Since 1970, KC HiLites has designed and manufactured specialized lights that light up the night for off-road motor vehicles. With a new multichannel system of managing orders and product data, it’s now paving the way for growth online with an updated product line.

“The goal is to ramp up and scale,” chief operating officer Alan Wang says.

KC HiLites, which takes its name from the initials of husband-and-wife founders Peter Kim Brown and Carol Brown, sells some 500 products through a network of distributors as well as retailers, including national multichannel retail chains like Pep Boys, web-only retailers like Amazon.com and 4WheelParts.com, and a number of independent mom-and-pop shops, Wang says.

KC generates about 5% to 10% of its revenue online, but “our goal is to grow that,” Wang says.

Growing online sales, however, will require a better method of taking online orders and recording them into KC’s accounting and inventory management software applications—a process that has historically been done manually by a team of KC employees. But as KC updates its product lines and grows its sales through distributors and retailers, it will need a way to automatically update its accounting and inventory records—increasing both accuracy and the ability to handle larger volumes.

To do that, KC is deploying a new data integration system from nChannel, an e-commerce technology and services company that enables companies to manage data from multiple selling channels. KC operates its e-commerce site, KCHiLites.com, on the Magento Community open-source e-commerce platform from eBay Enterprise, a unit of eBay Inc. It worked with Alliance Technologies, a Los Angeles-based web design and development firm, to build its e-commerce site. KC uses enterprise resource planning software, including its accounting and inventory management applications, from Sage Group plc.

KC recently started using the nChannel data management system, which it’s still testing, to automatically move online order data into its accounting and inventory systems. KC is planning to introduce more customized lighting products. “Our SKUs will be exponentially more complicated and diverse, so our order accuracy could be hurt” without the automated data management system, Wang says, adding, “This will free up our staff to spend more time on customer service and other operations.”

He adds that KC expects a quick return on investment from the nChannel system. The cost to set up nChannel typically starts at a one-time fee of $9,900, with ongoing monthly subscription costs running at an average of less than $1,000, nChannel CEO Steve Weber says.

KC is also planning to launch two new sites, one for Australia this month, and one for Mexico in the first quarter of next year. The Magento e-commerce platform provides KC the flexibility it needs to develop new sites as well as introduce new products, and nChannel helps to keep the product and order data from multiple sites up to date in accounting and inventory systems, Wang says.

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