About Myers-Holum
Myers-Holum, Inc. is an award-winning consulting firm and leader in delivering NetSuite, Stripe, Boomi, and Google Cloud Platform solutions. Myers-Holum helps clients across industries, from products to technology, leverage technology to improve operations, financials, and other business processes. It has more 40 years of experience implementing large-scale data warehouses, data lakes, master data management, and business intelligence solutions on leading platforms.
Like many of its clients, the professional services firm used several point solutions to run its business until recently. That included QuickBooks for accounting, Salesforce for CRM, and Mavenlink (now Kantata) for project execution, time, and expenses. This NetSuite Alliance Partner also turned to several other applications to run its enterprise data integration practice, none of which were integrated with back-end systems or each other. This only became more challenging as the company rapidly grew from about 10 to more than 400 employees over the past six years.
Knowing that many of its own clients realized substantial benefits from their own NetSuite implementations, Myers-Holum decided to consolidate its operations on a single ERP system in early 2023.
Tracking opportunities, engagements across multiple systems
When Myers-Holum used Mavenlink, a cloud-based professional services automation (PSA) software for project, resource, and financial management, the firm couldn’t allocate resources until after closing a sale.
“When we worked in a siloed environment where Mavenlink was disconnected from our sales tools, we were joining the data between our sales pipeline and the resource availability dictated by Mavenlink,” said Andrew Tai-Pow, practice director, professional services at Myers-Holum. “One of the reasons we moved to NetSuite is because even from the sales perspective—when we haven’t even closed the deal yet—we can forecast future resource availability for a project that may not close for months. That's pretty powerful.”
Mavenlink couldn’t handle financial management of the company’s projects, requiring integrations that created their own challenges because data was not in a uniform format.
“With Mavenlink, you can manage project plans, invoice your customers, and do some light resource allocations, but you're always going to have to integrate a financial or accounting backbone,” Tai-Pow said.
Myers-Holum had critical data spread across three systems, so getting the insights it needed required looking across all platforms. It learned that disconnected applications are only as strong as the integrations you build for it.
“You could do a million things in Salesforce, for example, but if your integration isn't designed to bring across all of the requisite functions and flows, then you're limiting your functionality and upside,” Tai-Pow explained.
Consolidating the entire business on NetSuite
Since Myers-Holum was familiar with NetSuite and had a decade of experience implementing the ERP system, it didn’t consider any other solutions when it decided to unify its business on a single platform. NetSuite’s scalability, straightforward customization options, and comprehensive integration capabilities made it the clear choice.
Myers-Holum replaced Mavenlink, QuickBooks, and Salesforce with NetSuite, going live with NetSuite CRM in January and then wrapping up the remainder of the ERP implementation in March.
“We moved to NetSuite in order to localize our operations on a single system and break down the data silos that existed across sales, delivery, and our core accounting functions,” Tai-Pow said.
“As a NetSuite Alliance Partner, we've always had an interest in implementing NetSuite for our business. We know the benefits of the platform,” he said. “We ultimately have control of the application because we know how to do the implementation work and also how to use and optimize the system.”
New ERP delivers on its promise
The 425-person company immediately began to see results after it started using NetSuite. Take resource allocation, for example. Myers-Holum must determine the optimal resources to allocate to specific projects based on availability, capacity, geography, technical skills, industry skills, and other factors. One client may want to work only with local consultants, for instance, while another will seek IT professionals with deep expertise in a specific industry.
“NetSuite has allowed us to connect those data and decision-making points and staff every project with the right person who has the right amount of availability and expertise to do the work,” Tai-Pow said.
By replacing Mavenlink with NetSuite, Myers-Holum consolidated its sales pipeline, customer quoting, and opportunity management on a single platform. That was essential in helping the company better manage its project opportunity pipeline from initial contact through final go-live. It also saved the company time, helped it avoid data compliance issues by creating a single source of data, and allowed multiple departments to see the same operational data.
Once projects start, Myers-Holum can easily and accurately track project costs, employee time, and expenses, since NetSuite manages all of these functions. The services company has automated the billing process, and NetSuite’s revenue recognition capabilities help it efficiently recognize and manage revenue from consulting services in compliance with accounting standards. The improved operational efficiency and automation means Myers-Holum can focus on delivering exceptional services to its clients.
A single source of information also encourages collaboration between Myers-Holum’s three main departments—accounting, sales, and delivery/execution—because employees can easily share data among teams and across departments.
This, in turn, helps Myers-Holum make better decisions around staffing, customer invoicing, customer status, and project status. The company can also better manage its customer relationships because it has a deeper view into project status and management of how receivables from customers. This, in turn, helps Myers-Holum deliver the best possible experience to its customers.
The company can also segment its financials by department or practice area, or by roles and responsibilities at the project level.
“This flexibility within the platform allows us to slice and dice our financials so we can drive key decision-making as it relates to recruiting, selling, and delivering,” Tai-Pow explained.
Customizing NetSuite to meet its needs
Myers-Holum built a dunning module for NetSuite and customized the system to create customer-specific PDFs such as invoices, credit memos, and customer statements.
Myers-Holum also built a customization that it uses to establish rate cards for each of its projects. This has increased cost transparency with prospects and customers from the start.
“As a services firm, we also need clear-cut financials as it relates to delineation of the departmental spend, where we're earning our revenue, and utilization reporting,” he continued. “These are some other areas where we’ve been able to customize NetSuite to meet our specific needs.”
As the company continues to grow, it now has a robust ERP to support additional scale and expansion.
“In terms of organizational growth, we need to be focusing on our sales reps and the segments where we could be doing more business; those are really higher incremental growth opportunities for us,” Tai-Pow said. “We’re using more NetSuite’s functionalities as we grow. We always have ERP optimization projects underway.”
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