The Consortium Clemenger
Fulfillment specialist ramps up direct-to-consumer services with ultra-scalable B2B integration from OpenText™ Business Network Cloud Enterprise
About The Consortium Clemenger
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Founded:1987
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Headquarters:Sydney, Australia
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Warehouse space:50,000 square meters
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Population Served:8.485 Million
Summary
Challenges
- Rapid growth in demand for direct-to-consumer fulfillment in Australia.
- B2B integration volumes increased to thousands of transactions a day.
- On-premises B2B integration solution was complex and costly to scale.
Solution
- Replaced complex and costly on-premises solution with a fully managed service in the Business Network Cloud.
- Achieved a seamless, disruption-free migration with no impact on trading partners.
- Slashed latency for key B2B transactions from hours to seconds, removing bottlenecks.
Results
Delivers new B2B integration services 95% faster
Provides real-time visibility on customer orders
Enhances visibility and minimizes support requests
Challenges
- Rapid growth in demand for direct-to-consumer fulfillment in Australia
- B2B integration volumes increased to thousands of transactions a day
- On-premises B2B integration solution was complex and costly to scale
The Consortium Clemenger offers connected sales and marketing fulfillment services for many of the world’s best-known brands. With operations across Australia, the company has brought a consumer-centric approach to fulfillment for over 30 years. Today, the company offers a comprehensive range of services, including end-to-end e-commerce, third-party warehousing and logistics, point-of-sale kitting and reward and loyalty promotions.
Vishal Charan, IT director at The Consortium Clemenger, explained: “We partner with tier-one brands to help them solve fulfillment challenges and engage more effectively with their customers. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in our direct-to-consumer (D2C) services has increased dramatically. To capitalize on those opportunities, we’re aiming to grow our D2C fulfillment volumes by a factor of three in the years ahead.”
To engage effectively with its 65 trading partners—which include leading brands, retailers and logistics partners—The Consortium Clemenger depends on its B2B integration capabilities. Every day, the company exchanges hundreds of messages with its trading partners, facilitating the smooth movement of products across its national supply chain.
“In the past, we relied on an on-premises platform to deliver B2B integration with our trading partners,” said Charan. “While the on-premises approach had served us well for many years, it presented several obstacles to growing our D2C business. To support new services and scale up existing ones, we needed to procure, deploy and configure additional infrastructure. Building the new services in-house was also a complex and labor-intensive process, which put significant strain on our lean team.”
To solve these challenges, The Consortium Clemenger looked for a future-ready approach to partner integration. Charan confirmed: “We decided to move our B2B integration capabilities to a fully managed service. The aim was to eliminate the need to touch the underlying technology and infrastructure, freeing us up to focus on developing innovative D2C services for our clients.”
With OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise, we’ve replaced time-consuming management and maintenance work with a robust service-level agreement, giving us the peace of mind that our B2B integration services will always be available when we need them.
Solution
The Consortium Clemenger moved its mission-critical B2B integration services to OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise, enabling the organization to ensure always-on connectivity with its partners and spin up new services rapidly.
Products deployed
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Business Network Cloud Enterprise
Leverage B2B managed services to easily meet integration requirements
Selecting a scalable cloud solution
By moving from an on-premises solution to a fully managed service, The Consortium Clemenger recognized that it could reduce operational cost and complexity while accelerating innovation.
“In the past, we often needed to schedule weekend downtime to perform maintenance on our on-premises solution,” said Charan. “With OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise, we’ve replaced time-consuming management and maintenance work with a robust service-level agreement, giving us the peace of mind that our B2B integration services will always be available when we need them.”
Charan added: “Crucially, moving to the OpenText Cloud gives us easy scalability as we expand our D2C services. While our on-premises platform wouldn’t have been able to cope if we added thousands of additional e-commerce orders a day, with OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise we can scale rapidly and elastically to accommodate our business volumes.”
Achieving a seamless migration
Working closely with The Consortium Clemenger, OpenText helped the company plan its migration strategy and achieve a seamless transition to the cloud. By replicating existing maps from the on-premises platform in OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise, the company switched over with zero disruption for clients.
“One of our requirements was to minimize the impact for our clients and trading partners—and by engaging OpenText, that’s exactly what we achieved,” explained Charan. “The migration to OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise was completely transparent to our clients, and we’ve significantly enhanced the capabilities we can offer them.”
Slashing latency and removing bottlenecks
With OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise, The Consortium Clemenger has slashed latency for key B2B transactions from hours to seconds, removing the bottlenecks associated with the previous on-premises infrastructure.
“Today, we offer our clients real-time integration, which enables more effective ways of working,” said Charan. “For example, one of our large partners in North America now releases orders to us overnight, so we can start executing them as soon as the next working day in Australia begins. We’ve also eliminated the development challenges associated with our on-premises infrastructure, which empowers us to explore new capabilities such as API integration.”
Charan added: “During the migration and beyond, OpenText has been a pleasure to work with. The OpenText team has excellent technical knowledge and worked closely with us to plan, test and deliver a smooth migration to cloud.”
With OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise, we can release new capabilities to our clients within as little as two days—around 95% faster.
Results
With OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise driving its B2B integration services, The Consortium Clemenger gained the speed, scalability, and connectivity to expand its D2C services and drive business growth.
Delivering new B2B integration services 95% faster
By moving to a fully managed service delivered via the OpenText Cloud, The Consortium Clemenger is accelerating the development of new services and the onboarding of new trading partners.
“In the past, delivering new services was a time-consuming process that could take up to six weeks to complete,” commented Charan. “With OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise, we can release new capabilities to our clients within as little as two days—around 95% faster. Our clients also greatly value that we provide very precise timelines for when their new services will go live, which simply wasn’t feasible with the on-premises platform.”
Providing real-time visibility on customer orders
The Consortium Clemenger is already leveraging the OpenText solution to deliver innovative services to its clients. Using the new real-time B2B integration capabilities, the organization is providing up-to-the-minute insights into the status and location of client orders.
“Recently, one of our clients asked us to provide enhanced track-and-trace information for their D2C orders, and thanks to OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise we rapidly launched that capability,” recalled Charan. “By using a real-time data interface from our logistics partner, we automatically provide data on the position of each order as it moves through the network. As a result, our client can delight their customers with real-time delivery information and avoid the need for manual reporting to identify delivery issues.”
Enhancing visibility and minimizing support requests
By leveraging OpenText Lens—a data visibility solution included in OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise—The Consortium Clemenger can monitor its B2B data flows, track SLAs and respond rapidly to issues.
“In the past, my team was often tied up fielding support requests from our stakeholders, but today we hardly receive any queries at all—our clients get the information they need automatically,” confirmed Charan. “Not only is OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise more reliable and transparent than our previous solution, but it also offers us deeper visibility into the status of our integration flows. When issues do arise, we use OpenText Lens to drill down to the transaction level to determine the root cause rapidly, which frees up our time to focus on developing value-added services.”
The Consortium Clemenger plans to build next-generation services based on the B2B integration solution. For example, the company plans to explore API integration with ride-sharing providers to enable new last-mile delivery options for clients and leverage big data analytics and robots to streamline pick paths in its warehouses.
“We have an excellent relationship with OpenText; their team understands our long-term goals and is proactively helping us to enhance our B2B integration capabilities,” concluded Charan. “Since we moved to OpenText Business Network Cloud Enterprise, we haven’t experienced a second of unplanned downtime—the solution is rock-solid, which makes it the ideal foundation for service innovation.”
