NetSuite in whole of business TurboSmart deal

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turbosmart

news Business-focused software as a service giant NetSuite has unveiled yet another win with a mid-sized Australian company, revealing a deal with automotive performance products manufacturer Turbosmart that has seen the company deploy a comprehensive suite of NetSuite products across its business.

Founded in 1997, Turbosmart’s automotive performance products are all manufactured from its head office in Sydney and distributed by a network of more than 200 distributors to performance workshops and auto parts stores in more than 50 countries, supported by a sales office and warehouse in the U.S. and a warehouse in Poland.

According to NetSuite, in 2013 the company deployed the vendor’s OneWorld suite to better manage its financials and other back-end global business operations. The organisation subsequently deployed NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce platform to integrate its ecommerce website with its core back-end processes. It is now using financials, multi-site and multi-currency management, customer relationship management (CRM), manufacturing, inventory management, order management, merchant services, marketing and freight integration services, all from NetSuite.

A statement distributed by the pair said that the traditional model of manufacturing and distribution was rapidly changing as organisations were looking for ways to transform their businesses into “agile enterprises” with timely execution and an online consumer-like experience in order to succeed. In this context, NetSuite’s platform was able to provide the ability for Turbosmart to rapidly enter into new markets and sales channels as needed.

Turbosmart’s previous ecommerce platform was the only core process not integrated with NetSuite OneWorld. It was set up in 2011 to sell spare parts and other products that shops did not want to stock but customers still needed. This lack of integration led to a lot of manual, double handling of data to ensure online orders were processed and payments validated. It also had separate web stores for Australia and the U.S., with some U.S. customers purchasing on the Australian website and having to pay significantly more in shipping costs, which often resulted in the shopping cart being abandoned before checkout.

“The market for automotive performance products is very crowded,” said Nicholas Cooper, CEO of Turbosmart. “In order to compete, we need to be aggressive with our marketing promotions and ensure that we have the most advanced systems in place to keep us one step ahead. Our website is an important part of this process, giving us a direct relationship with our end consumers and making them feel that they are using a product that is supported by us from start to finish. NetSuite gives us all the right tools to achieve this in a single, integrated solution.”

Since deploying the NetSuite platform, Turbosmart has been able to run its ecommerce website and back-end processes on one centralised platform. According to the pair, SuiteCommerce not only streamlines business processes and improves operational efficiency for the manufacturer, but it also provides a significantly enhanced and seamless experience for its online customers.

In particular, it speeds up the order fulfilment process by saving the team at Turbosmart a considerable amount of time by eliminating the double entry and manual processing of orders and payments, enabling multi-currency transactions through multiple sites seamlessly, which now go directly from the website straight into the accounting and financials components of NetSuite OneWorld.

“NetSuite has absolutely transformed that way we do things,” said Mr. Cooper. “The most significant thing is that we are now a proactive company, rather than being a reactive one. Before NetSuite, we were back at the point of just making it through orders. Now we have stock on the shelves and can fulfill orders in a matter of days, instead of weeks, regardless of the size of the order.”

Turbosmart is also benefiting from a marketing and CRM perspective, with NetSuite SuiteCommerce helping to build up a database of end consumers that it can market directly to and build demand and loyalty for new products.

“NetSuite now makes the process so much easier and trackable,” added Mr. Cooper. “Before, we couldn’t get an ROI figure on any of our promotions, and didn’t know which ones were successful or not. We can now target promotions to distributors and consumers that work and eliminate the ones that don’t.”

The news comes as NetSuite has over the past year announced a large number of new Australian customers for its software as a service offering.

In October 2013, for instance, the company revealed that Australia-headquartered travel publishing firm Lonely Planet would consolidate its business systems on the vendor’s OneWorld platform, ditching existing systems from rivals SAP (R/3 4.7) and Salesforce.com in the process. In August the company revealed that two mid-level Australian retailers, Indian handcraft store Tree of Life and veterinary and pet healthcare supplier Vet-n-Pet, had deployed a broad swathe of its e-commerce and business management software.

In July it was a clutch of Australian manufacturers including Headland, Precision Mechatronics and BA Equipment Group, in May it was fast-growing Mexican restaurant fast food chain Guzman y Gomez, and in March NetSuite revealed a new customer was Sydney-based sustainable packaging company BioPak.

opinion/analysis
This is the sort of deployment we’re increasingly seeing in Australia from NetSuite. The company increasingly seems adept at winning deals with fast-growing, mid-sized companies where it takes the whole pie — everything from CRM to financials, payroll and even e-commerce. It’s fascinating to see NetSuite continuing to roll on in this vein. In a certain sense, Netsuite is a lot like Oracle or Microsoft. Once you start buying products or services from one of these companies, you tend to buy a whole stack rather than just niche bits and pieces.

Salesforce.com seems to be picking up wins a little higher up the food chain with larger companies, while we haven’t heard a heap from Oracle, Microsoft and SAP about these types of business software wins in Australia recently. It would be interesting what level of and how many deals these rivals are picking up behind the scenes.

Image credit: Turbosmart