The Oregon® brand lists 9,000 products. Everywhere.
Oregon® is one of the most recognized brands in outdoor power equipment. If you've ever used a chainsaw, you've probably used an Oregon chain. The brand has been supplying the world's top OEMs for decades, and its product catalog reflects it: nearly 9,000 SKUs listed across retail partners, distributors, and direct-to-consumer channels worldwide.
When you're managing product content at that scale — 9,000 products, each with specifications, compatibility data, images, descriptions, and retailer-specific requirements — the operational challenge is enormous. The right data needs to get to the right place in the right format, reliably, every time.
So when my DCX team was brought in to evaluate the brand's digital commerce operations, one of the first things on the table was: what are we doing about product information management?
The answer we found was not what we expected.
$250,000 in. Ten months of nobody using it.
The organization had already made a major investment in Salsify — a market-leading product content management platform built specifically for this kind of challenge. Licensing, implementation, and the people-time to stand it up: roughly $250,000 all in.
By the time my team got there, the software had been in place for ten months. That's ten months of paying the platform fee. Ten months of maintenance. Ten months of organizational inertia. Ten months of zero meaningful usage.
The product content was still sitting in spreadsheets. Still being pushed manually. Salsify was deployed, configured, and completely inert.
Nobody was using Salsify because Salsify wasn't talking to SAP Hybris.
We dug in to understand why. The answer turned out to be technically mundane and organizationally catastrophic at the same time.
During the original implementation, no one had built the integration between Salsify and SAP Hybris — the enterprise system where Oregon Tool's master product data actually lived. Without that connection, product content couldn't flow from where it was created into the platform that was supposed to manage and distribute it. The two systems weren't speaking to each other.
The Salsify implementation had solved a real problem, on paper. But it had stopped just short of the one connection that would have made it functional in practice. Everything upstream of the integration was in place. Everything downstream was ready and waiting. The last mile — the actual connection between the old world and the new one — had been missed.
"This scenario is more common than you'd think."
$5,000. Thirty days. Finally started using the software.
We worked directly with Salsify's engineering team to build the SAP Hybris integration that had been missing since day one. Cost: $5,000. Timeline: 30 days.
Once the integration was in place, the platform worked exactly as designed. Product data started flowing. The content operations team could finally use the tool they'd been licensed on for nearly a year. The $250,000 investment that had been sitting dormant was suddenly delivering the value it was purchased to deliver.
The math is stark. A $5K fix — 2% of the original investment — unlocked a quarter-million dollars of sunk cost and got the organization moving.
We coined a term for it: the Last-Mile Investment.
This experience gave us a name for something we'd seen before and would see again. The "Last-Mile Investment" is the small, often-overlooked spend that bridges a new platform to the systems, workflows, or processes it needs to actually function inside your organization.
It's not glamorous. It doesn't show up in the business case. It's often not even visible until the moment you realize the technology you bought isn't being used — and you have to figure out why.
But it's almost always there. And the failure to budget for it, plan for it, or even anticipate it is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes in enterprise technology implementations.
What kills most MarTech investments isn't bad technology. It's the unglamorous last mile nobody budgeted for.
In logistics, the "last mile" is the hardest, most expensive leg of delivery — the final stretch from distribution center to front door. In MarTech, the Last-Mile Investment is the same thing: the final integration, the workflow bridge, the connector between the new system and the old reality it needs to live alongside.
Plan for it. Budget for it. Look for it before you sign off on a "complete" implementation. It's almost always there.