QUICK READ:

  • Sourceability is a global distributor of electronic components, offering digital tools, services, and data to help businesses meet their evolving supply chain needs.
  • The company works with more than 3,500 suppliers and offers access to more than 1 billion electronic components.
  • Until 2019, Sourceability was using a legacy ERP system that the company inherited from one of the startup companies it acquired in 2015.
  • The company reviewed its options and selected NetSuite. It then worked with partner Myers-Holum to implement the system.

About Sourceability

With NetSuite ERP, Sourceability can manage its business from end to end, such as tracking its entire order-to-cash process from lead through closed sale.

As a global distributor of electronic components, Sourceability is a digital-first company that uses technology to help its customers procure the parts they need to keep their operations running and production lines humming. Founded in 2015, the company has 20 locations in 13 countries and more than 350 employees.

Sourceability’s core offerings include Sourcengine, an ecommerce marketplace where customers can buy and sell more than 1 billion different electronic components; Quotengine, an enterprise quoting and bill of materials management tool; and Datalynq, a digital solution for market intelligence, analytics, and obsolescence case management.

Until 2019, Sourceability used a legacy ERP system that the company inherited from one of the startups it acquired in 2015.

“That mid-90s, niche-based ERP served us well during the early stages,” said Mark Long, Sourceability’s global IT director. “However, it didn’t allow for integration or customization, both of which we felt we needed to support our own suite of digital products.”

Making the right choice

When Long joined Sourceability in 2019, his primary responsibility was to select and implement a new ERP system. He had vast experience with multiple solutions and went in search of one that could unify the entire business and had proven integrations with other key applications the business had. Sourceability eventually narrowed its list of contenders to NetSuite, Acumatica, IFS, and iDempiere.

However, Acumatica only transacted in US dollars, no matter where in the world the transaction happened. IFS lacked the framework for predesigned integrations with other solutions. Finally, the open-source iDempiere system was a strong choice in theory, but after careful consideration, Sourceability realized it didn’t want an open-source ERP due to the related costs and potential complexities of that model.

Finding a strong partner to handle the implementation was another key consideration for Sourceability. NetSuite presented Myers-Holum as its partner and emerged the winner with strengths like being in the cloud from day one, global capabilities, and automatic, twice-per-year updates.

Other ERP systems offered “occasional upgrades” at the customer’s discretion. This inevitably leads to companies installing one version and neglecting upgrades until absolutely necessary, Long noted.

“The impact over time is either a major upgrade—just short of a new implementation—or an evaluation of whether to switch to a new system,” he said.

“It’s been my experience over the past 20-plus years that systems that have massive version releases are problems in and of themselves. You end up having to redo an implementation every few years. NetSuite updates twice a year and those updates just happen naturally.”

No more guesswork

In NetSuite, Sourceability found an ERP that could manage its business from end-to-end, such as tracking its entire order-to-cash process from lead through closed sale. This is an important win for a company that keeps its sales and procurement teams closely aligned from the very early sales stages.

“NetSuite lets us leverage visibility for both parties and create handoffs so that sales and procurement can identify the demand and the source, match them up, and get the order shipped out to the customer,” Long said.

The visibility extends to the company’s global warehouses. Sourceability can access more than one billion parts listings from thousands of global suppliers via its Sourcengine API. Starting with the placement of a purchase order, the company assigns internal lot numbers. It can then use NetSuite to allocate these lots to different channels, and this inventory then goes through a multistep quality control process that’s tailored to Sourceability’s standards.

“There’s no guesswork involved,” Long said. “We went from using a lot of emails, chats, and phone calls to inquire about order status to using NetSuite to view the order and see exactly where the part is.”

Following the sun

As a global company, Sourceability is constantly “following the sun”—with its presence around the globe, work is passed between offices to keep things moving. Most of its warehouses that distribute globally are located in Asia, but the customers themselves are based in either North America or Europe. Before NetSuite, communication between sales reps and buyers was disjointed, with many manual steps required to find the right products for any one customer. The result was that it often took a full 24 hours to move an opportunity or sale onto the next phase. Myers-Holum configured the system to automate many of those steps and centralize quoting data in NetSuite to eliminate those lengthy cycle times.

“Things that used to take three days are now taking one 24-hour cycle, and it's because everything is in the same system,” Long said. “Tasks can be handed off and handled the following morning.”

Moving forward, Sourceability wants to take advantage of more of the system’s analytics capabilities.

“The beautiful aspect of NetSuite is that while we've done a tremendous amount of customization and configuration, there’s still a tremendous number of features that we haven't even started to use yet,” Long said. “Our user base is really excited about what’s coming next in terms of new features and functionalities.”

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