Grosfillex North America Slashes EDI Costs Thanks to Orderful’s Outstanding Service

Business Challenge

Grosfillex North America delivers the high-quality resin furniture its customers need across the nation. But the company was taking up to six months to add customers to its EDI system, which delayed Grosfillex North America from filling orders and earning revenue in new relationships.

Solution

To address these challenges, Grosfillex partnered with Doppio Group, a leading technology consulting firm, to implement Infor’s Cloud ERP and Orderful’s modern EDI platform. The combination of these solutions allows Grosfillex to onboard new customers faster, reduce infrastructure costs, and streamline their business operations.

Results

1. Reduced customer onboarding time by 83 percent.
2. Eliminated the need for a full-time EDI administrator.
3. Reduced overall EDI costs by 28 percent.
4. Eliminated trading partner customizations.

Consumers love resin furniture for its stylishness, affordability, and durability. Grosfillex North America offers a wide range of outdoor resin patio furniture, garden planters, and shelving storage solutions.

With over 30 years of experience manufacturing residential products in the United States and distributing throughout North America, Grosfillex North America has built its reputation based on the quality of its resin furniture and its outstanding customer service. That’s why Grosfillex must be able to form new relationships with suppliers and customers quickly and easily.

Until recently, Grosfillex North America lacked a way to onboard new customers effciently. A satisfied user of Infor M3 ERP software, Grosfillex North America used the M3 Enterprise Collaborator (MEC) to add new customers to its platform and worked directly with an Infor consultant to make changes to the system. The company also used Inovis BizManager to translate documents for EDI transmission. But the arrangement didn’t come with a service level agreement, so Grosfillex had no guarantees that its most urgent issues would be addressed promptly.

“Our consulting arrangement with Infor was costly, and it left us with the feeling that if a big issue came up and our consultant wasn’t available, we could see a significant disruption to our business,” recalled Dave Sarge, IT Systems Process Manager, Grosfillex North America. “We eventually ended up hiring a full-time EDI administrator just to configure our EDI transmissions, but it was hard to justify that salary for part-time work, so we had to put our administrator on day-to-day IT support tasks too.”

Orderful

Even with a talented EDI administrator on its team, Grosfillex took at least six months to onboard new customers. To make matters worse, the company could only onboard one customer at a time.

“Our sales department often requested us to add two or three customers at once, so there was a bottleneck,” said Jim Berger, IT Manager, Grosfillex North America. “And we were dealing with two different consultants to configure our Infor and Inovis software platforms. We reached a point where we needed a simpler, more reliable, more cost-effective way to handle EDI.”

Jim Berger, IT Manager, Grosfillex North America

Trusted Partner Streamlines Path to the Cloud

As Grosfillex North America began looking for an EDI vendor that could help it streamline onboarding, the company focused on affordable vendors that had a deep knowledge of Infor M3. Grosfillex initially considered SPS Commerce but was turned off by the vendor’s pricing and complexity. Orderful quickly stood out from the pack—for several reasons. Grosfillex North America appreciated Orderful’s user-friendly interface, which was a stark contrast to other systems the company had used. Orderful also had a reputation for helping its clients onboard new customers more quickly. Orderful’s rules-based engine promised to make it easy to build and maintain EDI connections. And Orderful had a track record of working closely with the Infor M3 integration experts at Doppio Group.

“I had already worked with Doppio consultants on previous IT projects and had a good experience, so when I discovered that Orderful had a relationship with Doppio, that sealed the deal,” explained Dave Sarge, IT System Process Manager. “It was a relief to find a partner who already knew what we were working with. The combination of Orderful and Doppio gave us a cost-effective one-stop-shop for all our EDI needs.”

Orderful

With Doppio’s expert assistance, Grosfillex North America went live on Orderful through a phased implementation approach as part of a larger project that included transitioning from an on-premises Infor ERP platform to a cloud-based version. Thanks to Orderful, Doppio’s team found EDI to be the easiest workstream to move to the cloud.