client has also undergone extensive user training and is now fully self-sufficient in managing the systems. At the same time, our support team is still in contact with them should they need our assistance, which has been the case multiple times.
As of February 2024, some minor polishing of the integrations is still being done, and it’s expected that all the integrations will work absolutely flawlessly in the next couple of months.
