3 Innovative Uses of NetSuite by Scottish Businesses

To celebrate St. Andrews Day, we thought we would highlight some of the most innovative use of NetSuite by Scottish businesses. As a Scottish business ourselves, we are very proud to help developing and established business alike increase their productivity and modernise their systems. It’s been a pleasure to be a part of this implementation process, so here are our top 3 most innovative uses of NetSuite by Scottish businesses!

Aspen Solutions Ltd

Based in Glasgow, but with offices in Cumbernauld as well, Aspen Solutions are one of Scotland’s largest IT hardware, software and technical specialists. Financial Director Paul Harkins mentions how Sage was only ever really equipped to deal with low transaction volumes: “We used Salesforce for CRM, but the sales people failed to engage with it.  It was pointless putting information into Salesforce and then duplicating it in Sage.  As a consequence we didn’t have much visibility of sales pipeline or stock requirements going into each month.  Add to that the fact our Sage had not been set up to deal with the vast increase in orders we decided to make a change – to focus on customer service and support the continued growth of our business”.

This created a real lack of visibility, where performance was difficult to monitor. However, Harkins now asserts that “we can depend on the NetSuite system” and describes being able to provide a better service to customer, while also gaining insight into profitability and inventory levels. While a finance solution was the initial focal point, there were so many distinct benefits that proved invaluable to their business operations. Paul Grant, Director at Cofficient, mentioned that NetSuite will be able to “support them through their next stage of growth,” which will hopefully put them at the forefront of the burgeoning Scottish IT sector.

Read more about Aspen Solutions NetSuite implementation in this interview with Paul Harkins.

Simon Community Scotland

This was a special project for us in more than one way. For one, it was obviously great to work with a Scottish charity focusing on helping the homeless community in the West of Scotland, but we were also thrilled to see that they had a 100% increase in accuracy after we implemented NetSuite. With the amount of service users previously unknown, Simon Community was now able to accurately pinpoint and record who and where their members were.

Manual data entry previously made the whole process time consuming and fraught with complications. Since the NetSuite implementation, the process has been streamlined, saving valuable time that can then be reinvested into improving services. There was an 80% reduction in manual effort and logging, a 50% reduction in paper consumption, and a 20% reduction in travel times and expenses. However, we are particularly proud of the 10% increase in face to face contact with service users. It’s a great testament to the fact that a digital system doesn’t have to replace human interaction, which is a key element of Simon Community’s approach. Instead it can work to increase efficiency and make more time for these valuable interactions.

Read more about the remarkable results in our case study on Simon Community Scotland.

Calnex Solutions

Calnex Solutions, a leading provider of innovative R&D test solutions for telecom synchronization with more than 320 customers in 45 countries, faced increasing business complexity and customer demands with rapid growth and rollouts of new high-value, highly complex products. Sage 50 for financials and two heavily customised spreadsheets for order processing and fulfilment didn’t deliver the scale and agility the company needed.

“Calnex was going through a period of high growth and needed to replace a legacy system which couldn’t cope with all our critical business processes, says Ger Kirk, Operations Manager at Calnex.” Better visibility was crucial, and it’s exactly what they got. An integrated real-time view of all operations now makes intervention easier than ever before, providing the business with the reactive potential and agility it needs to grow further. The new system allows for scalable growth, with the ability to handle a 30% surge in transaction volumes and 11% revenue growth in the first year of its implementation. But more than anything, it gives this exciting, vibrant, and still relatively young Scottish business (founded in 2007!) the platform it needs to future-proof its operations before turning into a truly global powerhouse.

Check out the full story, with more details, in our full Calnex case study.

Do you want to be next?

Get in touch with us if you want more information about NetSuite and what it can do for your business. We’re always happy to have a chat and always enjoy being a part of someone else’s success story.