Adopting and adapting NetSuite’s Cloud-based business management system means beauty distributor Sweet Squared can spot sales trends and make faster, more accurate business decisions.
Leeds-based Sweet Squared is the UK distributor for leading US nail products, such as Creative Nail Design and the Creative Nail Academy Before using NetSuite for its customer relationship and financial management, the company was dogged by poor information. Different channels had their own payment systems and sales were only possible during office hours.
The biggest bug-bear for the company was stock control. When a customer placed a phone order there was no way of knowing if those items were actually in stock. It was time consuming and frustrating for the IT team to try and pull all this disparate information together to make a coherent picture.
Michael Cheung, head of IT systems development at Sweet Squared, remembers:
With NetSuite on board, Sweet Squared is able to pinpoint trends in the business. It’s easier to better match stock to demand and directly see the effect of a marketing mail shot on sales for example. In short, Sweet Squared has a far greater insight into its business. Cheung says:
Although NetSuite can be used without making any changes, Sweet Squared has adapted it to better meet its particular requirements. Cheung explains:
The company wanted better insight into what products were in-stock and for this information to be fed into the website. Today, the website is automatically updated when an item is sold and customers can see immediately which products are available or out of stock and buyers are no longer restricted to making their purchases during normal retail hours.
Improvements also extend into the warehouse. Previously, addresses and orders had to be manually typed in, but with NetSuite on board, Sweet Squared is able to scan bar codes and automatically generate shipping labels.
As a confirmed technofile, Sweet Squared’s managing director was keen to explore the benefits offered by Cloud technologies. NetSuite was the company’s first flight into the Cloud and a test-case to see if the software-as-a-service route would deliver on the hype and be applicable for other business applications.
Clearly, the company been happy with the results, as that initial NetSuite implementation in 2006 has been followed by pushing its Exchange management into the Cloud. It also uses Amazon Web services for data storage as the company needed to store many high resolution images, requiring more storage than NetSuite alone could provide. The company is also now evaluating Microsoft’s Office 365 software-as-service based desktop and server applications.
