Annaliese Kloe is passionate about how a NetSuite implementation can help a fast-growing manufacturing company grow more efficiently, just as it did for her own family’s Headland Machinery.
She cites the example of Patriot Campers, which Klugo helped onto NetSuite. Another family-based company, Patriot grew out of a couple’s passion for building their own camper trailers. Fellow campers soon started asking them to make more and the business quickly snowballed after it started selling in the US. Moving to NetSuite helped Patriot in many ways.
“It’s been a very fast journey for them as well,” Kloe says. “The software has enabled them to become a lot more efficient in what they do and also be able to expand internationally. If you’ve got paper-based systems and you don’t know where things are and you can’t track your orders and you’re manufacturing, it’s very hard to know where you’re at and make some sound decisions.
“They’ve made some very good calls along the way. Their challenge now is making enough changes. They’re out now to seven or eight months delivery times because they’ve got such demand for their trailers at the moment.”
NetSuite combines the manufacturing module, financials and customer relationship management into one tool that can work across borders through its currency management systems.
“Nearly all businesses will be leaping into the cloud in the next five to 10 years and on-premise software will become a thing of the past,” says Kloe.
Klugo has worked closely with manufacturers such as Patriot, and Kloe sees plenty of room for growth, particularly into services industries and in other areas such as medical devices that need regular servicing.
“Manufacturing in particular is a later adopter of the Cloud-based technology, but because it’s so cost-effective that’s driving most of the growth in the industry,” Kloe adds. “With Headland, we were quite savvy with our IT, but you get to a point where you can’t do any more with the systems that you’ve got that are band-aided together.”
Kloe is particularly confident about how companies can extend those savings and reduce complexity out along the value chain to include both customers and suppliers.
“Information will come in through your system and then communicating with your suppliers to buy more raw materials or to say ‘my machine is down, I need a service guy and automatically send that notification to that service person,” says Kloe.
Using the cloud-based ERP means any company can simply log on a new employee or grow a unit with an internet browser. It’s also attractive to younger workers.
“Younger generations have an expectation of doing that,” says Kloe. “And the new systems in the cloud allow that flexibility in the workforce.”