Boomi, a Dell Technologies business, and provider of cloud-based integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), has been working with Native Union in the latter’s automation of its entire e-commerce business.

Boomi’s AtomSphere Platform has also empowered Native Union to instantly connect its staff to the digital assets they need, allowing them to spend more time on delivering business value, while Boomi’s automation capabilities enabled the fully-remote deployment of a new overseas fulfillment warehouse.

Native Union designs technology accessories fashioned to empower the modern work-from-anywhere lifestyle. Founded in Hong Kong in 2009, it set out to challenge the preconception that tech accessories were boring, functional, and uninspired.

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“We did not start as an e-commerce company but had strong ambitions of increasing our e-commerce footprint,” said Farouk Merzougui, chief operating and financial officer at Native Union. “Compared to last year, the contribution from our direct online sales has doubled.”

Merzougui said that while the business could not have predicted the emergence of COVID-19, the flexibility and scalability Native Union gained from unifying its myriad applications with the Boomi AtomSphere Platform had enabled it to rapidly adapt to changing conditions.

“We had an ecosystem of more than 10 different applications, none of it connected, and each business function was working in its own silo,” he said. “We had low flexibility, poor scalability, and we could not draw on our data easily to make the right decisions.”

Low-code

Merzougui said he selected Boomi because its low-code functionality meant the platform was simple to manage and it would enable them to get to market faster without requiring additional technical resources.

Native Union first embarked on a digital transformation strategy three years ago in order to automate business processes and improve efficiency. This was to gain the scalability required to pursue an ambitious growth and expansion strategy, a strategy that has now accelerated significantly.

“Technology was a critical part of our expansion goals,” Merzougui said. “Before Boomi, my team was obliged to run repetitive, low-value tasks spending 90 percent of their time on manual data entries, and only 10 percent on actual analysis – I wanted to invert that ratio. I wanted to create integrated experiences that would enable them to instantly connect to the apps and data they need to serve our customers.”

Previously, employees would manually process and replicate orders from Shopify, which would be compiled into a spreadsheet and emailed to the fulfillment warehouse at the end of the day.

Merzougui said this entire process has now been automated by integrating multiple applications with Boomi. He said this level of business process automation has liberated his supply chain team from the drudgery of manual data entry.