Natural Pet Food Group snapping at the heels of the big boys with NetSuite

The business ran all five companies on a small-business accounting software package called QuickBooks. As the organisation continued to grow, so did the level of frustration at the software’s limitations.

“The main issue was the inefficiency caused by needing multiple separate logins for each company,” says James Jorgensen, Natural Pet Food’s CFO. “QuickBooks didn’t support inter-company elimination or group financial consolidation. These transactions had to be processed manually, which chewed up a lot of time. However, the driving force to change was that QuickBooks only had one inventory location — and we had thirteen locations.”

Natural Pet Food Group wanted a lean administrative headcount, while focusing on expanding into new markets and countries to achieve rapid revenue growth. They knew that improving efficiency and controlling costs would maintain their competitive edge. The company needed to make quick business decisions with more clarity to protect and improve their gross profit, which made access to real-time Sales and Marketing analysis and insights critical.

Jorgensen insisted on seamless multi-book tenancy from any new system. Natural Pet Food needed to produce timely, and reliable, consolidated group financial reports, minimising wasted time and effort.

In 2016, Jorgensen took to Google to find the solution which would simplify life and run the books for five companies effectively.

From a shortlist which included Sage, ACCPAC, Greentree, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and SAP Business One, Natural Pet Food chose NetSuite as their new ERP, and Fusion5 as their partner.

“We were impressed with Fusion5 and how well regarded they are. Initially we thought that NetSuite was a step too far, and that financially we were at least a year off making that level of investment. But we liked what Fusion5 were saying to us, and we knew we had to take that leap to get further ahead. 

We also felt that the other solutions we considered were still trying to get cloud-based offerings together, whereas NetSuite is a fully-fledged cloud solution, so we’d only have to do this once.”

A veteran of several ERP projects, Jorgensen appreciated Fusion5’s methodical approach to implementation.

“Fusion5 were more structured than any partner I’d worked with before. The behind-the-scenes work they put in to understanding our business was well justified, and gave us control of the outcome of our implementation process.”

James Jorgensen | CFO, Natural Pet Food

NetSuite supports Natural Pet Food’s multi-company, multi-country and multi-currency needs. And of course, it supports multi-location inventory.

Managing financial and group consolidation is no longer a manual process, and CRM and Marketing functions are embedded in the solution.

“NetSuite’s BI, analysis and reporting functions allow the team to generate their own reports,” says Jorgensen. “We can see what our subsidiaries are doing and check their sales on real-time dashboards. We’ve suddenly got a lot more flexibility with a lot of things that used to be a struggle for us.”

Jorgensen says that within a month of using NetSuite, he and the operations manager looked at each other and said ‘You know what? With this level of efficiency, we’re easily going to save hiring another person out of this.’

“Since we implemented NetSuite we’ve grown well over 30%, but we haven’t had to add more hours or people to our accounts function."

“The thing that has really pleasantly surprised us with NetSuite is how responsive it is. We used to take a long time running reports, especially balance sheets and profit and loss accounts. Now, we can generate reports in about three or four seconds. Fully consolidated, by market, whatever you want. And NetSuite’s reliability and uptime has been excellent, so we are really happy with that.”

As NetSuite is a native cloud solution, the business no longer has the IT administration costs typically associated with installed business software. And the Natural Pet Food’s team regularly use the in-built tools to build searches and queries without the need for external support.