“Will it blend? That is the question.”

Those words by Blendtec Inc. founder Tom Dickson (above) have kicked off each of the 146 (and counting) videos in the high-end blender maker’s phenomenally successful “Will It Blend?” video series. Each segment features Dickson pulverizing items ranging from golf balls to smart phones with the company’s flagship product. Launched in 2007, the series is considered a nearly perfect example of viral marketing: funny, short, repeatable and a perfect product showcase. Will It Blend? segments have notched nearly 300 million views on YouTube alone.

Not surprisingly, business has grown, but it wasn’t until 2013 that hypergrowth kicked in. In one year’s time the privately held company’s sales doubled to $200 million, putting a severe strain on its small-business-oriented SAP Business One enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, according to Sven Haynes, IT director at the Orem, UT-based company.

Blendtec needed a more scalable business engine along with the capabilities to build a robust e-commerce portal. The company had previously sold mainly through distributors, but the video series drove so much consumer interest that direct sales presented an attractive new opportunity.

Blendtech decided to go with an all-Microsoft approach, choosing Dynamics AX for ERP and Dynamics CRM for customer relationship management. While each package is powerful and flexible in its own right, there was one big problem: They didn’t integrate well enough with each other to handle the features Blendtec wanted to put in place, Haynes said.

Not on speaking terms

That can happen when products bearing the same brand have different lineages. Microsoft developed Dynamics CRM internally, but picked up Dynamics AX in a 2002 acquisition. Years later, integration was only limited to some basic connector functionality. Microsoft says it’s working on improving integration.

But that wasn’t fast enough for Blendtec, which needed to streamline and simplify order management while also moving toward customer self-service. The plan was to use Dynamics CRM for order entry and tie back to operational data like inventory and package tracking in the ERP system.

“The whole point of CRM is to customize it to the needs of the organization and the customers,” Haynes said. “Microsoft’s Dynamics connector works well for a very vanilla implementation, but the out-of-the-box connector was never going to deal with the flexibility that we needed.”

That meant looking for integration broker. Blendtec’s technology partner consulted with sources at Microsoft and came back with a recommendation of Scribe Software Corp.’s integration toolset. Blendtec said yes. “We’ve seen Scribe pop up increasingly in Microsoft’s own marketing,” Haynes said.

Scribe provides out-of-the-box integration between disparate applications, particularly Microsoft platforms. It sells a library of pre-built, pre-testing connectors and a drag-and-drop toolkit for mapping source to target data.

Data incompatibility adds complexity to integration projects. For example, two systems may use different stock keeping units (SKU) for the same product, or the same SKU may be preceded by a prefix code in one system but not in another. Poor data integration can cause transaction failures or worse. “You can destroy information in several places very easily,” Haynes said.

Of oranges and apricots

Scribe enabled Blendtec developers to perform a one-time data mapping and transformation process that was relatively simple, easy to understand and repeatable. “Scribe is wonderful because you can create a lookup table of transitory values,” said Neil Shelley, business systems team lead and CRM administrator.

The integration broker is also flexible enough to handle changes as new ERP features come online, Haynes added. “Flexibility is paramount because you start out integrating apples and oranges, but by the time you’re done the orange has become a banana and someone has thrown in a few apricots,” Haynes said.

Integration is having immediate business benefits such as streamlined operations, simpler workflow and reduced order handling time. “It also enables the consumer or business partner to participate directly in the process of placing and tracking an order, which frees up the human workforce to work on more important things,” Haynes said.

Communication has improved because “parts of the organization they don’t have the best track record of communicating with each other now share that information — despite their best efforts,” he quipped.

The self-service portal isn’t yet complete, but when it goes live customers will be able to create profiles, register warranties, track orders and submit warranty service requests without waiting for approval by a human operator. Blendtec’s choice of Adxstudio Inc.’s Portals e-commerce platform was prescient; Microsoft acquired the company last September.

Switching ERP systems while doubling business growth may have been “the equivalent of swapping the engine of a car going 80,” Haynes said, but the hard work has been worth it. “We’ve transformed what was a much smaller business into an enterprise that can scale up to meet the demands and growth that’s coming,” he said.

With thousands of suggestions waiting in Dickson’s items-to-blend queue, it’s a safe bet that more growth is on the way.

Image courtesy Blendtec