Logistics
GrowthAmericanflat supercharges deployment speed with Stedi and Surpass
Americanflat is an online art gallery filled with stylish, affordable, and carefully curated home decor products. They partner with a community of over 150 artists and use proprietary production processes that allow cost savings without skimping on quality.
To solve their EDI challenges, Americanflat selected Surpass Solutions, a consulting and software services firm that uses the latest technologies to make businesses more resilient, efficient, and profitable. With over a decade of expertise in EDI, eCommerce, and end-to-end integration, Surpass has built a reputation for going above and beyond to develop and deliver creative, cost-effective solutions that have a lasting impact on each organization.
Challenge
Americanflat engaged Surpass to build EDI integrations between multiple marketplaces and their third-party logistics company (3PL). They needed to start directing orders to their 3PL as quickly as possible to get goods to customers on time and meet their obligations to retail partners.
“Individual EDI integrations can sometimes take weeks, and the existing vendor only had the bandwidth to do one at a time,” explains Surpass Founder and CEO Paul Tittel. “We needed a modern solution that would allow us to build, test, and deploy multiple integrations simultaneously on an accelerated timeline.”
The ultimate solution also needed to handle “mixed” marketplace orders. For example, each inbound order from a marketplace retailer can contain items for 3PL fulfillment as well as print-on-demand products or SKUs that are shipped from an in-house facility. Americanflat needed to sort these items and route them to the appropriate locations.
Solution
Surpass used Stedi to quickly configure EDI integrations between Americanflat and each of their marketplace retailers, including Wayfair, Walmart, and Overstock. Instead of waiting weeks for each integration to complete, Paul and his team configured multiple retailers simultaneously within a matter of days.
To handle “mixed” marketplace orders, Surpass built a custom Stedi function. The function filters out items not destined for the 3PL warehouse, generates a fully compliant 940 transaction, and delivers the EDI file to the 3PL. It then sends the filtered items to a separate API for fulfillment.
Instead of adding extra middleware, Surpass used Stedi to integrate Americanflat with their 3PL. “Stedi mappings allow you to map data directly from one transaction set onto another,” Paul says. “This allowed us to do a complete transformation of 850 Purchase Orders to 940 Warehouse Shipping Orders within Stedi.”
Kent Nunez, Director of Operations at Americanflat, says these new EDI capabilities are a major improvement from their old system. “Stedi gives us visibility into each transaction far beyond what we had before, and the ability to handle mixed orders so efficiently resolved a huge pain point for us,” Kent says. “We’ve been able to grow our business while reducing our operational burden by an order of magnitude.”
Results
With Surpass and Stedi, Americanflat can expand into new markets with the confidence that new EDI integrations will be fast, reliable, and cost-effective.
Surpass continues to leverage Stedi to reduce costs for Americanflat in other areas, such as shipping. For example, Surpass is building a Stedi function to ingest the best shipping cost from an external API based on ship-to-location and order dimensions. Surpass is also developing a pre-built connector between ShipStation and Stedi so that orders and shipments can easily flow between EDI-enabled warehouses and API-enabled marketplaces.
Contact Surpass to discuss using Stedi to streamline EDI for your business. Their experts can design and build a custom solution that gives you complete control over your data and integrates all your sales channels, customers, and logistics partners.
