BioPak replaces Sage, MYOB with NetSuite

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news Cloud-based business software company NetSuite this week revealed that Sydney-based sustainable packaging company BioPak over a year ago replaced a number of point solutions such as MYOB and Sage’s customer relationship management software with a comprehensive NetSuite-based solution for its business applications.

Founded in 2006, BioPak designs, produces and distributes plant-based, biodegradable and compostable packaging solutions across Australia and New Zealand, shipping out 25 to 30 million total items per month. Its biggest market is coffee cups, which it ships approximately ten million units of a month. It also supplies other industries turning to sustainable packaging, including the electronics, medical and whitegoods sectors. The company’s 176 percent year-on-year growth for the past four years led to a FY2012 turnover of $11.2 million, and a ranking as the eighth-fastest growing company in the BRW Fast 100 in 2012.

In a statement issued by NetSuite this week, the vendor said BioPak had recently replaced Sage CRM, MYOB and other applications and spreadsheets with NetSuite’s OneWorld solution, which will provide the company with financial, inventory, order management, CRM, eCommerce, third-party warehouse partnerships another business processes services.

According to NetSuite, the vendor’s ability to customise its solutions allowed BioPak to create a range of automated business tools, including a carbon tax calculator that computes its greenhouse gas emissions to maintain a carbon neutral status, as well as a least-cost freight calculator that computes the cheapest freight costs in real-time. BioPak will also launch a B2B online store in 2013, to allow business customers to purchase its plant-based packaging solutions online at any time.

BioPak’s rapid growth had strained the company’s existing MYOB-based small business software, which required additional manual spreadsheets to get the job done. The company reviewed on-premise enterprise ERP solutions from rival vendors such as SAP, Microsoft and Exactus, before eventually choosing NetSuite.

“NetSuite empowers us to do what we need, gives us a very real-time view of our business and supply chain, and provides a single platform to manage our ERP, finance, order management, CRM and eCommerce, without the need for additional add-ons and products,” said Steven Orleow, general manager of BioPak. “Its many system-based alerts also allow us to focus on problems that arise in our business as opposed to the everyday orders, which is very powerful for us.”

Since it implemented NetSuite, the vendor said in its statement, BioPak had been able to successfully grow without needing additional headcount, despite an increase in its average daily orders from around 40 to more than 90 a day. “We knew business growth was coming and we managed to get NetSuite implemented in time to smoothly manage the increase in volume, without adding a huge amount of additional overhead,” Orleow said.

NetSuite’s development tools also enabled BioPak to automate many key manual tasks, such as sourcing courier freight estimates. The freight calculator it developed integrates with six third-party warehouse providers and automatically sources the cheapest freight quotes from a growing database of courier companies. As BioPak provides free shipping to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Auckland, and Perth, and subsidised shipping to all other areas across New Zealand and Australia, this keeps overheads low for customers who bulk-buy directly from the source of manufacture.

“NetSuite enables us to manage and track our logistics through several layers of service providers to identify where an order is in real-time and exactly when we expect delivery,” Orleow said. “This allows us to provide our customers with a much better level of service.”

Additionally, BioPak built a calculator to determine and offset carbon emissions from the manufacture and transportation of its products. As Australia’s first packaging company that is certified carbon neutral through the Carbon Reduction Institute’s NoCo2 scheme, this enables BioPak to maintain its carbon neutral status.

The news comes as the marketplace for cloud-based business software solutions in Australia has recently become quite competitive, with players such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and others all competing in the space.

Both Microsoft and Oracle have recently detailed significant wins in the space, although SAP and Salesforce.com have been quieter. The BioPak win by NetSuite represents one of the first new customer wins the vendor has disclosed for some time. The company typically focuses on medium-sized organisations with its solutions. Unlike some of the other vendors, it does not yet operate a dedicated datacentre in Australia for local customers.

opinion/analysis
Great to see NetSuite eking out this kind of win in Australia. We don’t often hear from the vendor, and in this case it went up against the big guns to win a comprehensive rollout at BioPak, so I wanted to highlight this story (even though the implementation is over a year old) to show that the cloud CRM marketplace in Australia is a little more diverse than some might think.

Image credit: BioPak

2 COMMENTS

  1. Is this an example of one of those PR releases dressed up as journalism that Renei has commented about ;P

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