BirdRock Brands Automates EDI with TrueCommerce for NetSuite

• Manual order processing is a growth ceiling. Before EDI, a full-time employee spent most of their day moving orders into NetSuite by hand. That bottleneck would have forced BirdRock to hire heavily just to keep up with volume, rather than investing in growth.
• Pre-built trading partner connections compress time to market. When BirdRock wanted to sell through Target and later Target+, TrueCommerce already had the connections and compliance mapping in place. Adding a new retail channel became a configuration task, not a development project.
• EDI integration with NetSuite unlocks the full value of both systems. The tight, purpose-built connection between TrueCommerce and NetSuite meant orders flowed in, labels printed, and shipments moved without manual intervention at any step.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, BirdRock Brands is a manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer of high-quality products for home, office, and outdoor spaces. The company operates multiple warehouses across the United States and sells through its own website as well as major home goods marketplaces including Amazon, Wayfair, and Overstock.com. BirdRock is also a participant in Amazon's Seller-Fulfilled Prime program, which requires reliable, high-velocity fulfillment operations.

BirdRock’s entry into Amazon Seller-Fulfilled Prime exposed the limits of their existing technology stack. Even after migrating from QuickBooks to NetSuite, the order management process remained highly manual. Orders arrived through a mix of channels, some routed to email and converted to CSV files, others downloaded through platforms like CommerceHub, all requiring human intervention to enter into NetSuite.

At peak volumes, one employee spent the majority of their workday doing nothing but checking for orders and moving them into the system. That person had other responsibilities, and the time consumed by manual order entry was directly pulling resources away from higher-value work. During holiday periods, the strain became acute. The situation also created tracking gaps: when a customer reported a lost or damaged order, BirdRock struggled to trace the product movements and identify what went wrong. As NetSuite Administrator Mark Chuberka put it, it was inefficiency on a massive scale, and it was not going to allow the business to grow.

After researching the options, Chuberka identified EDI as the right approach and began evaluating providers who could integrate directly with NetSuite and serve as a translation layer between BirdRock and its trading partners. TrueCommerce stood out through the sales process and was selected as the partner.

Once implemented, TrueCommerce EDI automated the entire order flow. Orders came in, were processed by the system, shipping labels printed automatically, and packages moved to the truck without manual steps. Acknowledgements, ASNs, and invoices were generated and transmitted to trading partners without staff involvement. Invoice management, previously described as a hassle, became straightforward.

The solution also simplified retail expansion. Because most major retailers already use EDI, BirdRock could add new trading partner connections through TrueCommerce rather than building new processes from scratch for each one. The TrueCommerce mapping team provided ongoing compliance support to ensure BirdRock met each retailer’s specific requirements, including Target’s mandates when BirdRock expanded to that channel and then to Target+.

The impact of TrueCommerce EDI on BirdRock’s operations was immediate and compounding. From the day the solution went live, order processing shifted from a labor-intensive, error-prone daily grind to a fully automated flow. Staff who had been pulled into manual data entry were freed to focus on their actual roles. The operational drag that had been limiting BirdRock’s growth capacity was removed.

What followed was a period of significant expansion. BirdRock brought on multiple new retail partners, channels that would have been inaccessible or operationally unsustainable without a proper EDI infrastructure. Selling through Target, for example, was simply not a viable option prior to TrueCommerce. With the integration in place, BirdRock could meet retailer compliance requirements, respond to customer-driven changes in mapping, and scale channel relationships without adding headcount to manage each one.

The scalability of the cloud-based system also proved critical. Rather than having to staff up to handle demand spikes during holidays or periods of rapid growth, BirdRock’s EDI infrastructure absorbed the volume automatically. The economics of that model were clear: the alternative would have required hiring specifically to manage manual processes, a cost that would have grown in direct proportion to sales volume rather than delivering leverage.

Chuberka’s summary captures the broader shift: “TrueCommerce enabled BirdRock to become a better company, work with more partners, and empower its people to do more. The investment paid for itself, and the business is in a structurally stronger position as a result.”