The words “IT strategy” are usually enough to make most Business owners roll their eyes. However Smart business owners understand but when it comes to designing an IT strategy the decisions that are made early on in the businesses life-cycle have a far-reaching impact as time goes on and business requirements change.
Most businesses start out with a core need in two main areas.
- Accounting and Financial Management
- Sales and CRM.
There are literally thousands of software packages on the market that aim to provide cost-effective solutions to specific areas of the business’s needs. In most cases, business owners look at potential IT problems through a very narrow window. More often than not, and quite unintentionally, business owners create a cluster of systems with the goal of solving immediate problems rather than looking at the bigger picture.
Typical symptoms of this approach include:
- Duplication of data entry, often across three or four different systems.
- Separate silos of information.
- Inability to gain access to live data.
- Multiple spreadsheets being kept to manage information that is not covered by existing software functionality.
- Increased staff numbers to cope with increased demand.
For a growing business these symptoms not only waste valuable time that could be spent in improving business processes but also cost a lot of money when you consider the amount of time and effort that goes into trying to manage a disparate cluster of software systems.
At Klugo, we help businesses assess the current IT and software strategy and design ways to not only improve this immediately but also plan requirements in the future. More often than not we see businesses that started out small and have either experienced rapid growth or industry changes that have impacted the way they need to capture data and report on information.
“A typical NetSuite customer is either a small to medium-sized business (up to 1000 employees) who has experienced rapid growth or is gearing up for planned growth.” — says Michael Dean, Klugo’s Business Consultant.
Similarly, other businesses that look to make a system upgrade to NetSuite might have some new requirements, such as new reporting for government or administrative bodies, and their current systems cannot support the business’s needs.
In either case, the need to have a holistic software solution to manage the needs of the entire business becomes evident. That’s where NetSuite comes in. For over 20 years, NetSuite has been the leading cloud-based business management platform and has grown to managing over 40,000 businesses worldwide.
NetSuite is different to most traditional or legacy ERP’s as it offers users the ability to start small, with just the modules they need to manage their current business problems, but also gives them piece of mind that they will be able to continue to expand NetSuite’s functionality as the business continues to grow and change.
The Phased Implementation
As a NetSuite partner, Klugo helps customers define which NetSuite edition and module mix is right for their immediate needs as well as putting a continual improvement plan in place to ensure the wider needs but the business has been considered during the evaluation process.
Phase 1. Minimum Viable Solution
Typically, customers will look to “go-live” with the core functionality that will allow them to trade and provide a replacement to the legacy systems the business have been using previously. In most cases this is a phase 1, but the implementation will provide a robust and highly automated solution that manages:
- Core accounting, financial an inventory control.
- Sales, CRM, and customer support.
- Procurement and purchasing automation.
- Dashboards, core reporting and business workflow automation.
Phase 2 – Expanding the Solutions Footprint
After a few months of using NetSuite, we revisit the implemented solution and original goals of the project to identify any areas of core business operation that still needs to be improved.
Phase 2 implementation often provides functionality and automation for:
- Marketing campaigns and lead source management.
- Warehouse automation including barcoding, scanning and printing solutions.
- Payroll, including timesheet entry, expense management and employee purchase requests.
- Work order management and assembly builds.
- Work centre reporting, WIP and job routing.
Phase 3. Continual Improvement through Managed Services
Once customers have implemented NetSuite across all departments of their business, they now look to undertake continual improvement activities to ensure that their users are improving their use of standard NetSuite features as well as making the most of new features and functionalities that become available at each new release.
At Klugo, our Customer Success Team works closely with our clients’ key NetSuite champions to ensure that there is a clear plan for continual improvement and to guarantee that they are getting the most out of their investment into the world’s leading cloud technology. NetSuite is a very comprehensive management platform, and we encourage our customers to always look for new and better ways to use NetSuite across the different departments of their businesses.
If you’re new or an existing NetSuite customer, we would like to discuss how we might be able to help you improve your current implementation as well as partner-up to continually improve it in the future. Feel free to reach out to one of our business consultants for a confidential and obligation free discussion.
We’re one a 5-Star NetSuite Solution Provider, and we are dedicated to help our customers leverage the power of NetSuite. Feel free to reach out. We’d love to help.
