How Excelled Mastered Real-Time Retail Integration

BUSINESS NEED

Excelled Sheepskin & Leather Coat Corp. is a leather and apparel manufacturer whose primary focus is outerwear. The New York-based company does business with a lot of brand-name stores, including Macy’s, SAKS Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Kohl’s, Sears, J.C. Penney, Boscov’s, Cabela’s, and Menards. In addition to private labeling for some of these brands, Excelled also supplies products, which include lines of jeans and T-shirts, for wholesale and direct shipment, through more than 120 trading partners.  

When Excelled decided it wanted to get away from its VAN dialer, IBM Expedite, IT Director Enrico Bozzetti started researching solutions that promoted automation. The Expedite system only processed files twice a day, and it required human intervention to facilitate the process. Bozzetti sought a solution that would eliminate the human element and give the company more flexibility in meeting the needs of its customer base, which was steadily growing. 

IT Challenge

Most of Excelled’s vendors still connect using a VAN, but about 25 trading partners require
AS2 for communications. Kohls.com, for instance, takes hundreds of thousands of orders
through AS2. When orders are placed for Excelled products, the digital information actually
goes right into Excelled systems. The company then had to fulfill all of the orders within 24
hours to meet a 48-hour ship mandate from Kohl’s or the customer would get to keep the
merchandise free of charge. A similar scenario applied to orders through J.C. Penney and
Cabela’s.

Additionally, the company runs three e-commerce websites, which are Magento shopping
carts. Those XML-based orders are processed via SFTP from Magento into Excelled’s Oracle
application, which can lead to inventory errors and costly fees if not done correctly.
With these mounting B2B and application integration requirements, Bozzetti knew the
outerwear manufacturer required a more efficient solution, one that enabled a smarter way
to quickly fulfill large volumes of orders and keep up with the speed and growth of its
business. “I was searching for Drummond Group-certified solutions when I found a
recommendation for Cleo,” Bozzetti said.

The Solution

With direct AS2 connectivity to some of its partners and OpenText VAN support for the
rest, all of Excelled’s EDI now goes through Cleo Integration Cloud. Cleo’s support for send/
receive commands, scripting, and scheduling matched Excelled’s needs, and Cleo-enabled
automation ensures orders that used to be processed once in the morning and once later in
the day through the VAN now get picked up as they happen.

Excelled also programmed its Oracle application to work with Cleo Integration Cloud so it
reads each order and looks for missing data before the file transfer fails. This keeps the order
process moving and keeps Excelled in compliance with the 48-hour shipping mandate from
its trading partners, saving the manufacturer countless in lost revenue.

With Cleo Integration Cloud's stable communications platform and automation capabilities,
Excelled can confidently process hundreds of thousands of files a year, including the 50,000
files that come in during Black Friday weekend alone. Bozzetti said Excelled will continue to
expand its EDI processes using Cleo and will to move the rest of its trading partners to AS2
to further secure its business-critical communications.