Posted by Ranga Bodla, Industry Lead, Wholesale Distribution, NetSuite(opens in new tab)
In a highly competitive market with a wide range of competitors, both physical and online, ecommerce(opens in new tab) has become a vital channel for Bailey Hydraulics(opens in new tab), a leading manufacturer and distributor of mobile hydraulic components.
(Photo: Bailey International, Mobile Hydraulics)
The Knoxville, Tenn.-based company sells its standard and custom products that include mobile hydraulic pumps, valves, motors and cylinders to a diverse customer base spanning thousands of consumers, dealers, distributors and large original equipment manufacturers (OEM) through multiple channels – online, catalog and via third parties. Bailey has a wide range of online competitors and being able to provide a compelling and immersive online customer experience is a key competitive differentiator as is the ability to continually improve its website.
Since early 2014, it has operated its website – Baileynet.com on NetSuite SuiteCommerce. The move has allowed Bailey to radically change the customer experience, offering single page checkout, images and filters with product searches and per-group and per-item pricing.
In creating its website on SuiteCommerce, Bailey has drawn on a variety of design inspirations: building on the functionality its previous site provided;responding to customer feedback about their online experiences; looking at what its competitors offer; and applying a lot of original internal creativity. Bailey looks at customer feedback on a weekly basis and welcomes the flexibility that SuiteCommerce provides to enable the company to continually innovate to meet customer expectations.
“After using a lot of different website tools in the past, we found SuiteCommerce to be an incredible ecommerce solution,” said Ken Baker, CEO at Bailey. “Since going live, we’ve made tremendous improvements in our ecommerce operations which has led to increases in website traffic.”
Bailey also runs its financials, reporting, manufacturing(opens in new tab), inventory, distribution, sales, customer service and supply chain operations(opens in new tab) on NetSuite, giving it a unified platform with direct ties to ecommerce. As a result, Bailey expects to ramp up its ecommerce business still further in the short term to boost its overall sales goals.
“There’s no way we could’ve grown our ecommerce operations to where they are now if it hadn’t been for the seamless tie into our fulfillment services provided by NetSuite,” said Baker.
Concerns about implementation times and total costs of ownership led Bailey to choose NetSuite over Oracle’s E-Business Suite after ruling out several other solutions, to replace a heavily customized ERP system(opens in new tab) written for IBM AS/400.
Bailey is benefitting from more than just ecommerce capabilities, however. NetSuite’s single unified source of data and real-time business visibility has enabled it to cut its financial close process – from 20 days to three days. Additionally,Bailey’s staff can pull and create their own reports using NetSuite within minutes rather than the two to three-week process of submitting an IT support ticket to extract data to then gain access to reporting.
Scaling the Entire Business by Running on NetSuite
Being able to natively integrate its ecommerce operations into all aspects of its business has been a big gain for Bailey, which moved from a system which required manual intervention between its website and AS/400 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
“With SuiteCommerce, the order placement and fulfillment process has almost become instantaneous,” said Baker. “Customers love that. Now, orders don’t have to be downloaded and managed by hand. The tie-in of our website into order placement and inventory availability is a huge win for us.”
A key driver in moving to NetSuite was Bailey’s need for an enterprise-strength solution which would fully support the company’s future growth both organically and via acquisition. In particular, Bailey wanted to be able to quickly and easily add and then manage subsidiaries. Bailey has the capital to grow tremendously following its 2012 acquisition by the private equity ownership. Bailey is currently in the process of onboarding Sure Grip Controls, a Canadian manufacturer of mobile hydraulic equipment that Bailey bought in February 2015, to NetSuite. All transactions are currently done in USD, but once Sure Grip is up to speed on NetSuite, Bailey plans to also start transacting in Canadian dollars.
“NetSuite has been a great tool for driving continual improvement across our business,” said Baker.“In the past, we utilized information silos in supply chain, IT, manufacturing and sales. With NetSuite, everyone now has easy access to data and it has made us a better company.”
Learn how leading industrial supply companies like Bailey run their business with NetSuite at the ISA (Industrial Supply Association) Annual Convention Booth # 1026 on April 16-18, 2016: http://www.netsuite.com/portal/email/event-industrial-033116-email.html(opens in new tab)