news Enterprise software company NetSuite this morning revealed that a clutch of Australian manufacturers including Headland, Precision Mechatronics and BA Equipment Group had recently adopted its software as a service platform, as the vendor continues to make headway in the mid-level customer market in Australia.
The three companies all supply equipment used in the manufacturing and engineering sectors in Australia. Headline, for example, supplies metal-working machinery equipment. Precision sells custom-designed equipment to a number of different industries, including products as esoteric as atmospheric plasma technology equipment for use by semiconductor, aerospace and medical device manufacturers. BA sells rock-breaking hammers and hydraulic boom systems to the civil construction, demolition, quarrying and mining industries in Western Australia.
NetSuite’s statement revealed that the trio had all switched to NetSuite for one reason or another over the past several years. Headland, for instance, adopted NetSuite’s OneWorld product back in 2011 to improve business efficiency and streamline workflows, also taking advantage of the service’s multi-currency conversion capabilities. The company is using OneWorld in eight different currencies in two countries for financials, inventory management, fulfilment, CRM, process workflow, project costing and reporting, as well as other core processes.
“NetSuite has really helped us to increase the utilisation and efficiency of our engineers as they now have the ability to know where all resources are at any given time, and who has capacity for further work,” said Lucas Vear, chief financial officer of Headland. “They now also have complete visibility of our customers in real-time, enabling them to be better prepared and better able to service customer requirements.”
Precision replaced MYOB for its accounting suite in August 2010, replacing it with OneWorld. The company needed a more comprehensive suite as it expanded into the Asia-Pacific region. It now uses OneWorld for financials, inventory and order management, customer service, marketing, sales force automation and other core business processes. Precision also uses the service’s currency conversion capabilities.
“We have greater visibility of our business now that everything is on the single, cloud-based NetSuite system—inventory, currencies, sales data and more,” said Jason Thelander, CEO of Precision Mechatronics. “We know NetSuite can keep up with our future growth plans and scale with us no matter how or where our company expands.”
For its part, BA replaced Microsoft Dynamics NAV with NetSuite to help it separate from its parent business and deploy fully featured ERP systems across multiple offices with no hardware required. It now uses NetSuite for financials, customer service, inventory and order management, project management, marketing, sales force automation and other core processes.
“NetSuite gives us more control over our business and quicker access to the information we need, when and where we need it,” said Campbell Nunn, managing director of BA Equipment Group. “It has eliminated guesswork and supports better forecasting so we can focus on growing our business and serving our customers.”
The news of the deployments comes as NetSuite has also recently revealed several other noteworthy deployments of its technology in Australia. In May this year, for example, it revealed that fast-growing Mexican fast food chain Guzman y Gomez had deployed NetSuite, while in March it revealed that Sydney-based sustainable packaging company BioPak had done the same.
“Traditional on-premise software approaches used by many manufacturers create a barrier to product innovation and business growth by increasing IT costs, driving up the cost of production and decreasing business efficiency and accuracy,” said Mark Troselj, managing director of APAC for NetSuite. “By switching to the NetSuite cloud, today’s modern manufacturers can accelerate innovation, produce higher-quality products at high margins, rapidly adapt to market changes and distribute across multiple channels, gaining a competitive advantage and driving success in the global economy.”
opinion/analysis
Good to see NetSuite’s cloud suite still picking up new customers of note in Australia, especially in the mid-level enterprise sector. Even in sensitive sectors such as manufacturing, it appears the switch to the cloud is gathering strength.