TRENDS Promotional Products, Australasia’s largest branded merchandise manufacturer, has consolidated more than 50 custom applications and legacy systems using the Boomi Enterprise Platform, creating a central data backbone to support its manufacturing operations.
In a news release, the company said the integration will improve operational efficiency, provide near-real-time data for decision-making, and support future applications such as forecasting and scheduling.
TRENDS manages over 6,000 products and 700 custom daily jobs across Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, and said its rapid growth over the past decade had left it with a fragmented technology environment that limited visibility and slowed reporting.
“We’ve grown fast, but the complexity behind the scenes grew faster,” said Jonathan Elliott, Chief Information Officer at TRENDS. “Our goal was to build a foundation of data that would scale with the organisation, not hold it back.”
Working with integration partner Adaptiv, TRENDS implemented the Boomi Enterprise Platform as its central integration layer, connecting multiple line-of-business applications and Microsoft Azure services.
Event-aware and scheduled pipelines move data from production floor systems and core applications into analytics tools in near real time.
“One of the biggest shifts has been moving away from one-off scripts to reusable, well-governed integration solutions,” Elliott said. “Instead of reinventing the wheel every time, with Boomi we have consistent, repeatable processes we can apply across the business.”
The system is already providing new insights on the production floor. In TRENDS’ heat-press department, machine data including job information and temperature settings is now streamed to dashboards for supervisors.
“TRENDS brought scale and ambition, and our role was to put the right integration solutions and governance around it,” said Nikolai Blackie, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Adaptiv. “Once in place, they were able to move from concept to value far more quickly than expected.”
TRENDS plans to use the platform to integrate a new Product Information Management system to improve product data quality, support e-commerce, and align with emerging Australian product-data standards. The system will also support future AI initiatives such as intelligent scheduling and demand forecasting.
“Whatever our future systems look like, the constant remains the same — the need for reliable, near-real-time data flowing between them,” Elliott said.
David Irecki, Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific & Japan at Boomi, said the integration provides a foundation for more efficient operations.
“Fragmented integrations can slow the business down. TRENDS has rebuilt that foundation, giving teams timely, trusted data and a platform that can support new markets, new products, and future initiatives,” he said.
