Need to hail a cab from your mobile phone in New York, London, Dublin or Toronto? Hailo's global taxi app for Android and iPhones makes that possible in cities across the globe -- with the back-office help from NetSuite's OneWorld.
Hailo, a London-based company with 11 international subsidiaries, connects Smartphone users needing a taxi ride to the closest available taxi, via a downloadable AP and GPS tracking. The concept has proved popular with both customers and taxi cab firms, enabling Hailo to grow rapidly. It has plans to expand to up to 40 cities over the next few months.
To achieve such rapid international growth, Hailo recently migrated to NetSuite OneWorld to handle the multiple currencies, taxes and operating rules in each locale.
The company had been using Sage Line 50, but moved to NetSuite's cloud solution in order to have the scalability and accessibility it needs as it quickly adds more geographically dispersed markets, along with their different currencies, tax regulations and government reporting requirements.
NetSuite OneWorld's support for multiple languages, currencies and regulations allows Hailo to invest more time in improving its operational efficiencies and planning growth strategies in its diverse international markets.
Using an integrated, cloud-based system also means monthly reports are easier to create. With the on-premise Sage software, generating monthly reports required employees to manually compile data from multiple, disparate systems into a single spreadsheet--a process that could take the financial staff days to accomplish. With the cloud-based OneWorld solution, that information is now automatically available for reporting or analysis. It also saves Hailo the cost of buying and maintaining its own hardware and software.
As Hailo financial director Nick Lally noted, "It's making us more agile and saving us the
money and time that would be spent on maintaining hardware and IT specialists."