Celigo > Case Studies > Vertex Wireless: Building a Custom 3PL Empire with Scalable, Hands-Off Integrations

Vertex Wireless: Building a Custom 3PL Empire with Scalable, Hands-Off Integrations

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries

Applicable Industries

Cement
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Procurement
Warehouse & Inventory Management

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Picking, Sorting & Positioning

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Vertex Wireless, founded in 2006, is a wholesale distributor of mobile devices, smartphones, tablets, wearables, and IoT hardware. As the business evolved, Vertex began to provide 3PL solutions and founded a sister company to develop and distribute mobility tech of their own. The company prides itself on its agility and adaptability, with a focus on providing custom 3PL offerings to its customers. Vertex Wireless is headquartered in West Chicago, IL, USA.

The Challenge

Vertex Wireless, a wholesale distributor of mobile devices and IoT hardware, was facing a significant challenge with their previous eCommerce connector. The company prides itself on its agility and adaptability, but the connector was proving to be costly and unable to accommodate the full extent of its data migration needs or their custom 3PL offerings to their customers. As the business evolved, the company found that their overhead was high due to the constant need to recreate the wheel with custom APIs. They needed a solution that could support the high volume of fulfillments they were doing, scalable custom 3PL implementations for their customers, and hybrid integrations between NetSuite and their on-premises warehouse management system (WMS).

The Solution

After considering multiple options, Vertex Wireless chose Celigo’s integrator.io, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The first stage of the implementation involved automating order entry and data migration between systems. The integration workflow connects to SQL to execute a query that exports serialized inventory data from the on-premises WMS to integrator.io. From there, the inventory data syncs with NetSuite and onto their customers’ storefronts on Amazon and eBay. With the help of Celigo’s team, Vertex Wireless configured integrator.io to act as an inbound API that can parse data from JSON. The company was able to offer custom 3PL solutions to their customers almost immediately after implementation. When an existing customer selected Vertex as their 3PL provider during the peak holiday shopping season, Vertex was able to respond quickly and build and deploy a custom 3PL integration on integrator.io for that customer within two weeks.

Operational Impact

With the implementation of Celigo’s integrator.io, Vertex Wireless has seen a significant reduction in the time and effort required to manage their system. The reliability of integrator.io means that data issues tend to be minor and few in number, freeing up time for the team to delve deeper into Celigo’s platform and push the boundaries of their integrated workflows. The company is now able to create more complex systems in integrator.io every day and find more ways to utilize it. They have discovered that they can do cool things with website data, connecting to emails, or sending out text messages, and are exploring all these potential ways that they can use this solution as a true iPaaS and not necessarily solely around NetSuite.

Quantitative Benefit

In the past year, Vertex processed 91,000 orders with 187,000 items picked for a customer they secured with Celigo’s help.
Building, testing, and implementing an integration for a new customer now takes a few hours a day, a stark reduction from the 6-8 months it took to create and integrate with custom APIs from scratch.
Martin is able to manage a system that processes anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 fulfillments per day with little effort on his part.