NetSuite Inc announced some of the latest companies from the wholesale / distribution industry to switch from Microsoft Great Plains to NetSuite to take advantage of NetSuite's unique integration of enterprise resource planning (ERP) / accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and Ecommerce capabilities in a single on-demand application.
These customers, which include Telebyte, J. Frank Golden & Associates, Total Beverage Solution, and Camcal Inc, also cited advanced functionality and ease of use as the other compelling reasons for moving to NetSuite from Great Plains' antiquated architecture and cost model.
On-premise software applications like Microsoft Great Plains were once very popular within mid-sized companies but are rapidly falling out of favor due to a number of deficiencies. Most do not allow business data to move easily across departments, resulting in a lack of real-time visibility across key metrics needed to optimize business operations.
In addition, wholesale / distribution companies that deploy best-of-breed applications like Microsoft Great Plains are forced to manage their business on separate on-premise software packages - one for accounting, one for inventory and warehousing, one for sales force management and one for Ecommerce - an approach that requires costly integration to get them to work together.
The cost of implementation, integration and on-going application maintenance in such environments can be many times the cost of the software itself. In addition, tying together disparate systems typically does not provide the integrated real-time visibility across business metrics that is essential to managing growth in a dynamic business environment.
In contrast to Microsoft Great Plains, NetSuite is designed to help solve the challenge of bringing together these different systems because it is a single system for ERP, CRM, inventory, and Ecommerce operations. As a result, wholesale / distribution businesses benefit from 360-degree, real-time visibility into their customers' purchase, payment, shipping and service history.
In addition, NetSuite is delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS), so not only is the cost of integrating disparate systems eliminated, but also the on-going cost of maintaining on-premise applications.
Thanks to NetSuite's SaaS delivery, wholesale / distribution businesses gain the added benefit of anytime, anywhere access, which allows them greater flexibility in expanding their business to multiple locations without the cost of installing on-premise applications, such as Microsoft Great Plains, in those multiple locations. This anytime, anywhere access is particularly useful to companies in the wholesale / distribution industries since they typically have distributed workforces.
NetSuite Inc
