Aquatec has had 30 years’ experience providing water and wastewater solutions to local government and commercial enterprises through the Australasian region. With plans to expand the business and improve on efficiencies, Aquatec required an internal system that would grow with their business.
“When we were searching for a system, we found that NetSuite was the only system that was fully integrated, cloud-based and didn’t need to be fully customised from the beginning. It’s out of the box capability met most of our needs and the additional modules and customisations would cover the rest of our unique requirements.”
Tanya Caruana, Business Process Manager
Challenges faced before implementation
Operating with multiple disparate systems, Aquatec saw the need for more efficiency and visibility over the company. Business challenges Aquatec faced:
- Manual entry of data and duplication of work
- Manual quoting to work order processes
- Multiple, disparate systems
- Manual inventory issues, and challenges with stock management and allocation
- Challenging to analyse job costings
- Lack of visibility of company deliverables in the warehouse.
- Inventory tracking and allocation against sales orders were a manual process.
- Lack of real-time data
- Lack of easily visible data over entire business performance
Aquatec’s business requirements
Aquatec required a single platform to consolidate their multiple, disparate systems, and give them visibility over their entire business. From sales to finance, through to service delivery, they needed to see the areas of business that were costing and making them money. Business intelligence, financial transparency and inventory management were key business areas that needed to be evaluated as part of a new platform.
Aquatec’s key business requirements:
- Remove manual quoting to work order processes and replace with automated workflows
- Reduce double handling and the risk of errors in the quote to order process
- Consolidate systems into one unified platform
- Address manual inventory issues, stock allocation and ability to analyse job costings
- Improve productivity in the warehouse via bin allocation, inventory tracking and allocation against sales orders
- Implement a system that unifies Aquatec’s three entities for consolidated reporting, streamlined analysis and the ability to review financial data in real time
- Significantly improve management of projects and get visibility of tasks, resourcing and transparency across the business departments
- Address Aquatec’s multiple quote to supply against a single opportunity as part of the CRM management
- Improve marketing campaign analysis and planning
- Enable warranty and returns visibility through serial tracking, case management and quote to repair
- Enable visibility on item usage, stock on hand, demand replenishment, and supplier orders, pricing and performance.
Why the move to NetSuite?
A detailed and thorough assessment of various ERP solutions lead to the selection of NetSuite. “It appeared easy to use, fairly intuitive and would provide the visibility that our businessrequired. The fact that other reputable companies were using it added to our confidence” said Tanya Caruana, Aquatec’s Business Proces Manager.
The biggest draw card for Aquatec was the systems business transparency. NetSuite offers Aquatec a platform where every aspect of the business can be monitored and managed – it enables the leaders of the business to see areas performing well as well as those needing improvement.
Centralised data was necessary. The company originally operated a number of disparate systems, making it difficult to instantly see current customer information and transactions. With NetSuite, this became feasible.
“All information is centralised within Netsuite and the soft links make it easy to find the detail we are looking for from any starting point – this is key to our business as we can pull up customer history or inventory levels in no time. The system helped us eliminate duplication and we can easily all aspects of our data. We still use outlook calendars however the NetSuite activities allow us to plan sales trips, record information and not lose sight of viable opportunities very easily”.
Tanya Caruana, Business Process Manager
As the company have a large warehouse, inventory management was a key issue prior to implementing NetSuite. Since implementing, Aquatec has seen a significant improvement in their warehouse management.
Since implementing NetSuite, as the previous system was manual, everyone in the company saw a big difference. Tanya said: “Keeping track of inventory on hand value and being able to manage our stock minimum and maximums quantities has been an enormous benefit, NetSuite gave us visibility of our deliverables and traceability of our despatches” The company is also now reporting on DIFOT (Delivery In Full On Time), which helps them to improve processes and efficiencies for their customers.
Just over twelve months after implementing the system, Aquatec saw significant productivity improvements in the business. Aquatec is now focused on phase three implementation and seeing the company’s continuing growth.
For more information on Aquatec, click here.
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