Australian Hair and Beauty Retailer Selects NetSuite SuiteCommerce and Retail Anywhere POS to Transform Business Operations After Years of Legacy Complexities
NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry’s leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced that Hairhouse Warehouse, an Australian hair and beauty retailer, chose NetSuite for a comprehensive multi-channel retail management suite to significantly improve business efficiencies, productivity and visibility. The retailer plans to replace MYOB Premiere, incumbent POS software and manual spreadsheets with NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce all-in-one cloud-based commerce platform, including NetSuite Retail Anywhere POS, to manage its head office operations, 150 franchised retail stores nationally and its B2C ecommerce site. This move is also expected to lay the foundation for global expansion into multiple territories over the next 12-24 months, providing multi-subsidiary and multi-currency support to manage global operations in real-time. To learn more about NetSuite SuiteCommerce, please visit www.netsuite.com/SuiteCommerce3.
Established in Melbourne in 1992, Hairhouse Warehouse provides beauty services along with a comprehensive array of professional hair care products from leading brands. The company has won numerous awards, including the 2011 BRW Most Successful Private Business Award. As the company continues to grow, it became increasingly obvious that its existing systems will not support a commercial operation of its size. Hairhouse Warehouse currently runs its business across a number of disparate systems loosely connected by an API. These systems are unreliable, slow and complicated, and require a large amount of manual processing.
“Every department works independently from each other, departmental strategies are created and managed in isolation, and technologies are bought and managed without any bigger picture thinking, so none of our systems communicate with one another,” said Tim Lai, national ICT manager for Hairhouse Warehouse. “Productivity and efficiency aren’t really words that apply here at the moment.”
Hairhouse Warehouse selected NetSuite largely due to its complete end-to-end integrated system that provides POS, financials, CRM, Ecommerce, inventory management, order management and demand planning functionality. While its warehouse management and supply chain are currently managed by a third party logistics (3PL) provider, NetSuite can allow the retailer to eventually bring these functions back in-house.
The integrated SuiteCommerce solution enables Hairhouse Warehouse to manage multiple channels and locations, integrate its website with its business, support its POS system, provide a unified real-time view of its business, perform automated merchandising and marketing, as well as gain a 360-degree view of each customer. It can give the retailer what it needs to grow revenue, open up new sales channels and expand its business globally. It also fulfills a strong demand for a single commerce solution that supports multiple customer touchpoints – from physical points of sale (POS) to call centers, and social media, via desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets. In addition, much needed pre-established dashboards, templates and reports can give Hairhouse Warehouse the ability to generate reports whenever it wants and in real-time.
“Right now our biggest problem is that we lack any visibility across our business – NetSuite can give us the tools we need to run our business as we want, to better analyse our data and expand our brand awareness,” Mr. Lai said. “All departments, franchisees and team members can benefit from NetSuite’s ease of use. We are not technology experts, so we need a system like NetSuite that doesn’t require extensive training.”
NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce and Retail Anywhere POS solution can also significantly lift the productivity and efficiencies of the retailer’s workforce. For example, company projections estimate that the time taken to process 300 franchise and marketing invoices could be reduced from 3-4 days per week to 2-3 hours per week, creating significant savings in franchise fees alone. Additionally, its finance department, which currently takes two weeks to process reports for franchisees could be able to generate reports in real-time. These productivity enhancements can allow the finance team to move away from basic data entry and administration to refocus on the analytical work that adds value to the business.
NetSuite’s integrated and automated solutions can also improve Hairhouse Warehouse’s relationships with its franchisees, providing them with greater visibility and control over their businesses, particularly with inventory management. Hairhouse Warehouse’s current system is too complicated for the franchisees to use, leaving few stores that actually carry out cycle counts and stocktakes or create purchase orders and receive stock into their systems. Automating the process can ensure the entire organisation is responding to customer demand and provide a clear understanding of franchisee performance and insight into how they can better be supported.
Hairhouse Warehouse launched its first ecommerce site in mid-2012 to provide customers with shopping flexibility and to support its franchisees. That site has proven to be very unstable, despite the time and money invested. By switching to NetSuite SuiteCommerce, Hairhouse Warehouse plans to improve the stability and functionality of the site and make it a more integral part of the business.
“Not only can we improve the customer experience when it comes to B2C, but inclusions such as geolocation and ‘click and collect’ can enable us to drive more traffic back into our bricks-and-mortar stores to support our franchisees,” added Mr. Lai.
Accelerating its decision to switch to NetSuite, the retailer’s entire national infrastructure came to a complete halt in February 2013, when a fire in an electrical junction near its support office caused the entire region to lose power. A further system failure resulted in the company’s active directory, exchange and storage servers catastrophic failure and major data loss. Its service provider just brought it back to operational status in April.
“It goes without saying that had we already transitioned onto NetSuite’s cloud-based system, we would have been shielded from such failures and effectively continued our operations,” said Mr. Lai. “We wouldn’t have suffered the level of loss that we did.”
According to Mark Troselj, managing director of APAC for NetSuite, “For many retailers, the complexity and cost of running a single transactional system that is optimised across all digital channels and integrated into internal business systems is overwhelming – this is where cloud computing really opens doors. NetSuite’s integrated commerce solution can give Hairhouse Warehouse a powerful tool to gain a single view of its customers, franchisees, sales and revenue – giving back the control it needs to efficiently operate its business.”
About SuiteCommerce
NetSuite SuiteCommerce enables B2C and B2B merchants, manufacturers and distributors to seamlessly connect every step of a multi-channel, multi-location business — from Ecommerce, POS and order management to merchandising, marketing, inventory, financials and customer support. Featuring an advanced webstore that allows the creation of uniquely branded and personalised shopping experiences optimised for multiple devices, SuiteCommerce empowers businesses to run across multiple touchpoints—web, brick-and-mortar stores, social, mobile—all from a single, unified cloud-based commerce system that provides unprecedented visibility into your business and customers. Visit www.suitecommerce.com for more information.
About NetSuite
Today, more than 16,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-class cloud financials/ERP suites for divisions of large enterprises and mid-sized organisations seeking to upgrade their antiquated client/server ERP systems. NetSuite excels at streamlining business operations as demonstrated in a recent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing financial management software vendor on a global basis. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud ERP/financials suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud is accelerating.
For more information about NetSuite, please visit www.netsuite.com.
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For more information about Hairhouse Warehouse please visit http://www.hairhousewarehouse.com.au/
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