When demand got high for online retailer Candy.com, the company had to devise a plan to improve order efficiencies while maintaining business outcomes. Entering information manually and relying on temp staff ultimately proved inadequate for the digital candy store, which could only manage so many orders without a foolproof data integration platform.

With a much-needed digital transformation in store, Candy.com partnered with Boomi, a Dell Technologies Inc. company, making it possible to reduce costs and error rates while increasing processing speed with electronic data interchange software.

“When we went live back in February of 2016, we were very excited,” said Gary Cifatte (pictured), chief technology officer of Candy.com. “We did 1,000 orders into our system in one day, and we thought, how phenomenal is this? I mean, a thousand orders; how many more orders could you actually look for? And we very soon realized that there was a lot more orders willing to come into our system if we could handle it.”

Cifatte spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Boomi World event in Washington, D.C. They discussed how Candy.com grew as a digital business and how Boomi helped the company become more efficient (see the full interview with transcript here). (*Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Martin: Tell our audience about Candy.com.

Cifatte: It is the endless aisle. It’s like going into the supermarket. It never runs out; it’s absolutely perfect. That’s actually how we started, knowing that there was so much candy out there that people wanted and the lines just weren’t long enough to put them in, no matter where you checked out. We started off being the online candy store, which was a foot in the door, but it was a very small opening at that time. 

Furrier: The technology side, talk about how you guys are organized. What are some of the challenges, and how does Boomi fit in? Take us through the journey.

Cifatte: When we started out, we thought, how hard could it be doing data entry? We’ll get the orders, they’ll come across, we’ll have some people enter them into the system, we’ll start fulfilling them, and then everything else will take care of itself. And within a few minutes, we realized that that was probably not going to work. It was not scalable because, first of all, data entry is error-prone. 

So we realized that there was a mechanism out there with EDI, and we went to a third-party provider to help us with EDI. That’s how we started with the first couple of integrations, and it was good. It got us off the ground, and it got us further into that door.

Martin: Take us back to the last 10 years of Candy.com and how that trading partner network has grown.

Cifatte: It always starts with the first step. We had one [partner] that was interested, one that wanted to work with us. And we started to do the work with them and figure out how to handle it. But they had multiple divisions. So even though there was only one, there were three actual integrations that had to be done. Being a traditional brick and mortar, it’s very competitive. So once the word got out that they were working with us, there was a couple others. We had six pretty big ones lined up early on that we needed to have integrated and up and running very quickly.

Martin: Where does Boomi fit into play?

Cifatte: We realized, unfortunately, that even when you have an integration up and running, and as good as the integration is, some of your trading partners will have changes. They’re going to give you a different reference number; they’re going to give you a different requirement; they’re going to make something that was optional now mandatory. So, we had problems because it wasn’t just us that it was impacting; everyone that was doing an integration with that trading partner had it. 

So if I had outsourced it and there were 100 people that had that map, we were one of a hundred. Sometimes we were one, and sometimes we were as far away from one as possible. And you understand that and you appreciate it, because there’s only a finite number of hours to get things done. So we understood that to be really profitable and get to the level of service, we needed to control the data. And that’s when we decided that we needed to bring the EDI in house.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Boomi World ’19 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Boomi World 2019. Neither Boomi Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE