QUICK READ:
- A husband-and-wife team started Regina Andrew Detroit in 1998.
- Today, the company offers luxe lighting, furniture, and home décor items both to trade customers (B2B) and directly to consumers (B2C).
- The business moved to NetSuite ERP to centralize business functions and improve the customer experience.
- Regina Andrew uses NetSuite Warehouse Management System (WMS) to improve inventory tracking and cost efficiency.
- NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced gives the company best-in-class features, like immediate inventory availability on its ecommerce site.
About Regina Andrew Detroit
Real-life couple Carla Regina and James Andrew founded Regina Andrew Detroit with one goal in mind: that everything they do should electrify the room. Based in the “Paris of the Midwest,” their home decor and lighting brand has hit that goal, and then some, as they’ve expertly blended form with function and added a hearty dose of rock ‘n’ roll along the way.
Regina Andrew(opens in new tab) engages in both B2B and B2C business, primarily through its website and national and international retail partners. Uniquely, both business models operate under the same web domain. Customers can register as either trade (B2B) or general consumers (B2C) to enjoy the same familiar shopping experience and streamlined checkout process. The company ships over 1,200 SKUs nationally and to 68 countries from its Michigan warehouse.
Regina Andrew also has a 10,000-square-foot showroom in High Point, North Carolina.
Using ERP but Systems Still Fragmented
Regina Andrew went live with its first ERP system, AcctVantage, in 2006, when it primarily relied on outside sales professionals to generate business. At trade shows, buyers would come in looking to plan purchase orders for the next home furnishing season, and the ERP system was built to handle that model.
Regina Andrew’s website was built on Magento while other tools, like the one used to run the company’s sales app, were on other platforms. Disconnected information made it difficult to draw overall insights that would inform customer interactions. It also hurt efficiency — getting orders out the door was a sluggish process as associates tried to stitch together all the data necessary to ship them.
After vetting other systems including Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Infor, Regina Andrew chose NetSuite ERP(opens in new tab) because of its deep functionality, scalability, and ability to manage more business functions in one place.
Cutting-Edge ERP Delivers Results
Regina Andrew has realized the benefits of having vast data under one system with NetSuite ERP. The business sped up order processing by eliminating the need for team members to work in multiple systems or aggregate data. It has improved communication with customers by easily surfacing order details such as product availability and shipment arrival time.
Meanwhile, Regina Andrew uses NetSuite Warehouse Management System (WMS)(opens in new tab) to simplify order processing and distribution. This saves labor hours because there are fewer total steps and touches per order.
SuiteCommerce Advanced(opens in new tab) has played a big role in the success of the dual-function B2B/B2C Regina Andrew site. The direct connection between the ERP and ecommerce systems provides several advantages, said the Director of Technology Ryan Shaltry. Real-time inventory availability is reflected in both the back-end system and ecommerce site, and sales orders placed through the site go immediately into NetSuite. The team has customized the system to create quotes and orders while at High Point Market in the spring and autumn, using iPads and barcodes.
With SuiteCommerce Advanced, there is no need for redevelopment or other major technical work, saving time and resources for the ecommerce team. The work is focused on polishing the look and feel of the site with tools that non-technical employees can use.
After implementing SuiteCommerce Advanced and thoughtfully redesigning the website, online orders surged from 8% to 36% of total sales; average session length jumped more than 30 seconds; and the bounce rate declined by 2.6%.
These improvements are especially meaningful as 60% of Regina Andrew customers visit the website at some point in their journey. The site’s mobile-friendly, responsive design is also vital as more than 50% of its traffic comes from mobile devices.
Meeting Customer Expectations
For Regina Andrew, one of the biggest advantages of NetSuite ERP is the ease of accessing and sharing data both internally and with customers. For customers, that means being able to go online and find the latest order status and information they’re seeking about their orders themselves.
NetSuite also helps the company provide the level of customer service today’s buyers expect.
“There’s an expectation that when somebody calls, emails, or texts you, you already know everything about them,” Bonomo said. “Having all information in-house on the NetSuite item record and customer record in NetSuite Customer Relationship Management (CRM)(opens in new tab) — and the sharing of this information internally — allows anyone on our team to efficiently and intelligently communicate with our customers.”
Regina Andrew is not only using the best-in-class business applications NetSuite offers but also pulling in data from other NetSuite modules such as WMS and SuiteCommerce Advanced that could answer common questions. For example, while the company operates both B2B and B2C, those customer types ask many of the same questions: What item will be the right fit? How much is it going to cost? Is it available? If not, when will it be available? When will it arrive?
When Regina Andrew can check in-house data to answer customer questions about item availability, price, estimated delivery date, order status, and delays without the customer having to make a call or send an email, that facilitates a seamless and enjoyable online shopping experience from initial search all the way through checkout. It’s about having and making available the information customers need to make a purchasing decision. In this way, NetSuite is helping Regina Andrew deliver on its commitment to customer service.
Future Priorities
Jim Bonomo advises companies considering or preparing to implement an ERP system to remember that it is a journey. Create sound business rules, then be realistic about what your current team can accomplish. Understand how other companies that mirror your own are using systems like NetSuite and the benefits they’ve seen, then make sure that the ERP you’re considering can scale to meet your expanding needs over time. That will prevent disruptive future transitions from one ERP system to another.
For Regina Andrew, the focus remains on creating great customer experiences. The company is exploring ways NetSuite can further improve customer communication by expanding the data that customers can see online. Regina Andrew is also looking for more effective ways to bring segmentation and personalization to its shopping experience. This can mean an ability to offer customer-specific recommendations as well as use a customer’s preferences and past purchases to offer content that might be most relevant to them, be that new product announcements, special offers, or articles.
“When we are considering using third-party software, we talk to our NetSuite rep to see if there's an in-house solution from NetSuite or from one of the SuiteApps catalog of applications,” Bonomo said. “It makes the operation a lot easier when everything's housed in one place.”
Regina Andrew has multiple ecommerce partners of varying technological sophistication. Some don’t have EDI capabilities at all, while others use a variety of EDI systems. The company must be able to accommodate all of this, so it is exploring ways technology might be able to make EDI a simpler process internally.
See how you can remove complexity from your ecommerce operations with NetSuite(opens in new tab).