When Bruce Capagli took over as COO of Precision Disposables, he knew exactly what he wanted to avoid in choosing an ERP system for the disposable medical goods startup.
Decades of paying consultants for upgrades on already costly systems convinced him of the merits of cloud-based ERP. Plus, having been through six major ERP implementations – including SAP – over the course of his career, he was all too eager to avoid the headaches and business disruptions he had learned to expect with implementations of on-premise software.
Yet the Rocklin, Calif.-based startup also needed a robust inventory management system that would help it innovate on traditional industry business models, as well as financial capabilities that would scale to ease future acquisitions and accommodate subsidiaries. And with a rapidly growing customer base, it needed that functionality fast, or it risked losing traction in this competitive space.
“We needed something in place from Day One that allowed us to scale without having to reinvest in a new system,” Capagli said.
After reviewing Xero and Zoho, Precision Disposables chose NetSuite OneWorld. While it wanted to leverage industry best practices in molding its own young business processes, Zoho lacked flexibility or implementation support to accommodate any customization. Xero, on the other hand, offered more flexibility, but couldn’t provide a fixed fee or firm timeline on an implementation.
As such, a key driver in Precision Disposables’ NetSuite choice was the SuiteSuccess customer engagement model, which offered the right balance of packaged functionality and industry best practices coupled with flexibility, plus a fixed fee and fixed implementation time frame.
“What I really liked about NetSuite is it’s 100 days or less. There’s no gray area,” he said. “When I said I wanted to do it in less, everyone kind of laughed.”
Capagli ended up having the last laugh – when the business went live with the software in September 2016 in just 59 days.
“I have 15 plus years of experience in all the major ERP platforms, including SAP, and I’ve been through six major implementations,” he said. “This was by far the best.”
Automation drives efficiencies
Precision Disposables has grown its customer base from three at the time of implementation to 36 without a concurrent increase in non-revenue generating staff.
A key business differentiator for Precision Disposables is becoming a sort of one-stop shop for all of its clients’ disposal goods needs – if Precision Disposables doesn’t manufacture the product itself, it will find the lowest price at the highest quality from a supplier. With NetSuite, the company can easily add a new supplier and tie the order back to an existing PO for complete visibility and streamlined order and delivery.
“The way everything is tied together has been a huge benefit for us in the speed of being able to scale our business,” he said.
In turn, with a unified view of inventory and accounting data, the business can easily examine profitability by a number of parameters – including individual item. In this way, within a week and a half of implementing NetSuite, Precision Disposables was able to remove redundant and unprofitable items from its product catalogue to reduce SKUs from 1,500 to 57, cutting waste to focus on its core competencies.
Unified platform empowers growth
The business plans to implement scanning technology in its Rocklin, Calif.-based warehouse and warehouse management with WMS Lite in March. It will integrate B2B and B2C ecommerce sites with NetSuite as it seeks better visibility in the order to cash process. And it will continue to build out dashboards to give executives easy access to KPIs and metrics that will empower insight-driven business decisions.
And there are much bigger plans for NetSuite in mind. Early success with NetSuite has encouraged Precision Disposables’ founders to explore moving its other business – Precision Medical – onto NetSuite from QuickBooks, leveraging NetSuite OneWorld as a unified platform to gain end-to-end visibility across its current companies and quickly provision the software to accommodate acquisitions.
“NetSuite has all the benefits and features that give us everything we need to quickly scale, while keeping our labor costs down,” Capagli said. “By implementing a platform that is this robust, I can scale to $30 million with a professional services team of 10 or less. That’s best in class.”
For more on the SuiteSuccess model, visit the SuiteSuccess landing page.