Optimizing Productivity and Preparing for Scale with NetSuite
By Ben VanderBeek
July 2022 | 4 min read
ABSTRACT
- An American food manufacturer was struggling to scale its business because of unintegrated technologies.
- After careful assessment, LIDD recommended the client merge all operational and financial data with a NetSuite ERP implementation.
- Thanks to NetSuite, LIDD’s client has full operational visibility and can maximize efficiency and pursue growth at all levels of its business.
As a business grows, it runs into problems that can be solved with targeted technologies.
But with increasing demand and rapidly shifting consumer habits, these technologies accumulate. Information recorded and transmitted in unintegrated systems becomes incomplete and imprecise. Simply managing these records takes a lot of time. Plus, management loses visibility into business operations, preventing them from improving efficiency and reducing wastage.
Once your patchwork of technology solutions becomes an obstacle to growth, it’s time for a change.
Here’s how LIDD’s supply chain and technology services helped a client transition from their older technology infrastructure to one streamlined solution.
General Context
The Client: A rapidly growing food producer in the US with products available in over 17,000 stores nationwide.
- Many software solutions, including QuickBooks order management and transportation management solutions built on the Salesforce platform.
- Manufacturing facility using on-premises software solution
- Grocery, foodservice, and ecommerce channels.
- Network of 3PL providers
The Challenge: The patchwork of technology solutions created numerous operational and financial problems.
- Information was siloed, imprecise, and sometimes contradictory.
- Management struggled to pinpoint inefficiencies because of imprecise information.
- Staff lost time making sense of financial reports and operations data from across the company’s various systems.
- The on-premise system which collected warehousing and manufacturing data did not include any attached financial value, interfering with analysis of the real cost of manufacturing.
LIDD’s Mandate
LIDD initially performed a Digital Transformation Roadmap. This helped LIDD identify challenges and propose a solution.
LIDD then agreed to implement these recommendations.
LIDD’S Solution
LIDD recommended a NetSuite ERP (enterprise resource planning) implementation fitted to the business’s operations and future state.
Why NetSuite?
NetSuite is a robust, widely used, and versatile ERP well-suited for food manufacturers and other small and mid-sized enterprises. LIDD recommended this ERP because NetSuite:
- Provides a source of truth for master data, inventory, and planned and actual transactions
- Includes financial value at all stages of production, enabling easy financial analysis
- Streamlines information through its integrated, all-in-one system
- Is a customizable system that can be tailored to the client’s needs and future state
- Is easy to buy, implement, and support
- Has hundreds of thousands of users, making it relatively easy to recruit key positions if NetSuite experience is required
LIDD also has many positive reports from food manufacturers who decided to implement NetSuite ERP.
Overcoming Challenges
LIDD adapted during the implementation to provide the best results and the most options to our client.
During the implementation, LIDD found that the client could benefit from implementing Netsuite’s warehouse management system (WMS).
Although these functionalities were not included in LIDD’s original scope of work, LIDD informed the client of the options and offered to implement the WMS. The client agreed, so LIDD promptly added NetSuite WMS to its scope of work.
LIDD Delivers
Our client can now organize procurement, manufacturing, customer orders, financial reports production, accounts payable, accounts receivable, warehouse management, and transportation management through one integrated system. NetSuite offers many benefits to the client’s current and future state, including:
1. Future Growth
LIDD’s NetSuite implementation has opened avenues for future improvements.
- With one reliable, integrated source-of-truth, our client can now identify where and why disruptions happen, plan for an optimized inventory, and engineer long-term efficiency improvements.
- If areas of the business are still not captured through NetSuite, these can finally be singled out and integrated through later projects.
Our client is in an excellent position to capitalize on growing demand without sacrificing efficiency.
2. Accessible Financial Data
Our client can quickly produce accurate financial data instead of chasing down information from across various software.
- All operations are tracked in NetSuite.
- NetSuite collects financial documents and streamline financial reporting The time of the business’s financial teams can now be put to better use analyzing the wealth of data provided by NetSuite.
3. Integrated Warehousing
LIDD implemented integrated barcode scanners and label printers for warehouse employees, connecting warehousing operations directly to the client’s ERP.
- All scanned document and printed labels are recorded through NetSuite, now, warehousing operations with financial data can easily track and monitor activities in real time.
- Integrated scanners and label printers make warehousing quick and convenient.
NetSuite has helped restore communication between warehouse and the rest of the business without needlessly complicating warehousing operations.
With NetSuite, our client has full visibility and integration from its warehouse to its logistics providers. It is ready to enter a new phase of growth driven by a sleek, all-in-one, customizable ERP solution.