$180M discrete manufacturer: 4 sites to NetSuite OneWorld in 5 months.
Anonymized engagement summary. Identifying details have been generalized. Pending written approval before naming the client.
The shape
- Industry: Discrete manufacturing — industrial components
- Revenue: $180M
- Sites: 4 production sites in the US
- Stack at start: Sage (financials, inventory) + significant spreadsheet apparatus for shop floor and demand planning
- Stack at end: NetSuite OneWorld with Manufacturing Edition, SuiteBarcoding, EDI via SPS Commerce, intercompany automation
Why they moved
Three drivers, in order:
- Close cycle was 14 days and getting longer. Manual reconciliation between Sage entities and shop-floor spreadsheets was eating 5–7 days every month-end.
- EDI compliance for a Tier-1 retailer was failing. Chargebacks running 2.4% of shipped value. Each ASN being assembled by hand from spreadsheet exports.
- Acquisition pipeline. Two acquisitions on the horizon needed a consolidated multi-entity ERP that could absorb new sites without a full re-implementation.
Scope
OneWorld with 4 subsidiaries (parent + 3 production-site entities). NetSuite Manufacturing Edition with native Work Orders, Routings, Advanced Inventory, and SuiteBarcoding for shop-floor capture. EDI via SPS Commerce to both Tier-1 retailers. Intercompany automation. 3 integrations (banking, FedEx, expense). Data migration of open transactions + 18 months history.
Approach
We led with the 70/30 rule. SuiteSuccess defaults for chart of accounts, baseline procurement, vanilla revenue recognition, standard reporting. Custom configuration only for the differentiated 30% — costing methods (standard with monthly variance close), shop-floor capture flow, and EDI compliance.
Discovery was 3 weeks. The first week was shop-floor walks at all 4 sites. Operators, not just managers. We mapped where Sage was getting bypassed and why. The honest finding: 60% of the spreadsheet apparatus could be retired with SuiteBarcoding plus light SuiteScript on work-order completion. The other 40% was real business logic that needed to encode forward.
Build was 4 months with a single senior consultant lead from Discovery through go-live. UAT was 4 weeks with real users on real data. Cutover was a single weekend with day-one validation Sunday night.
Outcomes
| Metric | Before | After (month 1) |
|---|---|---|
| Close cycle | 14 days | 6 days |
| EDI chargebacks | 2.4% | 0.3% |
| Shop-floor reconciliation | 5–7 days/month | Continuous |
| Sites live | 0 | 4 |
What worked
- CFO + COO held scope tight. Discovery produced a customization disposition document with 28 candidate customizations. Together we cut it to 9 that actually shipped. Saved an estimated $80K and 5 weeks of build.
- SuiteSuccess for the boring 70%. Did not customize chart of accounts. Did not customize baseline procurement. Did not customize standard rev rec. Saved months.
- Operations in the design room from week 1. Shop floor scoped first; GL closed up to it. The system operations actually uses, not the system finance designed in isolation.
What we’d do differently
- More aggressive SKU rationalization before cutover. We migrated ~9,200 SKUs of which ~2,400 had not shipped in 24 months. Cleaning that pre-migration would have saved ~3 weeks of post-go-live reporting cleanup.