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Sugar and Sas, a Sydney based boutique distributor of high quality and luxurious lifestyle products chose TeamBlueSky to assist with their re-implementation of NetSuite at a time that their business was undergoing significant growth.
Having NetSuite’s SuiteSuccess editions now available meant that Sugar and Sas were able to quickly implement a vastly superior solution that more closely aligned to their current financial management and operational needs. Having already been familiar with JCurve and NetSuite, they were able to leverage their existing knowledge and take advantage of the wholesale distribution lead practices that come out of the box with new NetSuite editions.
At the start of 2020, Sugar and Sas had already experienced significant growth in their range of adult products and lingerie due to their commitment to providing the market with some of the world’s leading and most coveted brands. Sugar and Sas pride themselves on their unwavering dedication to providing premium customer service, product education and informative advice.
As was the case with many industries, the adult product industry experienced a surge in interest and online purchases during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. This sudden increase in demand from their B2B clients, whilst positive from a business growth perspective, had repercussions when it came to resourcing both their back-office accounting and administration teams. The warehouse teams were now facing a growing pile of orders that needed to be processed in a timely manner.
Director of Sugar and Sas, Jo Radnidge, identified that their sudden growth may become a risk to their ability to provide their customers with the level of service they were accustomed to, and proactively went to market to find a partner who would be able to support both their increase demand in administrative and accounting activities as well as understand and advise on how they could improve their technology platform to better support their changing organisation.
Sugar and Sas had been using J Curve, a version of NetSuite designed to meet the needs of small businesses, since 2014. At that stage, a great deal of time and financial investment was put into building a technology platform that would help them scale up.
Due to their growth, new team members had limited knowledge of NetSuite and the opportunity was missed to provide these people with training. This led to an increase in the frequency of incorrect processing of a wide range of transactions including sales orders, purchase orders and customer invoices.
Often customers are not aware of the full depth of functionality that is available in a product like NetSuite and assume that because the system isn’t doing it currently, that it can’t do it. This led to J Curve remaining in a static state, and opportunities to expand their functionality, modules and use of the platform was not taken up.
The businesses financial and operational reporting requirements had changed significantly since their original implementation just over 6 years ago. The executive team was relying on reporting designed for a small distribution company, which was becoming increasingly frustrating and making decision making a more drawn out and difficult process.
Having brought on a number of new product categories and more suppliers, segmenting data into departments, product categories and supplier types was inaccurate. Their ability to understand the performance of each category was limited.
When managing a large number of suppliers, especially when importing from overseas, the process of applying overhead costs, such as freight and duties, becomes increasingly important and challenging.
Lead times from order to delivery varied widely from supplier to supplier. Without a solid system in place when it comes to managing minimum inventory counts, Sugar and Sas saw that they were missing out on sales, and potentially risking customer satisfaction as a result.
The volume and size of transactions they were now receiving was putting stress on back-office team members. The workload required to correctly enter, track, reconcile and verify both customer orders and purchase orders to suppliers was overwhelming.
In 2021, TeamBlueSky and Sugar and Sas continue to partner together to continually improve their business systems and extend their use of the feature-rich software ecosystem they have invested in. This year, we will be undertaking a new phase of implementation which will help further their ability to grow, without exponentially increasing headcount, as well as integrating their new eCommerce solutions to streamline the flow of customer, order and inventory information with NetSuite.
We are excited to be working with the team at Sugar and Sas and look forward to further strengthening our relationship with them as their preferred NetSuite Implementation and BPO partner.
