Name: Take Back Control: How Outdoor Research Escapes Black-Box EDI for Full Visibility and Automation
Uploaded: 2025-07-23T13:23:03.806Z
Duration: 1 h 7 min 8 s
Description: Take Back Control: How Outdoor Research Escapes Black-Box EDI for Full Visibility and Automation

Transcript for "Take Back Control: How Outdoor Research Escapes Black-Box EDI for Full Visibility and Automation": Well, hi all, and welcome to Take Back Control, how Outdoor Research escapes black box EDI for full visibility and automation. Today's exciting webinar is sponsored by Celigo and their featured guest Outdoor Research and produced by SmartBrief. My name is Jess Steinbach. I'm with SmartBrief, a future b two b company, and I'm so happy that I get to be your moderator today because my guess is that a lot of you here with us today join this webinar looking for some hope, looking for a way out of the slow, partially automated, maybe possibly a little Frankenstein legacy EDI systems that you have in your organization. Or, hey, maybe it's all kind of fine, but it's a little bit bulky, a little bit slow. You've got limited visibility. So whether you're about ready to pull your hair out or you just know that things could be a little bit better, you are right. There are solutions. There are ways that you can move to a more future focused, modern, efficient, transparent solution without disrupting sales and operations. It can be done, my friends. And today, we will not only learn how, we will get real world examples and insight from our expert presenters. It's going to be such an interesting conversation. I cannot wait to dive in. We've got lots to explore. So let's take a quick tour of your audience console, and then we'll bring our speakers on out with us today. Alright. I wanna start out by taking you on a little bit of a tour. Let's hang out on the right hand side of your screen. You see those three little tabs there? We've got chat, docs, and q and a. So the chat there, that's where we're gonna get interactive. That's where we get to share our stories with each other. I see a lot of you chiming in, telling me where you're from. We've got Morteza. We've got Jose and Matt and Todd and Kenneth and Andrew and Daniel and Reg and Gilbert. We got a whole awesome crew chiming in from all over. Keep those highs and hellos coming in. And then as we go through our session, if you have a thought, something that you've tried that worked for you, that didn't work for you, share that in the chat. So the chat is where we interact with each other. If you take two little hops over to that q and a tab, that's where you're going to ask questions directly of our wonderful expert presenters who I will introduce in just a moment. And we're gonna take some time to get into your questions as we go through our session today, so make sure you're getting those questions in. Now right in the middle, that's the docs tab that is full of cool resources and takeaways. This is how you're going to take action on all of the cool things that you're learning as we go through our day today. When you carry these forward into your organizations and you wanna revisit these conversations later, those resources there are going to be hugely helpful. So that's chat, docs, and q and a, all there on the right hand side. I wanna mention that we do have closed captioning available. So that would enhance your webinar viewing experience. Make sure you've got those turned on. And I also wanna call out the wonderful Josh who is here with us today in the back end helping things run smoothly. Josh is available. If you need any help via chat, you can post in the chat window. Now if you're having any technical issues today, the very first thing you're gonna try is a browser refresh. That is the panacea. Right? That'll that'll cure all. So try the browser refresh. If the browser refresh doesn't work, you can also try light mode. You can enable that on your console. And your bat signal in the sky, if none of those are working for you, is to post in the chat window and Josh will be there to help you out. Alright. Last but not least, we do have a wonderful prize giveaway available to one lucky winner here with us live and present at the webinar. And we will give that away at the end of our webinar. That's a $250 Amazon gift card. If you are wondering if you meet the price terms and conditions, you can visit that docs tab and you can find the full t's and c's waiting for you there. Okay. That was all the info that we need to get going here. And I don't know about you guys, but I am ready to jump into our conversation today. We have a whole fun interactive thing ahead of us. It's gonna be great. So everyone shake it out. Get ready. Get ready to answer some polls. Get ready to get those questions in. I am gonna introduce you all to our wonderful speakers that we will be hearing from today. That is Ebru Saglam, product marketing director at Celigo, and Eric Leung, director of enterprise applications at Outdoor Research. I gotta tell you all, I am a bit of a fangirl for Outdoor Research, so I'm very excited to talk to Eric in a minute here. For now, let's do a little bit of an introduction here. April, I'm gonna invite you to come out and join me here on stage. Welcome. Welcome. Hi, Jess. Thanks for having us today. Very happy to have you here. And I know you're gonna give us a little bit of an introduction, help us understand what we're getting into today, and what we're here to explore. As we kind of do that and maybe I'll ask you to introduce yourself a little bit, but I'm going to open up a poll, and get that going right now. So let's open that up. And I'm actually gonna pull this one up onto the screen so everyone can see what we're asking. What we're looking for here is, from the audience, how would you describe your current EDI experience? And this is going to help us understand where we wanna focus today. Depending on kind of where you're at, this will help us focus our answers. So, Ever, from your experience, are you expecting to see one answer kinda pull in front of the others? Yeah. Actually, definitely, I'm, expecting to see that the solution is partially automated at most companies, but I was actually expecting also to see more of a black box. Oh. So surprising to see it less, but that tells me something about our audience today. Yeah. I I it sounds like, you know, we were kinda chatting a little earlier about folks that maybe are in that half and half, which can almost make it harder sometimes. Yep. Partially automated. Okay. I'm gonna let those votes trickle in for a second longer, but I'm gonna hand things over to you. What I do wanna let the audience know though, we're gonna keep opening up these poll questions as we go through, and they're just gonna run quietly over on the right hand side there. So you'll see that little poll pop up from time to time. Please keep responding to those because, again, it's gonna help inform where we go with our chat today. So just give us an idea where you're at as we go through. But I think, you know, we'll we'll keep rolling for now and get into the the meat and potatoes of what we've got ahead because there's a lot to cover here. So I'm gonna hand things on over to you. Okay. Great. Thank you so much again. So hi, everyone. I'm Ebru Salaam, and I'm, really excited to discuss how Outdoor Research moved, away from, Black Box ETI and, you know, was able to regain back control for full visibility and, automation. So before we start, a bit about myself. So I'm a director of product marketing at Celigo, and I focus, on our EDI, digital commerce and supply chain solutions. I'm based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I've been, with the company for more than four years now. So, yeah. Eric from Outdoor Research will be joining, me today, and we will be discussing about their journey, how they transition from a legacy black box CDI to a modern self-service, solution. But, before I invite him to the stage, I wanna take a few, minutes and talk a bit about what we do at Celigo. And also, I wanna set the stage for, Eric and talk about some popular EDI solutions, out there today. So, let's get started. So, Celigo is an iPaaS integration platform, and, we have a lot of adoption across manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, brands, and retailers. So all of these, successful well known companies you see on the screen, and thousands more are our customers. And, they use us, to ensure excellence across their b to c and b to b commerce operations. So they automate their business processes that can span across, you know, applications, departments, and partners. And, you know, when I say business processes, you can think of, like, order management, shipping fulfillment, inventory management, and things like that. So just also to give you an idea about our, platform scalability, so it currently connects more than, 6,000 unique endpoints and processes over 40,000,000,000 records, per month. But it doesn't end there. So, our, AI based error resolution, also resolve more than 762,000,000, integration, errors per month. And that means, it gives time back to IT team so they can, you know, focus on, driving the car instead of, fixing it. So, and at the core, you know, our, platform is, designed to enable scale with efficiency. So 95% of errors are auto reserve, eliminating manual triaging. And also, IT teams can automate faster, or, like, by reusing automation workflows they've already built and also reusing, you know, our free prebuilt integrations available on our marketplace. And then, last but not least, IT can also now, set controls in place, and empower business users to safely manage automation, within the well defined, guardrails. So, we are also recognized, you know, by our customers as a leader in EDI, API, and also, as a great leader for iPaaS now, six times in a row, with the most, recent one, for summer two thousand twenty five by g two. And then on the right here, I have some numbers. And if you look at these, so these are based on a, independent study, conducted by Forrester. So our customers can expect, like, 70, percent faster development and, up to 83, percent reduction in error, resolution time. So now, I think that was, enough with the intro. So, hopefully, you have an understanding on who we are. So I would like to now, you know, set the stage for EDI. So EDI is obviously very, critical, you know, for a company's b two b growth. Right? But what I often hear from, you know, customers and prospects is that it is often a bottleneck. And if you look at the why, so there are a few reasons. Right? First one, it takes too long to onboard new trading partners and slow implementation is actually a part of this. And, number two, EDI costs are unpredictable. Right? It can grow, fast unexpectedly. And, the reason really would depend on the vendor. Like, for example, if you work with a managed services provider, transaction based pricing, might be contributing to this. Or if you're doing self-service EDI with a two outdated solutions, resources that you would need to put in place to date to support day to day management, of EDI, would contribute to this. And then, finally, you know, delays, errors in EDI processing. They can, you know, put your, trading partner relationships and and compliance at risk. So at the end, you know, your EDI can, go both ways. So it can either hold you back or it can, you know, unlock growth for your business. So, yeah, let's let's first, take a look at the popular EDI options out there. So self-service EDI through legacy iPaaS and standard managed EDI. By the way, like, if you are using, you know, a solution that falls outside of these two categories, private and chat. I would love to hear about that. But, the options I'm highlighting here so both of them are outdated, and this is really, what's causing most companies to get stuck. So, if we look at the, you know, traditional self-service EBI with a legacy iPaaS, these tools are very complex to use because they require heavy, development work, so heavy development, dependency. And, so these dependencies can translate into, cost large cost and also slow implementation and maintenance and also bring along life the difficulties in, you know, making any changes. And then if you look at the managed vendors, you know, these act as black boxes. So, you, as a customer would have very little control. Right? Issue resolution is slow. We hear often, like, their customers have to go back and forth with the vendor, you know, for every fix, for every, issue resolution change request. And then as I mentioned before, like, pricing is unpredictable, right, with transaction based cost. So these companies actually penalize their customers for growth. And then the other thing is they are purely focused on EDI. So if you do b to b trading with some API based integrations, your vendor requires that, so these solutions, this solution would, fall short. And, so those were the legacy option. And now, I would like to talk a bit about how a modern approach to EDI looks like. So first of all, modern EDI eliminates the heavy developer dependency of a soft service approach. So it comes with efficiencies built into the EDI implementation and management process. So it provides fully customizable prebuilt trading partners and prebuilt trading partner documents built to partner requirements. And then, EDI workflows, would be reusable so that you don't have to start over with each trading partner and, you can build faster. And then, with a self-service approach, you get, like, visibility into things like mapping. Right? Integration errors, or, into your transaction statuses so that you can proactively take action before anything, impacts your operations. And now from the core cost perspective, it means, like, less hours spent on EDI management through the efficiencies introduced into the process and also with a flat, subscription, pricing model. And then, finally, with all the efficiencies, you know, you would be able to scale your resources, more, efficiently. And, that's actually, at Celigo. So we recently, or towards at the end of last year, introduced a new EDI product, b two b manager. And, this is, you know, where our solution fits in, a modern, simplified self-service, EDI, approach. So now, I would like to invite, Eric on stage. Eric. Yeah. Hey, Eric. Thanks for joining us today. Hello. So, yeah, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Okay. It's great. Thank you. So can you talk a bit about outdoor research, talk about the company, and also we would like to hear about your role. Sure. Well, I am the director of enterprise applications. Outdoor Research was, started in 1980. We are Seattle based. Our founder, is from was from the Seattle area, and the company was really born out of our founders, failed attempts to climb Denali, back in the late seventies. And it he the trip failed because he had a piece of gear that failed. So that prompted him to, essentially build a better mousetrap. You know? So we were we the company was born from, the one product that he built to be a better thing than was out there. So, early on, we started making technical accessories like hats, gloves, travel kits, medical kits for the outdoor industry, things made of Gore Tex, things that were waterproof, protect her from the elements, either, keep you keep you warm, keep you dry, keep you all of those things. And then in the early aughts, we moved to making full apparel. So, jackets, pants, that were really geared towards people doing things in the outdoors. So, so protection is, like, is our big thing. Protection from the weather, you know, from the elements and things like that. And we have, our product is manufactured both offshore and in at our two facilities in The US. Yeah. That's pretty much the company in a in a nutshell. I've actually been here for, well, thirty plus years now. So, I was kind of along the journey with at the very beginning of our EDI journey. And so I can speak to, you know, where we started, all the challenges that we had along the way, and sort of where we are right now. That's wonderful. I mean, yeah, hearing that, I think you are a true EDI expert. Like, you've probably seen everything. I have seen a lot of things. Yes. And we've Yeah. Over the years, we've been through a lot of different ERP systems, a lot of EDI solutions, a lot of integration solutions. Yeah. I've pretty much seen it all. Awesome. So, before, you know, moving to EDI, so you've been a Celigo customer for a while, and, I think you initially, came to us and started using the platform to automate your ecommerce operations. So can you first, you know, talk a bit about that, about, you know, the first stage of your journey, how you automated everything, your experience, and then, we can maybe talk a bit about, like, legacy EDI solutions. Mhmm. Yeah. So we switched to our current, ERP system, Dynamics three sixty five f and o, in 2021. And prior to that, I would have to say that all of our ERP systems have not been great, and none of them had, really good integration capabilities. So really, switching to switching to a modern day ERP system that had full API capability really enabled us to bring in all these integrations other systems. And when we brought in a new ecommerce platform, we started looking around for, for an integration platform. And that's been you know, we we did a lot of investigation, did a lot of trying things out, and landed at Celigo as an iPaaS platform, to do those integrations. And at the time, it was specifically for, like, we want to integrate our ecommerce platform with our ERP. And very quickly, we realized that, that Celigo was good for lots of other things as well. There were lots there's lots of other systems out there that also have full APIs. And, really, it it just sort of unlocked the door and allowed us to do things that we've never been able to do before. And so fast forward to, sometime last year when Celigo introduced this b to b manager EDI product, it brought it brought legacy EDI into that modern, that modern integration platform to where we can now do just about anything with legacy EDI that and things that we were never able to do before. That's great to hear. So, and so you you were working with legacy EDI solutions before. Can you talk about, you know, your challenges, with with those, previous solutions? What's it like day to day look like, for your team as a result of those challenges? Mhmm. So the the solution that we were that we were using, and and we still are because we haven't quite finished our transition yet, but the solution that we had been using was the one that was one that was kind of recommended for g three sixty five f and o. It was a known solution. It worked with that ERP. So we started there. The biggest challenge was that even though it even though it was it's installed locally and we have access to the server, there are still a lot of things about it that are black box. So if, if an EDI spec changed or there was some other special logic that needed to happen, the the EDI vendor needed to make those changes. And those changes could take weeks to do. I mean, really simple things could take could take weeks because we would identify the problem or the change. We would have to write it up. We'd have to send it off to the vendor, wait for them to do something. They would send us back an updated mapping or configuration. We would test it. Inevitably, it wouldn't work the first time. We would have to and we would get stuck in this really slow loop of we identify, we tell them what to do. They they do what they think we told them to do, and then it's just that back and forth. Whereas being able to take all of that stuff back so that we have complete control over it, we can react so much faster to to these small changes like, oh, the you know, we sent the we sent the, our trading partner, an an eight ten invoice that had some calculation done incorrectly. That would be like a twenty minute fix for us, whereas whereas with our legacy solution, it might have been, like, a one or two week fix. Mhmm. And, so, I mean, it looks like it was also a big productivity loss for your team. Right? Just, you know, having to deal with the vendor going back and forth. So instead of, you know, focusing on important things like, that will, you know, make a more positive impact to the business to scale growth, you had to, like, deal with, following up with people. Hey. Was this fixed? Was this not? And now what about, you know yeah. Other other challenges, how did those impact your team? Were there other major challenges? I would say that all of the other challenges that we faced kind of just came out of that main challenge. Right? Because we've got here's this thing that's a black box that we have no control over. We can walk around it. We can see it, but we can't actually do anything about it. So and then, you know, like I say, the other other challenges came out of that core challenge of just not being able to have full control. Yeah. So, because one of the things, you know, I know, what's, what's holding your team back was, like, the ability not to fully automate, you know, some of the, EDI processes and, not having the freedom to innovate. Can you talk a bit about those? Yeah. And I I would say that for the most part, our legacy solution was automated. But and I and I saw on the poll, that one of the one of the answers was, you know, mostly automated but required some intervention. Like, that's kinda where we were. There was a lot of you know, it mostly ran kind of by itself, and it was automated in the background. But Mhmm. A lot it needed a lot of hand holding. There was, like, you had to go through and check to make sure that my sending system sent 15 transactions. I actually got 15. Sometimes I'd get 14. Sometimes those 14 would be incomplete. So there was just lots of hand holding along the way. And and because we didn't have the full visibility and to be able to see inside that box, like, we wouldn't we wouldn't necessarily even be able to tell what the challenge was. Like, where do I even start looking? Why did I why am I missing these these two transactions? Why are these incomplete? Things like that. Yeah. And then, you know, so one of the challenges I've heard a lot, was, like, transaction based cost model with, managed vendors, especially. How was your experience with cost? Yeah. And then and cost is definitely a big one because, you know, I remember way back when, when you're onboarding a trading partner, the supplier and the customer would sometimes negotiate, like, who's gonna be paying those transaction costs. Mhmm. Whereas now, it just seems like with most EDIs or many EDI solutions, we kinda get double dipped. As a vendor, we have we have customers who are using another EDI platform, and they charge us transaction costs. So we get charged for transactions as they leave the trading partner and then as they come to us. So, like, being able to just cut out the middleman on a lot of those things and go, go direct to in in a system where that doesn't charge you transaction costs, even if we were able to cut them in half, you know, cut out our side of the transaction costs, but we still have to incur the cost of the customer sending stuff, that's still better than than getting double dipped on some of these things. Yeah. Of course. And, now, you know, let's, move to, Celigo and, you know, with the modernized EDI approach. How do things change for you? Can you talk a bit more about that? Yeah. And, I mean, that first point is kind of the biggest one, that end to end visibility. So we have now with with b two b manager and the full Celigo stack, we can see exactly what a transaction looks like as it comes in from the trading partner. We can see the mapping where where that EDI x 12 or whatever it is. It doesn't that's a great thing is it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be EDI x 12. It could be it could be x 12. It could be XML. It could be CSV. It could be JSON. It could be anything that the partner wants to send us. We can deal with it now. And we get complete control over any any logic that happens during the integration. Any how that how that intermediate mapping gets mapped to our ERP, like, we're in full control of that entire, electronic journey of that document in both directions, which which is probably the biggest pickup. Mhmm. And, so you achieved now full visibility and control. And how does it impact your ability, you know, to fully automate some of the processes that, you know, previously required manual, intervention? And also, are you now, you know, able to try out new things in a way, how does how how does everything change? Yeah. I would say that it was, as far as automation, that was more of an evolution rather than a revolution. It's because we were already, like, mostly automated. It was really just, like, stability of that automation. Mhmm. And then also, it opened the door to, and to all the attendees who are suppliers, you know, the bane of our existence is the EDI eight sixty. Right? Like, how do you take a customer initiated purchase order change and automate it in your system so that it so that no one has to touch it? That one, we're still kind of, we have kind of on the drawing board. We know how we want it to work now. Now it's just a matter of building out all the pieces to make that work. I would say that that for us, that's the kind of the last piece of this full automation. Like, everything else, we've, for the most part, have all all of the other, EDI documents we've been able to automate, but it's just that one it's the the eight sixty that is still, a non fully automated process. And then I guess, like, we could just go down the line here. Efficiency and scalability. One of the big challenges with legacy EDI has always been, like, the onboarding process. Oh, we're onboarding someone new. We have to gather up all the specs. Then we turn them over to our legacy EDI vendor. They have to do the mapping. It takes them a while. They send us a map. All of those things. Right now, we have we're we are mostly done with building out what we're calling really kind of a universal data map and and, a data map and process so that our goal is to speed up that EDI onboarding, to make it go much, much faster than it did before. And we can do that by creating this universal map that we could use for essentially anyone who comes in. So that that initial mapping, we don't really need to do it because it's already been done with our universal map. So bringing up a new trading partner should be a simple matter of sign them up, we copy the maps and the flows from the previous trading partner that we used, you know, so we're able to recycle a lot of the things that we've done, and then go through the testing process because we all know that the testing process takes a long time as well. So that that is definitely gonna that will help us out in to make things more efficient and be able to scale much, much faster than we have. And then flexibility to innovate, like, as I was mentioning, because we came from an environment where we didn't have access to modern day rest APIs, and we do now, and and we have a platform to be able to leverage that, like, we have much more flexibility than we ever have through the combination of just, you know, switching to a modern day ERP, modern day iPaaS, modern day, ecommerce platform, that sort of thing. And then lastly, the centralization. Like, having everything in one place, but ultimately, when we're finished and we we can finally jettison our our legacy EDI, everything will be in one place so that, you know, for monitoring someone, you know, they can just log in to one place and see all of the integrations, you know, that they can see a dashboard to say, here's what here's what error, here's what didn't error. All lights are green, everything is good, that sort of thing. Okay. Excellent. So my next question is about migration. That's something I hear about, a lot, because I know most companies that do EDI, they already have a system in place. And it's sometimes scary for them, you know, to bring in a new solution because they don't know, like, how to approach migration without, you know, disrupting business operations. So how did you approach your migration? Like, can you walk us through the process? Yeah. That's a great question. And it's sort of like a you know, it's a mini it's a mini implementation of, like, as I mentioned, we've gone through multiple ERP systems. And swapping out an ERP system is no easy task. I sort of liken it to, replacing the planes in your the engines in your airplane while it's in flight. Like, you need to be able to do this without completely disrupting the business. And we sort of took the same approach with with moving EDI partners as we did with an ERP implementation. That is, we we picked, we picked a partner that had a fairly simple EDI integration with us. We have some partners who really we just we exchange eight fifty, eight ten, and eight fifty six. Like, those are the kind of the easy targets because they're not really complicated. There's no order confirmations and changes involved. It's really straightforward. So we take it we we would take that and say, here's here's the the trading partner that we're going to move over. We would go through to make sure that we have a current spec, and we would start building it out and start running those transactions through to make sure that we're getting the same result. So, like, here's an $8.50 that the the partner has sent us in the past. Here's what it looks like running through our legacy ERP. Here's what it looks like running through our new Celigo map. Do we get the same results? Does it look exactly the same in the ERP when it lands? If it does, great. We move on to the eight ten. We go through the same process. We set up a map. We generate an an eight ten using the legacy system. It looks like this. We send it through the new maps. It looks the same. Great. And then once all of the mapping is done, depending on who the partner is and depending on if they're a real EDI trading partner that goes through a traditional van, we might have to make a van switch. If it's, if it's someone who is exchanging through a s two or FTP or some other method of transport, then we can just make a a simple swap. And the partner did our goal is that we would be able to swap this out without the partner even knowing about it. Because really, like, they don't need to know about it. If you're sending something to them, whether it came from system a or system b, if it looks exactly the same, it it makes no difference to them. So that's kind of been our approach. We have not been able to, you know, we have a lot of different trading partners, and it's gonna take us a while to get us through the list. I think that we've been through two of these so far, and they've gone fairly well. And we we plan on, you know, using that same methodology for the rest of the trading partners. Wonderful. I hope that was also very helpful, guidance to the, audience on how to, you know, approach migration. So now, you know, as you are moving your trading partners, to your, to Celigo And, now, you know, managing everything through central centralized platform, right, both like your ecommerce applications, your trading partners. Do you see any benefits from having a unified platform? How does that, you know, change how you operate overall? Yeah. I mean, it definitely is it's I can't tell you how big of a deal it is to just have everything all in one place. And, you know, as I mentioned, because we were using Celigo prior to b two b manager, we were already really familiar with kind of just how data flows through the system, how it comes from a source. It gets in you know, you apply whatever sort of mapping and logic that you want to to go into that, and then it sends it off to its target system. By bringing EDI transactions into that fold, the data just flows through. It's it it all just becomes part of that same data stream and that same logic stream. So, really, there's no need on our side to understand yet a different data and logic stream because it's all the same stream. You know, you just have different tributaries of how different things come into the stream. And if it all is going into the same target, you know, it doesn't necessarily matter where the data is coming from. So I would say that that's been just a really a really good change for us to be able to get have one platform that controls everything, multiple data streams, possibly, you know, potentially multiples, but definitely, diff data coming from different sources all go into that same funnel and then go to the target. That's been the biggest thing for us. That's wonderful to hear, Eric. And here's, you know, my last question. How has, you know, all these changes impacted your team, and what's next on your radar? You know, I I think the biggest thing has been that it's just opened up a lot of doors for us. You know, in in my role, managing this department and overseeing our applications is that I always felt like I was a naysayer. People would come to me and say, hey, can we do this? And I would be like, yeah. I don't know. That's, we don't really have the system in in place for that. Whereas, now I feel like I'm a yes person. Like, people come to me with stuff and I say, yeah. I think we can do that. That's definitely doable. And that's been a big it's been a big mind shift for our entire department of of really having the tools to be able to say yes. I kinda feel like we went from having, you know, sticks and stone axes to having, like, fine surgical tools. It's it, it really has been a big thing. That's wonderful. I mean, I I love hearing how you became from saying no to become became saying a yes person. That's wonderful. And do you have anything, you know, to add for what's next on your radar? Well, we do have a lot of we do have a lot of large projects coming up. There are, we're working on an AP automation project. We have a PLM system that we, need to integrate with our ERP. So there's just other there's other, like, projects, big and small, that are coming up from an integration perspective. And, you know, these are projects that I would have sort of dreaded in the past, whereas now, I'm like, yeah. Let's go. We've got we have the tools. Let's do it. Okay. Wonderful. So thank you so much, Eric. So before we move to questions, I would like to just, you know, bring up some final thoughts, for our audience. So when you, you know, approach EDI, I think in today's, you know, modern world where everything is moving really fast, you have to think that how can you solve for more, like, what are other automation needs you have, because we hear, right, there are new, like, best of breed applications popping up every day, and you're unsure you hear from your business teams they wanna start using them as soon as possible. There are supply chain disruptions happening, like the, you know, not a recent Trump tariffs, that you need to, you know, find a way to move away from. And then new business models, especially in ecommerce, keep, coming up and your business wants to adopt them. And, you know, that just, like, brings more workload for your IT team. So you really need an agile, scalable solution so you can, you know, integrate and automate fast without putting too much burden on your, team members. And, so with Celigo, you know, you can integrate everything, your applications, trading partners in one place and automate all your business processes, whether EDI or API based, in a efficient way, and without losing, any control. Okay. So having said that, you know, we would love to hear from you. We would love to continue the conversation. If you would like to discuss about your EDI strategy, you can scan this QR code and set up a meeting with our team. And I see, Jess is back on stage here. Hey, Jess. Hey. I'm back. And, and I've been loving this conversation. What a wonderful chat this has been. Eric, I I was just I was being in backstage. I love love love getting to be the yes person. Everybody hates to be in that no role and and getting to say yes and, you know, where do we go? What we build? I I think I'm sure you lit up a lot of people in the audience with that. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. It's, yeah. I I I would say that, I changed a lot of people's attitudes in the company, like, rather than people just being like, oh, I don't really wanna bring this to him because he'll just say no. So, like, now, you know, we we really, as a company, have just elevated to a different level of being able to just like, we we started off really as a can do company, and we're able to stay there, which is great. That's huge. And and I I said this to you when we first met her, and and I'm a huge fan of Outdoor Research. I have to throw on a quick plug completely unrelated to this webinar. I love the waterproof gear from OR. I have the gators. I have the soft shell pants. I love, love, love everything I've got. And and you do manage to create that sense of innovation while still, you know, hitting with what what we need, what we're relying on OR for. So I can hear you bringing that that brand story through to how you approach your solutions internally as well, and that's been really exciting to kinda get to know, you know, I've loved your brand for a long time from the outside. So to get to hear it from the inside has been really interesting. Oh, that's great to hear. And, you know, for all the mountain bikers out in the crowd, we did recently launch a mountain biking line, of, pants and tops. So check that out at outdoorresearch.com if you if you're interested. You've got some shout outs in the the chat. I got some mountain bikers here. Mountain bikers, you guys are crazy. Like, I I love the outdoor world. I I and everyone has their fears threshold. I'm a big whitewater kayaker, which a lot of people think are crazy. Mountain biking is next level crazy. You y'all are crazy pants. But at least now you can look good while you do it. Go go visit OR and check those out. I'll I'll put in a plug for the cross country ski softshell pants. Those are lovely. A little bit less adrenaline. Alright. Well, that's incredible. Let's get into a few audience questions before we kinda wrap things up here as as we've got people, Herb saying, I was just looking at that. I have a big race in Breckenridge this summer. Oh, yeah. Herb, get those get that gear for Breck. That's perfect. Alright. Well, we could go off on a whole other webinar all about outdoor gear. Eric, we'll have to have you back to do that. But let's let's get into this question here. And, actually, Eric, I'm gonna kick things off, with you because I think this is a question that you can help us understand. When you were chatting about kind of bringing in new partners, so, question here. I'm curious about migrating trading partners. Could you give us an idea of your priorities or possibly the lessons that you learned for scaling without compromising stability? Oh, it's a tough balance. Yeah. And what I was saying about, like, picking the partner that made the most sense to do, like, we have some trading partners that are, like, really, really complicated. Yeah. We don't wanna we didn't wanna start there because, you know, the the time it would take to kind of work out all of those things as well as the risk of failure was pretty high. So we didn't we definitely didn't wanna start there. So we took our our legacy trading partner list and just started ranking them in order of, like, easiest to most complicated. Who are the partners who are who just have, like, the simplest, lowest volume where there is the lowest risk? And that's where we started. I love that approach. And then that way, we you know, it's it's kinda like, starting with training wheels where, you know, there's there's there's a less of a risk of, like, face planting and getting all skinned up. Right? So we Or if I'm gonna start off run. Yeah? Yeah. Exactly. So we start at the place where we have the the chance of the most success and then we go from there. That's huge. And maybe finding a partner that you have a really strong relationship with so that you can kind of, hey. Give us feedback. Work through this with us. And then for the when you can bring some of those lessons, you smooth it out each time you do. You get you get better, and then the next thing you know, you're at your hucking ramps off your we're We're using this mountain making metaphor for the rest of the weather. It's all we're doing. I'll I think that's great advice and and a really important sort of step one, getting started. Get started with someone you know you trust. Get started with something a little easier and then work that into the more complex ones. Amber, I'm gonna throw a question your way. Could you talk a little bit we have we have someone in the audience who's thinking maybe cost, and my guess is possibly bringing this forward to, you know, when you're making that discussion with the decision makers in the company, and you always have to get into that cost structure. So, could you tell us a little bit more? How does the long term cost structure of Celigo EDI compare to managed service providers? What would you say to that, Ebru? Yeah. And I think we touched, on this a bit. So with, managed service providers, I think we've mentioned that they have a transaction volume based pricing. And what we hear often is, you know, cost can be unpredictable. They grow as the, you know, business grows, and in a way, they penalize their customers for growth. And, with Celico, the main difference is we have a a flat subscription pricing, and it's purely based on the number of trading partners and number of document types. So there are no surprise costs, you know. You know, like, how your price will change within a year as you're, bringing more trading partners or if you add in more document types. You can anticipate everything in advance. And then, so biggest advantage is, like, especially for, like, high volume sellers, there'll be, like, huge, huge reduction in total cost of ownership, with this model. I appreciate digging in a bit deeper on that because I think that is something that comes up a lot. Alright. Speaking of boosting and booster, Eric, I'm gonna ask you to answer this one because we got sort of what I think is a bit of a follow-up question to what we're chatting about earlier with integrating and trading partners. Any of you have anything you wanna add as well. But, Eric, have you did you have any we have an audience member wondering what do you say if someone says no. Have you had anyone sort of push back, on on wanting to do a migration? Or or did you face any, maybe change management obstacles with that? Someone saying no, like, someone on on our team saying no? Or No. Like a training partner saying, we only work with this system, so we're not gonna migrate. Oh, well and here is just sort of a carryover from legacy EDI is that Mhmm. You have you have your customer. You have you, the vendor. So the customer has their EDI partner. You have an EDI partner. So if they wanna continue working with their EDI partner, there's there's nothing where you can really do about that. And this is sort of what I was getting into with that that pricing double dipping thing. Mhmm. Like, for instance, we have a customer who is working with, who is working and I don't know if I can name them, but they're working with an EDI partner. It's like they're handling the transactions. Well, that part that EDI vendor charges us for the for the transactions. Like, it's just a cost of our doing business. We are not in a position to say, you, customer a, can't work with your EDI vendor anymore. That's something that we just have to accept because we can't control which partner they work with. But we can certainly control what partner we work with. I don't know if that that helps. I think so. I think and, you know, David, if you have any follow-up questions, to that, please do post and chat and we'll get to that. But I but I think controlling your sphere of influence, controlling how you're integrating with information. Ibra, did you anything that you wanna add to that? No. I mean, I think that was a great answer. Perfect. Okay. We're getting close to the end of time. So I'm gonna try to sneak in, maybe one, if if we can, maybe two more questions. So, Eric, this I'm I'm I'm kicking you all the questions there. We're really putting you in the hot seat. Do you have full time staff, managing or or employed by OR in order to administer EDI? We do. And I I see this question in here from David. So we have one FTE handling, not only EDI, but really all of our integrations. K. Easy. Yes. So one and then a really good system, one person can manage that. You don't need a full team. Right. Right. Exactly. And, and then I guess a little plug for the Celigo managed services team is that so unlike traditional legacy EDI where the mapping is all controlled by them Mhmm. So in Celigo, we build the maps, but we either we could build the maps or we could have the Celigo Managed Services team build the maps. So they can build the map for us and hand it over and say, here's the map, and then we maintain it from there. So that and we've had to do that just be you know, because we have one FTE. There's been cases where we've had to to engage managed services for that because it would have just been too much work for us to build those things from scratch. Yeah. So that's been really helpful. But, you know, for anybody who has the staff to be able to do it, like, it it's definitely something that you could completely maintain, you know, build from the ground up and maintain in house. I love I love that shout out for the support, you know, and and really, Celigo being that kind of partner, I I think is is huge. We are very, very close to the end of time. I do wanna say, Eric, that Dave there's multiple Davids here today. We have a we have a David, ensemble in the questions, but one of the Davids, who, had asked the question about what do you do if you get pushed back, wanted to say thank you for your answer. So, it looks like we got the info that he was looking for there. I think as we start to kind of bring things to a close, what I'm gonna do is ask for a final thought from each of you. And, Eric, I would love for you to give us a final thought around EDI, and then I'd also love, just as I fangirl a little bit about OR, if there's anything that we should have on on our radar to be watching for from your organization. Oh, EDI. Well, it's, EDI in general is just one of those necessary evils that, you know, EDI has been around for a long time. And as we all know, it was supposed to be this thing that was standardized across all trading partners, but as we all know, it is anything but standardized from partner to partner. So it really is this necessary evil, and being able to have complete control over that has just made all the difference in the world for us. So if you have the opportunity to just claw that back, that control, I would say I would say do it because it will change your business. You know, I not necessarily Celigo, but, really, some sort of platform that allows you to have that to bring back that complete control in house is huge. And I know that it's tempting to go manage you know, to have to go with manage EDI. And if you listen to one of the other EDI companies, they will that's what they sell because those are their services. You're not doing yourself any favors by handing over the reins on that. You really need to take back that control. As for outdoor research, you know, like, as I mentioned, we launched a mountain biking line, fairly recently. So there's kind of some core collections that we continue to build off of. You know, our Ferosi collection, our Echo collection, you know, those are all great pieces. And, you know, we just we we wanna continue to get the word out there of who we are, have people try our products. Oh, and if you're, in Washington State or you're gonna be visiting Washington State, we did open up a new retail store in Bellingham, just last week. So if you happen to be in the area, come check it out. Or check out, either our flagship store in, in South Seattle or our, our outlet store in Des Moines, Washington. So many great options. Yes to all. 10 out of 10 recommend, in in a completely neutral party way. I have to I have to suggest, everyone go check that out, especially it's a it's a gross rainy day here in in in the Rockies. So, I'm I'm gonna be using my OR today. Eric, thank you for that. And, April, I'd love to get, a final thought and and kind of an action step. What what can we do to get a little bit more familiar with Celigo after we wrap the webinar today? Yeah. Definitely. First of all, I think Eric's story, was a great example of, you know, how, companies, can regain back control of their EDI and, you know, scale, more efficiently. And it's all about, you know, thinking, rethinking your integration and EDI strategy. So if you wanna, you know, learn more about Celigo, you can visit our website. It's siligo.com or, yeah, just, scan this barcode here. And then you can just, you know, reach out to us through our contact form if you would like. We can schedule a call. We can discuss your EDI strategy, or you can just, you know, browse yourself and learn more about, our solutions available. Love it. Okay. Lots of good ways to follow-up. Well, I I'm gonna bring things to a close. I wish I didn't have to do that. There's clearly so much more that we could explore here, but we'll leave it there for now. And we'll have to invite you both back for another conversation. I wanna point out you're getting a lot of shout outs in the chat, lots of thank yous, and appreciation for the content. I agree. Eric and Eber, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you so much, Jess. Thank you, Eric, for joining this session. Alright. Well and I'm gonna leave that QR code up for a second longer because I wanna give you all a chance to scan that if you haven't already. If you are looking to learn a little bit more right away, the other thing you can do is visit the docs tab. There's a bunch of resources. It's a treasure trove. It's just full of resources. You've got the definitive guide to modernizing EDI. You can dig into choosing the right EDI solution, six steps for retail suppliers. I love these sorts of guide. How do you evaluate the best solution for you? So all of that is there for you. You can read about outdoor research taking back control of EDI and fully automating b to b trading. And, of course, you can read how Celigo customers eliminate bottlenecks and unlock growth with modern b two b. So some great follow ups to the conversation we had just unpacking each one of those layers that we dug into. I saw a few of you right at the end asking how do I make this pitch to decision makers. A, I think both Eva and Eric gave us some great answers right at the end there and then as well as throughout. But I think those answers, they're kind of final wrap points are really important to consider when you're bringing this to your decision makers. Also, read those resources. They have they have all the insight in there that you can bring, to those those decision makers in your organization. And when in doubt, book a call. Book a call with Saligo. Get to know them a little bit. Have a chat. Explain what you're looking for, and they can walk you through how they can be a part of that. So lots of great ways to follow-up. Last but not least, I do wanna point out that Josh is opening up a a survey. We would love to hear from all of you. We just wanna make sure that we're hitting you with the right information at the right time, so let us know what you thought. Definitely fill out that survey there. Alright. And before we wrap, I want to remind all of you that we do have a prize giveaway coming up. And, before I get into it, we are going to, remind you all about the questions in the in the q and a tab there. So I know that we did not get to all of those questions. What we're gonna do is send those to the Celigo team, so there will be lots of opportunity to get answers back and follow-up. So if you had a question that did not get answered today, you will get an answer back via email. And if you still have a question rolling around your head, there is still time. So get that into the q and a tab right now. So So questions while you're doing that, I will do prizes. Here we go. We have a $250 Amazon gift card going to Casey Gordon of Wyoming. Casey Gordon of Wyoming. Congratulations to you, Casey. And we will follow-up with you after we wrap, so stay tuned for that. Alright. Well, with that, on behalf of the SmartBrief team, I want to once again thank the legal for making this webinar possible, especially to our wonderful speakers, to Ibra and to Eric, for giving us so much to to think about today. And to all of you, for those of you who joined in, I gotta say the chat was just full of good vibes today. All the highs and hellos, all the getting to know yous. I love that. I love the energy that you all bring. That is what makes these conversations so fun. And I really feel like we got to explore today how we can modernize EDR. We talked about, you know, whether you're making big changes or little changes. You know, you all indicated in the poll some of the challenges that you were facing with automations or semi automated and the amount of manual time that it's taking. A lot of you said that you are in the process of evaluating if you need to make a change. So today, I think we really got to unpack how you can take those first steps and with some real world examples. And I think that's such an important place to start. So, hopefully, you're feeling inspired to learn more. I would love to see all of you at our webinar again soon. And until then, have an absolutely beautiful end to your day. Thanks all.