Asia Pacific’s largest and fastest-growing companies talk about how NetSuite’s integrated platform helped them expand quickly across continents and plan roll-outs efficiently.

Business, whether SMEs, mid-market, or large public-listed corporations, have faced the same challenges when expanding and scaling since time immemorial: hiring new teams, working around different regulatory environments, understanding different cultures and languages, and ensuring the financing can support all these new changes.

With the advent of Big Data and digital transformation, a new wrinkle has been added to the mix: putting all these data together and making sense of it.

In the digital age, expansion is now not a matter of years, but weeks or even months. NetSuite, the world’s first cloud computing software company, has been through that same journey of expansion with over 18,000 customers globally since it was founded in 1998.

Its suite of business software solutions on the cloud include enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), professional services automation (PSA), and e-commerce solutions.

Traversing countries, currencies

With cross-border expansion comes not just different cultures, but also costing in different currencies and taking into account different tax and regulatory regimes. Manila-based Jollibee Foods took on the Chinese market in 2009. The food chain brought in NetSuite OneWorld to run multiple subsidiaries and multiple currencies in one system.

NetSuite OneWorld gave Jollibee a fast and cost-effective way to automate reporting, perform real-time analytics, conduct audit trail analysis, operate an international supply chain, consolidate international financials, and enforce corporate governance standards in its subsidiaries and divisions.

Before rolling out NetSuite OneWorld in China, Jollibee first ran the solution in Vietnam — complete rollout for 10 stores took only two months. China was a go: NetSuite OneWorld was implemented across all 265 Jollibee stores in China.

The solution’s multi-language support allowed the China team to access systems in Chinese while global management saw the same information in English. Online supply ordering also helped cut store restocking costs, and shave order times from three days to one.

Another NetSuite OneWorld user is Singapore-based online property portal PropertyGuru, which leveraged the solution to accelerate its expansion across Asia Pacific. Replacing MYOB, Salesforce and numerous Excel spreadsheets, NetSuite OneWorld was deployed in 2012 to support financials, revenue recognition, subsidiary management, workflows to manage lead orders to cash and tax calculations across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

PropertyGuru co-founder and managing director Jani Rautiainen said: “We needed a solution that would scale with us and manage our business operations across multiple countries. NetSuite OneWorld allows us to consolidate financials from four different currencies in real-time, which has given us unprecedented insight into our operations, wherever and whenever we need it.”

Since deploying NetSuite OneWorld, PropertyGuru has tripled revenues and staff headcount across the region. At the same time, the solution has helped PropertyGuru slash the time it takes for month-end close reconciliation from over a month to an average of 10 days.

It also made the revenue recognition more efficient which resulted in a tripling of the portal’s online advertising revenue. NetSuite OneWorld’s audit and compliance reporting feature provides an always-on audit trail as well as built-in analytics and enhanced compliance support, to support the group’s compliance across all its markets.

Streamlining product rollouts

Phillipine media conglomerate ABS-CBN is a global behemoth with services as wide-ranging as content broadcasted to various platforms, cargo, money remittance, retail and telecommunications.

The group’s legacy systems were a patchwork of software applications across multiple operating regions (US, Canada, Middle East, Europe, Japan, Australia, and Asia Pacific), which hindered efficiency and growth, requiring constant and costly IT maintenance.

Reconciling all that data across different business divisions and markets led ABS-CBN to adopt a flexible, efficient two-tier NetSuite ERP model with integrated reporting into parent company’s SAP instance. This enabled greater speed and flexibility in rolling out different products whilst empowering hundreds of business users with self-service management capabilities, eliminating reliance on IT for everyday tasks.

“Our previous system was simply not fast enough for our people to be as proactive as we needed them to be. NetSuite provides the functionality and flexibility we needed, and a single version of the truth, with a reduced initial cost outlay,” said ABS-CBN project manager Marvin Sanchez.

Another company that used NetSuite to accelerate its expansion was Zimplistic, which is a Singapore-based product design company founded with the bold mission of simplifying lives, needed an integrated platform to consolidate its financial data for reporting and business strategy.

It can be argued that with the help of NetSuite, Zimplistic is able to connect its back-end systems to its e-commerce website and automate its back-office management, rendering a more agile platform that can help the company scale.

This increased visibility across the supply chain helped improve workflows, reduce lead times, and enabled the company to have better control of its inventory. Moreover, the fully integrated system made it easier for Zimplistic to know the company’s financial performance at any time.

“NetSuite has set us up for success — having up-to-date financial data at any time enables us to make better decisions for business growth and realize our vision of becoming a leader in the smart kitchen appliances market,” said Simon Chua, Finance Director, Zimplistic Pte Ltd.

NetSuite’s solutions not only retain the agility of scaling together with a customer across borders, but also are flexible enough to incorporate and streamline data from different tech software, analysing information to enable quick management decision-making.

Kickstart your business growth today with the help of NetSuite’s slew of services. Connect with them here to find out more.

 

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