TRENDS Builds AI-Ready Manufacturing Backbone with Boomi

WELLINGTON, NZ – February 09, 2026 – TRENDS Promotional Products, a leader in wholesale goods across Oceania, has transformed its sprawling and complex technology landscape into a unified, AI-ready foundation. By implementing the Boomi Enterprise Platform, the company has consolidated over 50 disparate custom applications and legacy systems, tackling the operational challenges that came as a byproduct of its own meteoric success.

The move marks a strategic shift for the manufacturer, moving from a reactive, fragmented IT environment to a proactive, scalable infrastructure designed to support faster decisions, enhance customer responsiveness, and power future AI-driven initiatives like intelligent scheduling and forecasting.

The Paradox of Explosive Growth

A decade of relentless growth saw TRENDS’ revenue skyrocket from approximately NZ$10 million to NZ$130 million. While a monumental business achievement, this expansion created a significant and increasingly risky technological challenge. The company, which manages over 6,000 products and processes 700 custom jobs daily, found itself entangled in a web of custom-built applications and manual data flows.

This fragmented technology estate, a common side effect of rapid scaling, resulted in data silos, limited visibility across operations, and slowed down critical reporting. Each new system or process added another layer of complexity to an already fragile ecosystem.

“We’ve grown fast, but the complexity behind the scenes grew faster,” said Jonathan Elliott, Chief Information Officer at TRENDS, in a statement. “We had dozens of bespoke integrations stitched together. Every change required effort and created new risk. Our goal was to build a foundation of data that would scale with the organisation, not hold it back.”

This situation is a classic example of the "growth paradox," where the very success of a company threatens to undermine its operational efficiency. Without a central, coherent data strategy, the accumulation of technical debt can stifle innovation and create significant operational risk, a challenge many manufacturers in the Australia and New Zealand region are now tackling with significant investments in data-first strategies and automation.

From Chaos to a Cohesive Integration Layer

To dismantle this complexity, TRENDS partnered with integration specialist Adaptiv, a Platinum Boomi partner, to implement the Boomi Enterprise Platform. The platform now acts as a central integration layer, a digital backbone connecting the company's dozens of custom line-of-business applications with its Microsoft Azure services.

The project represented a fundamental shift in IT philosophy. Instead of relying on brittle, one-off scripts and manual workarounds, the company now utilizes governed, reusable integration processes. This new approach, facilitated by Boomi's low-code environment, makes system changes safer, faster, and more predictable.

“One of the biggest shifts has been moving away from one-off scripts to reusable, well-governed integration solutions,” Elliott explained. “Instead of reinventing the wheel every time, with Boomi we have consistent, repeatable processes we can apply across the business.”

Event-aware and scheduled data pipelines now move trusted information from shop floor systems to core applications and into an analytics environment in near-real time. This centralized monitoring and consistent error handling provides the IT team with unprecedented visibility, allowing them to proactively address issues and ensure the reliable flow of data to key reporting tools.

The role of an expert partner was crucial. "TRENDS brought scale and ambition, and our role was to put the right integration solutions and governance around it,” noted Nikolai Blackie, Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder at Adaptiv. "It’s shifted the perception of integration, from something that slows the business down to something that clears the path for better insight and faster decisions.”

Unlocking Real-Time Factory Floor Efficiency

The impact of this new data backbone is already being felt directly on the production floor. In TRENDS' heat-press department, for instance, the integration now streams real-time data from machines directly to supervisor dashboards. Key metrics, including job information, machine temperature, and pressure settings, are monitored continuously.

This flow of live operational data empowers supervisors to monitor performance at a glance and, more importantly, spot potential issues that could impact product quality or production throughput before they escalate. It marks a significant step in bridging the traditional gap between operational technology (OT) on the factory floor and information technology (IT) in the back office, a key tenet of the Industry 4.0 transformation sweeping the manufacturing sector. By creating a unified view of its operations, TRENDS can now make faster, more informed decisions that directly impact efficiency and output.

A Launchpad for an AI-Powered Future

Beyond immediate operational gains, the unified data foundation is primarily a strategic investment in the future. By solving its integration problem, TRENDS has laid the essential groundwork for adopting advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

The company plans to leverage the Boomi platform to integrate a new Product Information Management (PIM) system. This will not only enhance product data quality and enable richer e-commerce experiences but also support alignment with emerging Australian product-data standards.

More ambitiously, this same integration fabric will underpin new AI initiatives. These include AI-driven demand forecasting, which analyzes historical data and market trends to optimize inventory and production, and intelligent scheduling, which uses AI to optimize the allocation of machines and manpower in real time. Such technologies are at the forefront of smart manufacturing, enabling businesses to move from static planning to adaptive, self-optimizing operations.

Boomi's platform is designed for this evolution, with built-in AI capabilities for intelligent workflow design and the ability to orchestrate custom AI agents. This allows companies to not just connect systems, but to build a responsive, intelligent enterprise.

“Whatever our future systems look like, the constant remains the same — the need for reliable, near-real-time data flowing between them,” concluded Elliott. “The Boomi Enterprise Platform lets us evolve without rebuilding connectivity every time. It gives the organisation room to grow.”

This forward-looking approach positions TRENDS not just to manage its current scale, but to harness the next wave of industrial innovation.