Volatile costs for materials, fast-moving competitors, and selective customers can make for a challenging environment for product companies. This high-pressure environment puts a premium on finding ways to increase efficiency across accounting, operations, sales, and order fulfillment. That’s where NetSuite Alliance Partners come in, bringing a proven track record of helping product companies simplify business processes from end to end with the world’s leading cloud ERP.

This post is part of a series that showcases our Summer 2024 Alliance Partner Spotlight Award winners in the product company category, featuring manufacturers, retailers, and suppliers in agriculture; apparel, footwear, and accessories; appliances, and biotech/biopharma.

Customer: YoungLA

Apparel, Footwear, and Accessories Spotlight Award Winner: Ekwani Consulting

YoungLA is a fast-growing lifestyle clothing brand headquartered in Los Angeles offering a broad range of stylish and casual activewear, streetwear and accessories for men and women. Founded by two brothers in 2014, the company has grown exponentially by word of mouth and social media influencer marketing, now counting 150 employees with distribution in Los Angeles, Louisville, and Germany.

With their 20% year-over-year growth, YoungLA quickly outgrew its existing system and began the search for an ERP and warehouse management system (WMS). The search resulted in a more robust and scalable NetSuite ERP, which Ekwani Consulting implemented in three months.

NetSuite provides YoungLA with an integrated platform to handle a high volume of transactions and support its continued rapid growth in the US and internationally. The company has streamlined operations, reduced manual data entry, shifted sales analysis and procurement planning to NetSuite, and improved data accuracy. Ekwani also uses Celigo connectors to connect NetSuite with its Shopify ecommerce storefront, an Avectous WMS, and several third-party logistics providers. In upcoming phases, YoungLA is eyeing additional improvements by using NetSuite to assist with procurement, landed cost management, demand planning, and material requirements planning (MRP).

“Selecting an ERP system was a big decision, but an equally sized decision was selecting the correct implementation partner. It was imperative that we found a partner and not a supplier, a partner that was willing to understand our business, rather than pushing a pre-existing implementation template. We found that partner in Ekwani.” – Phil Suarez, Chief Operating Officer at YoungLA.

Customer: Fremont Farms

Agriculture Spotlight Award Winner: Beyond Cloud Consulting

Family-owned Fremont Farms is a premier producer of high-quality liquid egg products, with farms that include state-of-the-art cage-free and conventional pullet and layer barns, a dedicated on-site feed mill with grain storage, and an inline egg processing facility. The company was founded in 1998 and is based in Malcom, Iowa.

Using industry-specific Aeros ERP, Fremont Farms had limited ability to track and manage inventory, feed mixes, and overall operations. Aeros was cumbersome and required extensive manual work, leading to reporting inefficiencies and duplicate data entry. A problematic integration with SAP Concur expense management further complicated financial processes. Fremont Farms decided to turn the page with a NetSuite implementation led by Beyond Cloud Consulting.

Fremont Farms has improved feed management with weekly reconciliations of detailed feed consumption data accessible in NetSuite, generating insights for more informed decisions. New traceability functionality helps the business quickly identify and address any feed quality issues. As a result, Fremont Farms can correlate feed distribution to egg production information in integrated flock management systems to continuously optimize. Beyond Cloud customizations that automate bill of lading processes and give Fremont Farms a three-way matching and approval workflow for purchasing have further increased efficiencies. Fremont Farms is looking to fuel additional gains by adding NetSuite Analytics Warehouse and NetSuite Planning and Budgeting down the road.

Customer: Hahn Appliance Warehouse

Appliances Spotlight Award Winner: Bryant Park Consulting

Hahn Appliance Warehouse is an independent retailer of stoves, refrigerators and freezers, washer and dryers, dishwashers, grills, and other major appliances. Founded in 1958, the employee-owned company operates four stores in Tulsa, Edmond, and Oklahoma City, offering hundreds of products from major brands.

With outdated, homegrown systems previously managing finance, inventory, and sales, Hahn Appliance faces challenges with inventory control, order management, and systems security. Tracking inventory required inefficient manual processes with limited real-time visibility, and order management lacked the streamlined workflows needed to optimize customer experience. After evaluating business management platforms, Hahn Appliance selected NetSuite, with Bryant Park Consulting leading the implementation.

NetSuite has provided Hahn Appliance with stronger inventory controls and heightened visibility across the business. A Bryant Park customization lets staff query inventory for a single-screen view of product availability by locations, bins, or other user-selected criteria. A custom inventory commitment solution ensures that inventory is reserved based on delivery type, helping prioritize confirmed orders and optimize stock allocation.

Integration between NetSuite and Package.ai, a customer engagement platform for appliance retailers, lets employees schedule deliveries directly from sales orders. A bespoke rebate solution was also developed by Bryant Park to accommodate the complex structures of appliance rebates.

The new system has helped enhance the customer experience with simpler order management and fulfillment, while the upgrade provides Hahn Appliance with much-needed efficiency and insights in financial management and reporting. After Hahn Appliance’s success with NetSuite, Bryant Park will implement NetSuite at a sister company, Metro Appliances & More, which has nine locations in four Midwestern states.

Customer: Outlook Therapeutics

Biotech/Biopharma Spotlight Award Winner: Archer Insights

Outlook Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company working to achieve FDA approval to commercialize therapies for retinal diseases including wet age-related macular degeneration (wet AMD), a condition that can lead to blurred vision and vision loss. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in New Jersey, Outlook Therapeutics went public in 2019 and is backed by private equity firm GMS Capital Partners.

As the company was looking for an ERP, NetSuite was a natural choice since the controller had used the platform at a previous life sciences company. The firm chose Archer Insights, which specializes in the life sciences industry, to lead the implementation. As a public company, Outlook Therapeutics needed stronger internal controls for purchasing and invoice approvals than what QuickBooks could provide, especially for SOX compliance and SEC reporting. Archer’s SOX-enabled Approval Module addressed these needs, while their HCP-enabled Vendor Onboarding Module streamlined and automated supplier onboarding, improved visibility, eliminated manual steps, and shortened onboarding cycle time.

With NetSuite in place, the Outlook Therapeutics finance team was able to take on additional work without adding headcount. The organization has strengthened internal controls and streamlined regulatory reporting and compliance. The purchasing team now manages supplier contracts and relationships more efficiently with NetSuite's intuitive UI and Archer’s multicurrency and multilanguage OCR Vendor Bill Capture module with bank integration.

By incorporating NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, Outlook Therapeutics is leveraging AI to improve financial analysis and forecasting. Next, the company is considering extending NetSuite capabilities to automate account reconciliations for faster creation of financial statements.

On May 28, 2024, Outlook announced that LYTENAVA™ received marketing authorization from the European Commission (May 28, 2024) and the UK MHRA (July 8, 2024), and that the FDA has accepted its BLA resubmission with a PDUFA goal date of August 27, 2025, paving the way for potential full U.S. commercialization.

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