How Mondetta Accelerated Global Fashion Integration

BUSINESS NEED

Mondetta Clothing Co. is a Canada-based manufacturer of casual sportswear and performance gear based in Canada. The apparel manufacturer was most famous for making shirts and sweaters adorned with flags back in the 1980s, and its business quickly took off. The company now has private-label agreements in place with a number of major retail brands and serves those retailers’ stores all over the world. Mondetta also produces its own brand of high-end activewear called Mondetta Performance Gear (MPG).  

There are two parts to Mondetta’s EDI business: direct transactions with wholesalers, which are integrated with Mondetta’s ERP system, and an e-commerce platform for end consumers driven by a separate NetSuite ERP.  

But its legacy EDI gateway and translator driving these business units were cumbersome for this growing company, and its internal ERP was designed specifically for manufacturers, offering little flexibility for integration with other systems and applications.

IT Challenge

Mondetta’s internal ERP acts as the company’s central nervous system for these operations, and the quality of the data flowing in and out of that ERP and through its business was critically important. Mondetta was communicating with 20 to 30 trading partners via SFTP and AS2 and transmitted X12 documents, including purchase orders, invoices, message acknowledgements, and inventory inquiries.  

Even though Mondetta’s data volume was pretty low (between 100 and 200 transactions a month), any system update was inconvenient because its legacy EDI system was clunky and inflexible. It didn’t easily allow changes to improve daily workflows, had poor logging, and often required weeks or months for mapping changes to take place.  

Thus, all work to its EDI systems had to be outsourced to the vendor, which was expensive and very slow. Mondetta also didn’t have the visibility into its transactions that it required, and so the company pledged to regain control of its EDI, streamline its critical workflows, and support the additional partner connectivity it had envisioned. With the freedom to invest in a high-quality EDI solution, Mondetta system analyst Andre Barbosa found Cleo via a Google search and saw a world of promise during the free demo.  

The Solution

Barbosa had previous experience with a European-based vendor in the MFT and integration space while managing EDI for a major automaker, and he understood the kinds of functionality Mondetta required. With the costs of that vendor and Cleo being negligible and the intuitiveness of Cleo solutions, Barbosa chose the Cleo Integration Cloud (CIC) because he saw so much more potential for Mondetta’s growing business.  

Barbosa said Mondetta received the EDI, flat file, protocol, and information integration support it craved via CIC, and the apparel manufacturer was able to:  

• Reduce the time it takes to connect to customers.  

• Reduce costly chargebacks for EDI errors.  

• Increase monitoring and visibility throughout its global ecosystem.  

• Reduce costs for operational maintenance and annual support.

• Upgrade the quality of mapping and information exchange with customers.