Chilly's (Chilly's Bottles)

The organisation

Chilly's is a UK lifestyle brand founded in 2010, known worldwide for its reusable water bottles and coffee cups engineered to keep drinks cold or hot for hours. A certified B Corporation headquartered in London, Chilly's sells direct-to-consumer online alongside major retail partners and marketplaces across the UK, Europe and the US, and has grown rapidly on a mission to make reusable products the everyday choice.

The challenge

Chilly's runs its finance and operations on Dynamics 365 Business Central, but almost all order volume originates elsewhere: its own online store, several marketplaces, major retail partners over EDI, and a business-to-business ordering platform. Every one of those flows reached Business Central by hand-keying or file loading, each channel had its own way of creating customers and naming products, and reporting was rebuilt by hand in Excel from marketplace exports. Finance reconciled bank feeds, marketplace settlements and returns entirely outside the system, and logistics partners sent stock movements by file and email, so stock positions routinely lagged reality.

The solution

We designed a data hub with landing, staging and publish layers sitting between every channel and Business Central, orchestrated by Azure Data Factory, with customer and product master data aligned centrally rather than per channel and reporting served from the published layer in Power BI. Sales order flow runs both ways, so returns and write-offs come back out of Business Central into the hub automatically rather than being reconciled by hand. Delivery was phased across three stages: an eight-to-ten week Foundation phase stood up the hub and automated the primary online store feed end to end; a Consolidation phase onboarded each remaining source, marketplaces, retail EDI partners, B2B ordering, bank reconciliation, logistics and payroll, on a repeatable three-to-four week pattern of schema mapping, data quality rules and formal cutover from the manual route; and a Centralisation phase retired overlapping legacy marketplace analytics tools onto Power BI and rolled out role-based operational views. As with our other engagements, the proposal itself was delivered as an interactive, AI-assisted prototype so Chilly's stakeholders could click through the plan before committing.

How we ran it

1. 01

   Discover

   Mapped every order, finance and logistics source feeding Business Central and identified the key-person risk sitting under the brand's growth curve.

2. 02

   Design

   Designed a landing, staging and publish data hub architecture with master data aligned centrally and two-way Business Central integration.

3. 03

   Develop

   Built the Foundation phase first, standing up the hub and automating the primary online store feed end to end under DevOps change control.

4. 04

   Deliver

   Consolidated and centralised remaining channels on a repeatable three-to-four week onboarding pattern, retiring legacy analytics tools onto Power BI.

The result

Chilly's now has a single governed source of truth between every channel and Business Central, replacing per-channel manual keying and file loads, with each new channel onboarding as a costed three-to-four week exercise rather than a new permanent manual process. Finance close and reconciliation runs automatically, with settlements, returns and write-offs flowing both ways instead of being handled outside the system, and overlapping marketplace analytics licences have been consolidated onto Power BI. Key-person dependency has been designed out through DevOps change control, monitoring and a documented run book.