How Can an iPaaS Benefit Roll-Up Groups?

Roll-up groups often acquire and integrate multiple retail brands with disparate ecommerce, ERP, CRM, marketing, and finance systems. This tech stack fragmentation can lead to inefficiencies, data silos and inflated operational costs. Every team requires unique skills and resource sharing is limited by technology. These bottlenecks can compound quickly, reducing the ability for multi-brand businesses to scale without friction.

An iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) like Patchworks helps these brand groups to streamline operations, consolidate their tech stack and scale efficiently - and all without requiring heavy IT resources. 

This article will explore these benefits in more detail.

Key iPaaS advantages for roll-ups

1. Seamless connectivity & automation across disparate systems

Acquired brands typically come with different systems for managing key commerce functions. For roll-up groups, it’s important to get data flowing smoothly across all these platforms as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This is where an iPaaS comes in. It acts as a central integration hub, enabling roll-up groups to seamlessly connect disparate business functions without the need for custom development. This reduces data silos, improves operational efficiency, and helps to accelerate post-acquisition onboarding of brands.

Consider the following examples of this in practice:

• An iPaaS can sync orders from multiple brands using different ecommerce platforms with a central ERP, thus providing a group-wide view of business operations and ensuring efficient processing, shipping and tracking.
• Despite different brands in a group using separate accounting platforms, an iPaaS can automate consolidation of financial data - syncing sales, refunds and expenses from multiple brands into a single dashboard for better reporting and tax compliance.

2. Phased approach to tech stack consolidation

Managing disjointed tech stacks across acquired brands can inflate costs, create IT complexity, and complicate the backend experience for ecommerce teams.

An iPaaS like Patchworks can empower brand groups to consolidate the technologies and processes used across multiple brands. This helps to reduce group-level SaaS platform costs and remove complexity.

Since an iPaaS is vendor agnostic and can connect with a wide variety of systems, it enables roll-ups to acquire brands without needing to migrate their tech stacks immediately. This progressive approach to tech stack consolidation allows data to flow from legacy systems until licences expire, at which point business functions can be migrated to a standardised platform. 

For example, consider a roll-up group that is running its existing brands’ ecommerce operations on Shopify, with Microsoft Dynamics as the chosen central ERP. The group acquires a new brand, running on Magento with an SAP B1 ERP licence. 

The first efficiency that the group can make quickly is consolidating the frontend - moving the brand they have acquired to Shopify. This ecommerce platform migration reduces licence costs (they have more buying power with Shopify), and improves operational efficiency as the rest of the business teams are already familiar with and able to provide support on Shopify. An iPaaS can integrate SAP B1 to Shopify and allow the business to see value created through efficiency and cost consolidation. 

The second efficiency comes after the initial frontend migration, by consolidating ERPs across the group. In this case, SAP B1 is migrated to the central ERP tool, Microsoft Dynamics, once the licence expires. Being on Dynamics will cost less, as it's an addition to their group licence, not a separate licence. Using a single system across the group will also allow consolidated reporting and simplify any future audit processes, reducing audit cost and complexity.   

3. Improved onboarding & scalability 

Onboarding newly acquired brands into roll-up groups can traditionally be time-consuming and disruptive to business operations. And, as roll-ups acquire more brands and the number of systems increases, managing traditional point-to-point integrations can become complex and difficult to maintain.

An iPaaS provides a scalable architecture which allows new brands to be onboarded with minimal IT intervention. Patchworks accelerates and simplifies the integration process, with pre-built connectors that enable rapid integration and negate the need for extensive custom development projects. 

Leveraging an iPaaS also makes it easy to expand into new markets, sales channels or distribution networks without a major overhaul of your commerce infrastructure, making it easy for roll-up groups to scale faster and more efficiently.

“Roll-up groups move fast – they need scalable, repeatable infrastructure that doesn’t slow them down with technical overhead. That’s exactly where Patchworks comes in. With our iPaaS, roll-ups can integrate new brands quickly, reduce tech complexity, and get immediate value from acquisitions. Our strategic partnership with Swanky ensures these businesses don’t just grow – they grow smarter, with systems that support long-term scale.”

Fraser Clilverd, Head of Partnerships at Patchworks

4. Better decision making with centralised data

For brand groups, having an accurate, unified view of data across brands is essential for maintaining efficient business operations and making smarter decisions.

With an iPaaS, you can connect various business systems with central data management software for accurate real-time reporting. Marketers and decision makers can see group-wide ecommerce metrics in one place, without having to manually extract data from multiple sources. This helps aggregators to track performance and improve profitability. 

5. Cost reductions

As we’ve explored, an iPaaS like Patchworks reduces the need for expensive bespoke development and ongoing integration maintenance through pre-built connectors and an intuitive user interface. This reduces reliance on developer resources, helping to cut costs for roll-up groups whilst increasing agility. 

Meanwhile, by automating processes across a group’s tech ecosystem, an iPaaS can minimise labour costs and free up resources for strategic growth initiatives. It also reduces the need for duplicate staff across multiple acquired brands.

Finally, an iPaaS can help brand groups to optimise technology costs by reducing reliance on redundant SaaS tools and consolidating group-wide tech stacks.

Leverage Patchworks with official delivery partner Swanky

Leading Shopify agency and Shopify Platinum Partner Swanky partners with Patchworks to provide retailers with streamlined and efficient commerce architectures. Their dedicated in-house Systems Integration team can leverage Patchworks’ pre-built integrations, or build new connectors from scratch, either as a stand-alone integration project or as part of a wider platform migration piece.

Contact the team at Swanky to discuss your integration needs.