Canada’s Purolator Works with Cleo for Delivering on International Supply Chain Business Commitments

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Purolator International transitioned from a high-maintenance legacy EDI environment to Cleo Integration Cloud (CIC) to address a critical shortage of specialized EDI development skills and rising maintenance overhead. By adopting Cleo’s Managed Services ("Glass Box" approach), Purolator decentralized its integration management, allowing business and operations teams to gain real-time visibility while leveraging Cleo’s 24/7 expert support for complex troubleshooting and partner onboarding.

KEY PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES

• Decentralized Issue Resolution: Shifted primary EDI monitoring and simple troubleshooting from the IT department to business and operations teams, reducing internal bottlenecks.

• Operational Visibility: Utilized the CIC Cockpit to provide stakeholders with end-to-end transparency into transaction history, order processing, and SLA performance.

• Skill Gap Mitigation: Successfully outsourced complex EDI mapping and technical maintenance to Cleo’s managed services team, eliminating the need for hard-to-find in-house EDI developers.

• Accelerated Onboarding: Streamlined the process for adding new trading partners by utilizing Cleo’s pre-built connector library and expert implementation team.

INTRODUCTION

Front and center on the Purolator website are the words “It’s not a package, it’s a promise.” And every day the company strives to live up to that commitment.

Purolator is a leading integrated freight, package, and logistics provider headquartered in Ontario, Canada with extensive operations serving local and regional markets throughout North America. The company delivers to 100 percent of Canadian postal codes and delivered 157 million pieces in 2023.

BUSINESS NEEDS

For decades Purolator had offered its customers and partners a commonly accepted method for integrating their services via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) technology.

As time passed however, Purolator recognized that EDI was starting to require higher degrees of maintenance to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies. Plus, people with EDI development skills and troubleshooting expertise were becoming harder to find.

So, in 2017, the company launched a business-critical initiative to find a software partner who could work with them to modernize their EDI platform.

The company’s IT leaders felt that taking a fresh look at the capabilities out there in the market could help them get a better grip on many of their challenges – e.g., managing the growth pains of scalability … keeping up with technology evolution … and accommodating new API (Application Programming Interfaces) integration technology as a hybrid complement to EDI, which was rapidly becoming an expected capability in the age of the cloud.

The company was on the hunt for a highly scalable and ultra-performant integration solution that could, among other things, deliver more visibility and control, enable faster customer onboarding, and, when needed, provide personalization capabilities, as well as greater flexibility, more clarity, less complexity, all while being easier to use.

IT CHALLENGES

Those managing the search for a new integration technology vendor first heard about Cleo from a Purolator customer who was already using Cleo Integration Cloud (CIC).

Based on that recommendation, and an immediate need that had arisen, the company asked Cleo for a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a relatively small but time-sensitive data transformation project involving one important customer.

Cleo was able to quickly implement the business-critical integrations on CIC as part of this PoC and helped Purolator meet its commitment to this customer quickly and successfully. From there, as the competitive vendor selection process moved along, the more Purolator’s team learned about Cleo, and vice versa, the more impressed they both became. In the end, Cleo won Purolator's business.

“We felt Cleo was, hands down, the top solution contending for our business and the one that clearly brought the best value,” Marculescu said. “Cleo met almost all of our requirements, including deep, roles-based visibility into the platform. With the CIC Cockpit, we get to see all transactions going through the Cleo Integration Cloud – in near real time. So now we always know which transactions succeed, when failures occur and why, so we can rapidly provide our customers with high-quality troubleshooting and support.”

Such customer accommodation is essential for Purolator to live up to its high-customer satisfaction, Marculescu added, as previous EDI platforms were not user friendly for facilitating day-to-day operations according to Purolator customers’ reports.

“From an SLA perspective, within our EDI-based relationships today, these customers want to know what’s happening with their packages, where they are in our extensive network. Thanks to Cleo, we have committed to an SLA to transmit shipment status documents every 15 minutes, which is about as real-time as it gets in the EDI space. Prior to working with Cleo, this used to take us more than an hour. Not to mention that with API-based relationships, those status updates are virtually instantaneous now.”

SOLUTION

Wisely, the Purolator team was not looking for just a solution that would suffice for today. Rather, in Cleo they found a long-term strategic partner whose flexible cloud-based platform and inhouse expertise is helping the company uphold its supply chain commitments and meet its evolving business objectives.

Purolator has three core EDI services – shipment statuses, invoicing, and shipping. Then there’s various integrations (e.g., Orchestrations and Transformations) for these and all related electronic documents, plus there’s a Line-of-business dimension to it all because Purolator’s integration team supports these documents across both the company’s courier and freight lines of business. 

Prior to Cleo, each of these business lines implemented its own technical solutions - including EDI. With Cleo, they’re consolidating all the documents to solely flow through CIC and retiring those other EDI approaches.

The ability to “tune” CIC to align closely with Purolator’s customer SLA’s and customer transaction growth was instrumental in the initial success of this partnership. From processing 30,000 to 40,000 transactions every 15 minutes for extended periods, to processing daily volumes of more than 2 million transactions per day, CIC is able to support Purolator’s business of today and is set up well to support Purolator’s business of tomorrow.

“For us, it’s all about speed and accuracy. The faster we onboard, the better the experience is for all concerned. Plus, we’re moving revenue faster too, and that’s good for Purolator,” Marculescu continued.

There’s no question Cleo’s category-leading visibility, agility, and control were big attributes Purolator liked, and that helped Cleo stand apart in the selection process.

Also, over the multiple years the companies have now been doing business together, Purolator says they have always felt like the Cleo team has truly understood what they are trying to accomplish. “They’ve always been there to guide us and have introduced flexible capabilities for tomorrow while also meeting our business requirements for today.”

LOOKING AHEAD

For Purolator, working with Cleo is viewed as a strategic working relationship that helps the company deliver on its promises to its customers. Likewise, it is a continuous journey both companies are on together to discover different ways of leveraging the Cleo Integration Cloud platform.

Cleo appreciates the platform improvements Purolator requests and is already working with Purolator on assignments that will take the relationship beyond the company’s “core” EDI/API hybrid needs of today and into new business areas Purolator is focused on for tomorrow – such as eCommerce, Health Care, or other promising business initiatives.