How O'Rourke Sales Company Mastered the One-Hour Pricing Window

BUSINESS NEED

O’Rourke Sales Company began in 1965 as O’Rourke Bros., a two-man distribution business that sold CB radios. Over the past 50 years, O’Rourke Sales Company has grown into a national distribution and fulfillment company for electronics and appliances across multiple sales channels, including rent to own, e-commerce, military exchanges, and independent and national retailers.  

O’Rourke maintains fulfillment contracts with large vendors and houses products for suppliers, including LG, Acer, Amazon, and Cuisinart, and sells them directly to small stores and mega retailers. It’s also the largest fulfillment house for Dell.com, which required a strict time frame to upload its price list. If O’Rourke missed this hour-long window, product prices for the next day were off and triggered multiple chargebacks.  

With the IT team manually converting around 500 documents a day and with limited visibility into the nearly 1,000 daily file transfers, O’Rourke required major improvement in B2B integration and managed file transfer (MFT) operations if it was to improve SLA compliance and scale its business.

IT Challenge

O’Rourke sought a better way to regulate, log, and track its various FTP, SFTP, and AS2 transactions, as the company didn’t have much visibility into when and why a transfer failed other than the fact that it just didn’t show up. This was very evident in uploading price lists to online portals, such as Dell’s, and when its customers were submitting shipping and order information. 

 “Our partners would often have to contact O’Rourke to alert us to a failed inbound transfer, because we had no way of knowing,” said Adam Kraus, EDI systems architect for O’Rourke Sales Company. “And these errors were costing O’Rourke negligence fees in the form of $100 per error per file, which really added up.”  

Additionally, O’Rourke sought a better way to convert incoming documents from X12 to its own XML schema. The company built a robust in-house engine that handles XML, flat file transformation, and even some API pieces, but it had no way to generate a 997 Functional Acknowledgment document on the fly. It also was a four-step conversion process that required a lot of custom programming — for one document, for one customer — and there was no way for O’Rourke to scale that. 

The Solution

O’Rourke discovered that it could improve its B2B processes, better integrate its data flows, and gain the agility for improved customer service by investing in its own technology, and the Cleo Integration Cloud delivered the capabilities it sought. O’Rourke stood up Cleo Integration Cloud for X12 data transformation and for secure, reliable data movement and visibility into all its information exchanges.  

By choosing Cleo, O’Rourke:  

• Became more self-reliant, gaining the ability to adapt, evolve, and resolve in the digital age.

• Saved more than $100,000 in a year in fees. 

• Expedited the trading partner onboarding process by weeks.

• Automated what was once a four-step X12 conversion process.

• Gained visibility into critical B2B communications.

• Achieved the scalability that will help grow its business. 

“Cleo delivered maximum value for our business,” Kraus said. “Verbose logging and tracking is a huge benefit for void problems, and the Cleo Integration Cloud automated our entire transformation process."