gearUP Sports launches dozens of custom team stores a day. Three months of process discovery, then Adobe Commerce, a headless configurator and an ERP integration replaced spreadsheets, email and web forms.
This project was delivered by our partners at Above The Fray (ATF). We include it here because it is the clearest example we know of what made-to-order printing needs from software: start with the process, then pick the platform that can follow it.
Introduction
gearUP Sports has supplied custom team uniforms to sports leagues in the United States for close to fifteen years. Coordinators, coaches, players, parents and fans order through a dedicated web store per team. Every order carries a roster, sizes, embellishments and artwork that has to be proofed and approved before production.
The challenge
Nearly every core process was manual and spread across Excel spreadsheets, email and Cognito Forms. Launching a single team store took dozens of handoffs between sales, finance and production. The existing OpenCart shop could not personalise stores in real time and had no integration with the ERP, so the company could not keep up with demand for new team stores.
The solution
Discovery first
Close to three months went into discovery before anything was built. Existing processes were mapped, then rewritten into documented standard operating procedures that could be integrated and automated.
Systems architecture
Adobe Commerce Cloud was chosen for its fit with RabbitMQ and Microsoft Dynamics. Orders, pricing and fulfilment flow between the shop and the Dynamics ERP without manual re-entry.
Headless product configurator
A headless, React-based configurator lets sales reps merchandise custom products on a team store in minutes and produce a garment proof with the approved artwork.
Automated processes
Formerly manual workflows across finance, sales and production were automated. New stores are created by cloning a proven setup instead of starting from scratch.
The results
Proofing time went from three to five days to minutes.
More than fifty team stores launch per day, on a system built to scale to over a thousand per week.
"Before, our teams were bottlenecked by manual workflows. Proofing could take days, and launching a new store was a heavy lift. Now, we're creating hundreds of fully customized stores each week, and what used to take days happens in minutes." Tony Alfarez, Director of Technology, gearUP Sports.
Source: Above The Fray, "gearUP Sports", abovethefray.io/work/gearup-sports.
