By Danalynne Menegus
For a business to run smoothly and seamlessly, its core IT systems must be built on a solid foundation and perfectly aligned.
Gary Cifatte, a history buff and the CTO of fast-growing cold-chain food distributor Green Rabbit, draws an interesting parallel between IT alignment and construction of the famous Gateway Arch in St. Louis in 1965.
The 630-foot tall arch had been built as two standalone steel legs that would be joined by inserting a final piece at the peak. But the sun’s heat had caused one of the legs to expand by a critical few inches. The final piece wouldn’t fit. Then a lead engineer on the project had a brainstorm.
“They got the fire department out there to spray cold water on the arches to shrink the metal, and that’s how they got the final piece in there,” Cifatte explains.
Cifatte says he doesn’t need to worry about such nerve-wracking misalignment and workarounds with two of Green Rabbit’s core applications, NetSuite (for enterprise resource planning) and Boomi (for electronic data interchange). Native interoperability between the two cloud platforms prevents problems like that.
“That sort of thing isn’t a concern of ours because Boomi and NetSuite already have a solid connection,” Cifatte says. “Whenever there’s a new NetSuite release, everyone has made sure it’s tested before it’s released to production. That’s phenomenally important because I need to make sure my foundation is strong.”
“Boomi and NetSuite can talk back and forth through an established connection, and Boomi knows all about NetSuite schemas,” Cifatte adds. “I can just tap into the systems and utilize the capabilities. I don’t have to worry about stopping and fixing something, and that’s really key to us.”
To learn more about the transformational improvements Green Rabbit has made with Boomi and NetSuite, read the case study.
Business Transformation in the Cloud
The 12-year partnership between Boomi and NetSuite, with more than 1,600 joint customers, has been instrumental in delivering the scale and agility needed for rapid growth at Green Rabbit, as outlined in our new case study.
Formed in 2018 as a parent company to candy distributor Candy.com, Green Rabbit supplies perishables such as dairy, produce, bakery, and chocolates from 150 manufacturers to consumer and business customers, including 25 top U.S. retailers.
“We wouldn’t be anywhere without both Boomi and NetSuite,” Cifatte says. “It’s part of the three-legged stool to our success – our relationship with Boomi, our relationship with NetSuite, and our own proprietary algorithms for shipping temperature-sensitive foods.”
Green Rabbit’s use of NetSuite and Boomi dates to its Candy.com days. In 2012, Candy.com upgraded from entry-level systems to NetSuite to manage financials, orders, and inventory. Yet the company still faced challenges with using a third-party EDI provider, needing to manually process trading partner transactions as the business grew.
That’s where Boomi came in. In 2016, Candy.com rolled out Boomi B2B/EDI Management to automate trading partner transactions, dramatically improving scale and efficiency. When Green Rabbit launched in 2018, it leveraged the proven infrastructure already in place.
Scalability to 120,000 Transactions a Day
Today, Boomi scales in tandem with NetSuite, giving Green Rabbit the ability to process 120,000 trading partner transactions a day, up from several thousand at the start. In its first 11 months running Boomi, Green Rabbit handled 600,000 orders. That quickly scaled in 2019: in just three months, the company handled 1 million orders.
“We’re excited to be able to process 5,000 orders an hour through Boomi into NetSuite, which allows about 120,000 transactions a day,” Cifatte says. “Boomi and NetSuite have handled our growing volumes when the rubber hits the road.”
The reliability, speed, and scalability of Boomi B2B/EDI Management have been critical as Green Rabbit grows operations. That’s included setting up 10 microfulfillment centers around the U.S. to accelerate delivery to as little as one day.
The food distributor now runs 40 Boomi EDI integrations, one for each trading partner — twice the number it had in 2018. Parallel processing enhancements to both Boomi and NetSuite have reduced order creation time from 45 seconds to less than two seconds.
“Thanks to Boomi, we have extreme confidence in our EDI process,” Cifatte says. “Boomi also gives us more visibility and control over critical data – [it’s] fast, fluid, and accurate.”
Over 400 Hours a Month in Time Savings
What’s more, Cifatte has found that Green Rabbit can set up EDI connections in Boomi in as little as 36 hours – dramatically faster than eight-week estimates he’d received from IT consultants using different tools.
Green Rabbit is saving even more time by using Boomi automation to eliminate what had been 250 hours month of manual order processing. And in finance, Green Rabbit uses Boomi to capture data from suppliers’ Excel invoices, create payments, and reconcile invoices in NetSuite. That’s cut out 160 hours a month of manual work.
Less manual data work means happier employees, and that’s important for satisfaction and retention across Green Rabbit’s workforce of 250 employees, up from 100 in 2017. Personnel now have more time to focus on higher-value tasks.
“Eliminating all those hours of manual work challenges our people to be more creative, and that’s a win for everyone,” Cifatte says.
The biggest win for Cifatte — and for Green Rabbit — is a worry-free IT foundation anchored by Boomi and NetSuite working in perfect alignment.
To learn more about the transformational improvements Green Rabbit has made with Boomi and NetSuite, read the case study.
More than 1,600 NetSuite customers rely on Boomi to connect NetSuite to everything. Learn more about the power of Boomi + NetSuite.