Bigbelly Data Integration Success with Harmony

Keystone Business Services implements Jitterbit Harmony to automate business processes across NetSuite and Salesforce

Background

Founded in 2003, Bigbelly offers a world-leading smart waste and recycling solution. Deployed in every state and in more than 50 countries, the company’s cornerstone platform leverages renewable solar energy and cutting-edge IT to help municipalities and organizations transform their waste management processes for greater efficiency and reduced carbon emissions.

Summary

• To help Bigbelly streamline its business processes, Keystone implemented a NetSuite ERP system and connected its legacy applications by custom coding the integrations.
• In the project’s subsequent phase, Keystone eliminated the time-consuming coding work, deploying the Jitterbit Harmony platform to quickly and easily integrate the company’s NetSuite and Salesforce environments.
• The Jitterbit integration created streamlined, automated workflows encompassing Bigbelly’s key accounting, sales, manufacturing, and order fulfillment activities.
• No longer reliant on manual processes and spreadsheets, the company greatly improved data accuracy, visibility, and accessibility for users across the enterprise.

Challenge

A fast-growing business pushes against the limits of its disjointed application environment

When Bigbelly initially engaged Keystone Business Services to automate and optimize its application environment, the waste management company supported its key business functions with disparate legacy platforms. Many of its essential processes—including sales, invoicing, and order fulfillment—required manual effort and relied heavily on the use of spreadsheets.

As a result, Bigbelly struggled with disjointed and inaccurate data, limited visibility across its business operations, and a lack of effective reporting capabilities. “It was extremely inefficient,” says Eric Jozwiak, Keystone Founder and President. “The company was growing rapidly and had a great value proposition, but it was at the limit of this manual model for managing its business.”

To help Bigbelly streamline its business processes and reduce the manual effort involved, Keystone implemented a NetSuite ERP system and developed custom integrations to connect legacy applications Bigbelly wanted to continue using.

Keystone successfully integrated the company’s applications with its new NetSuite environment, but each integration was a lengthy process, involving time-consuming custom coding work. Plus, the integrations still required a certain amount of manual data input into the NetSuite application, increasing the likelihood of error.

“Ultimately, the goal was to pull all the data together from these existing systems,” says Russell Fulling, Keystone Practice Director. “However, every time we made a change to one of the systems, we had to do coding work to allow for the modifications to be mapped correctly into NetSuite.”

“From what was a very complex environment, we now have Bigbelly’s business running on two main cloud applications with a well-defined process and synchronization of records between each.”
Eric Jozwiak, Founder and President, Keystone Business Services

Solution

Jitterbit Harmony provides powerful API integration to streamline workflows

In the next phase of the optimization effort, Keystone focused on implementing a flexible and scalable API integration layer to connect Bigbelly’s business-critical systems and eliminate the need for custom-coded integrations in its application environment.

Deploying Harmony, Jitterbit’s low-code integration platform, Keystone quickly integrated Bigbelly’s NetSuite and Salesforce environments, enabling fast, efficient processes across the applications and ensuring that users had access to the appropriate data in each. The Jitterbit API integration created streamlined, automated workflows encompassing Bigbelly’s key accounting, sales, manufacturing, and order fulfillment activities, including:

• Entering new SKUs. Bigbelly adds new product components and SKUs in its NetSuite application and automatically migrates this data to the Salesforce environment at scheduled intervals.
• Issuing quotes and closing deals. Within Salesforce, salespeople use the product data when issuing quotes and closing opportunities. After a customer signs a sales agreement, the agreement data pushes to NetSuite as an order.
• Building products. Bigbelly builds custom products based on the order and generates a serial number for the assets, which flows to the Salesforce database for management.
• Invoicing and offering renewals. Invoices created in NetSuite push to Salesforce, making the data available for salespeople. Triggered by the status of the invoice, Salesforce creates new opportunities for service renewals.

Benefits

Integrated business operations, ready to scale for further growth

With Jitterbit Harmony providing an agile API integration layer, Bigbelly runs its business operations primarily on its integrated NetSuite and Salesforce platforms. “From what was a very complex environment, we now have Bigbelly’s business running on two main cloud applications with a well-defined process and synchronization of records between each thanks to Jitterbit,” says Jozwiak.

The flexible Jitterbit, NetSuite, and Salesforce environment will easily scale as Bigbelly’s business expands. “Bigbelly now has a business process leveraging cloud applications that are very scalable,” says Jozniak. “These are enterprise-class platforms that can support any future growth.”

Bigbelly’s application environment runs with very little administrative support, but with the Jitterbit platform’s easy-to-use interface, the company can perform tasks as needed. “Bigbelly knows how to run integrations on demand,” says Jozniak. “When an opportunity comes in, the team knows how to go into the console and run the processes without an administrator involved.”

With automated data flowing back and forth in real time, Bigbelly has eliminated manual processes and spreadsheets, greatly improving the accuracy, visibility, and accessibility of its data for users across the enterprise. Employees on the accounting side of the company have complete access to the transactional data they need in the NetSuite environment and salespeople have 360-degree views of Bigbelly customer data within the Salesforce application.