Risk #1: Runaway costs obscured by disconnected subsidiaries
At NetSuite, we’ve seen this issue crop up among our customers. One manufacturer, in particular, had 15 subsidiaries that each operated independently. Every reporting period, analysts had to export data and manually join it in spreadsheets and their business intelligence (BI) tools.
This slow, tedious process of aggregating and consolidating the subsidiaries’ financials made accounting painfully complicated for the parent company. Limited insight into overall financial performance made planning difficult, too. And maintaining the company’s ERP system, SQL databases, flat files, BI tools, and legacy systems was costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
Ultimately, the manufacturer consolidated its data in NetSuite Analytics Warehouse.
and sunsetted most of its old infrastructure. The move slashed costs by 66% and gave the entire team access to visualizations of each subsidiary’s financial and operational performance.
Risk #2: Missed sales targets due to poor channel visibility
In another scenario, an accessories retailer was growing at a rapid clip and needed to overhaul its sales channel forecasting. Its BI tool couldn’t readily aggregate and analyze data from multiple Shopify instances, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and other sources.
The retailer switched to NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, gaining the ability to easily pipe in data from each of those sources. The machine learning capabilities improved the company’s ability to anticipate customer demand and keep stores stocked with the items customers want most. The team has considered endless applications of its new data warehouse solution, including pulling in weather data to create sales forecasts for its outdoor mall kiosks.
Risk #3: Loss of customers from outdated inventory data
NetSuite customers also include a drinkware wholesaler that formerly struggled to respond to simple changes in customer demand. Every day, the team manually exported ERP and ecommerce data into spreadsheets to track inventory levels. The time-consuming process forced decision-makers to use stale data. And in a highly competitive market, leaders knew it put them at risk of losing customers.
By replacing spreadsheets with NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, the wholesaler now blends data that reflects its ERP activity with its Google Analytics data. The solution automatically generates daily inventory scorecards and forecasts down to the SKU number. The team now better anticipates and responds to demand, which boosts customer retention, lowers costs, and allows it to jump on trends in a fast-changing market.