As a business that has seen significant growth, MiniFAB have moved to underpin their future growth by implementing a cloud-based, integrated, advanced manufacturing solution, NetSuite.
Established in 2002, MiniFAB is a privately-held contract engineering firm providing custom development and manufacturing of disposable polymer microfluidic and micro-engineered products. With diverse geographical locations, MiniFAB’s growth into the US and Europe has paved the way for expansion into the global market, having worked on over 900 projects world-wide. A cloud based business management platform was essential to their global footprint, minimising infrastructure costs and providing a nimble, accessible system anywhere in the world. Dean Maxwell, MiniFAB’s newly appointed CFO says the business has operated successfully on many manual processes, however future expansion requires an integrated system which provides timely information to assist decision making. “Rapid growth has really been the key driver in re-assessing our systems and processes to ensure we can keep aligned with our information and maintain the flexibility to innovate as a business,” he says. ”Reducing our current financial reporting timeline and gaining real-time visibility over the business financials were also key in our evaluation of systems.” “We were looking for a solution that was cloud-based and was able to scale with our growing business.” MiniFAB currently uses a construction based solution with several siloed databases and fragmented processes. The business estimates the potential to increase productive capacity by up to 20% across the business with the introduction of NetSuite. The Minifab solution provided by Klugo is unique to the Manufacturing industry as it is a complete, end to end Advanced Manufacturing solution that caters to PLM engineering, machine automation, advanced manufacturing, right through to the back end core Financials, CRM and inventory management. NetSuite’s Advanced Manufacturing Suite, together with NetSuite’s SuiteApp Arena is helping manufacturers innovate, ensuring global compliance and reduce costs through a cloud based platform that enables full visibility over their business, with real time business intelligence. Arena PLM, provides highly regulated medical device companies with a superior enterprise-wide approach to quality. This holistic quality solution offers visibility, cross-functional team collaboration, and long-term tracking of quality resolutions. The system allows manufacturers to meet FDA and other regulations, by managing information to show compliance as well as streamlining management of BOMs, design history files, device master records and change orders. It was Arena PLM’s decade long industry experience that gave MiniFAB assurance that the solution was the right fit for their business. Due to NetSuite’s status as a global market leader in ERP solutions and significant continued investment in the product’s development, the business was comfortable investing in the technology, knowing they could be rid of unwieldy upgrades in the future and benefit from over 30,000 global businesses using the platform. MiniFAB have been a customer of Klugo’s parent company Headland Machinery, however, it wasn’t this connection that made MiniFAB choose to work with Klugo. Dean says it was the “honesty and openness from the Klugo sales team” that played a big part in the decision. “Klugo supported MiniFABs approach, listened to what we wanted, and they are prepared to make it happen,” he says. Dean was also impressed with the implementation methodology of the Klugo team. Annaliese Kloé, Director of Klugo says helping local manufacturers transform their business is extremely rewarding. “As the Managing Director of Klugo’s parent company Headland Machinery, I have been in the manufacturing space for about 30 years and have seen the effects first hand of software that just gets you by. It’s great to see that Klugo can provide an advanced manufacturing solution that is tailored to MiniFAB’s needs and help them on their path to growth.”
