Leading Australian Retailer Replaces More Than 80 Instances of COSTAR POS and Other On-Premise Applications to Transform Business Operations with a Single Instance of NetSuite OneWorld
Sydney, Australia—28 October 2014—NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry’s leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that Battery World, Australia’s largest retail franchiser of portable power and specialist batteries, has selected NetSuite to transform its B2C and B2B retail franchise business operations. This modernisation effort can enable Battery World to gain the agility, flexibility and scalability it needs to maintain its market leadership and future proof its business. The company is replacing over 80 instances of on-premise COSTAR point-of-sale (POS), an in-house intranet, and multiple manual spreadsheets with NetSuite OneWorld. With NetSuite OneWorld, Battery World can run its POS, financial consolidation, franchise inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing and real-time analytics and reporting across more than 80 stores. Furthermore, Battery World also has plans to deploy NetSuite SuiteCommerce to enable ecommerce transactions from the same single unified cloud platform.
Disparate, Outdated Solutions Generate Inefficiencies
Founded in 1997, Battery World (www.batteryworld.com.au) is Australia’s largest specialist retailer of portable power and batteries. However, opportunities to extend its leadership position were being hampered by limitations of using disparate software systems. The company was unable to effectively share data between stores, which meant that if a customer purchased from one retail outlet and returned the product to another, it required a lot of manual interaction between stores to fulfil national customer service and warranty coverage. Eighty-two separate instances of POS and the lack of a centralised system of record for financial planning, reporting, marketing and CRM insights also meant that generating reports to gain critical insights into the business was time-consuming and error prone. Additionally, as the business had already transitioned from being primarily a trade-based business serving a niche audience into a mainstream B2B and B2C retailer, Battery World’s current platform architecture is unable to scale for any future expansion into ecommerce or other territories.
Why NetSuite?
After carefully evaluating several software solutions, NetSuite OneWorld cloud-based business management solution was selected as it met all of Battery World’s requirements. It can give the retailer much needed access to real-time data across all stores, improved business analysis and reporting, superior CRM and marketing capabilities, intuitive and advanced POS functionality and the cloud architecture required to rollout NetSuite SuiteCommerce in the future to power ecommerce transactions, all from a single unified business management software platform that provides anywhere, anytime access. NetSuite OneWorld’s two-tier ERP model can also enable Battery World to deploy the cloud-based business management solution across its franchises, whilst integrating with its existing on-premise QAD Enterprise Application solution at its head office.
"The expectations of today’s customers are significantly different to those of 10 years ago," said Rowan Hodge, general manager at Battery World. "A seamless, customer centric retail experience is now a prerequisite to create and maintain brand loyalty. NetSuite can help ensure that we continue to lead our industry and remain competitive. It offers cutting-edge POS functionality and future proofs us for any multi-channel, multi-geography business development going forward. We can rest easy knowing we have a platform that gives us more control and visibility."
NetSuite OneWorld can provide Battery World with the following key features and benefits:
Single View of the Retail Customer – NetSuite’s POS functionality will ensure that Battery World’s customers have a positive, seamless and highly personalised shopping experience, with national customer data available from any store at any time. The system is also expected to drive customer satisfaction with detailed product information available at the touch of a button, quick checkouts and integrated payment processing.
Real-time analytics and business intelligence – NetSuite’s dashboards reporting and analytics tools can enable Battery World to better monitor, report and analyse store performance in real-time to drive more informed business decisions and create greater franchisee value by providing benchmarking, data sharing and cross-store communications to all of its franchisees.
Seamless B2B and B2C ecommerce platform – Battery World can leverage SuiteCommerce to power its B2B and B2C ecommerce strategy providing them with one unified platform to unite every step of an online and offline retail business. The addition of NetSuite POS can allow for options including buy online/pick up in store, buy online/return to store and order in store/fulfil to enhance the customer experience.
Real-Time Inventory management – NetSuite OneWorld provides seamless multi-location inventory management, which can provide real-time visibility into rapidly changing stock levels across all Battery World stores.
Enhanced staff productivity – NetSuite’s POS system has an easy-to-use and intuitive touch-screen interface. This is expected to boost productivity and reduce the amount of time spent inducting and training new staff members into the business.
Superior CRM – NetSuite can provide Battery World with a true 360-degree view of its customers, which can help shape purchasing and marketing decisions, and make marketing initiatives a quick and simple process, such as the introduction of a loyalty card, POS daily special offers and POS rolling billboards.
"NetSuite is a true built-for-the-cloud infrastructure, which is a huge advantage for us as it can provide the opportunity to explore an almost unlimited raft of other business sales channels with minimal investment," said Mr Hodge. "I am also excited about the superior diagnostic and analytics capability it will give us. As a franchise business, one of our key roles is to help new franchisee stores benchmark performance and best practice. NetSuite can enable us to lift our game enormously by providing this type of business critical information to our expanding team."
According to Mark Troselj, managing director of APAC and Japan for NetSuite, "Battery World is the latest in a series of Australian retailers that are realising the transformational capabilities of our cloud-based business solutions. As a national franchise operation, Battery World can gain critical insights and visibility into its retail operation to drive nimble decisions to take the business forward, whilst providing a flexible architecture platform to rollout new retail initiatives in the future."
Today, more than 20,000 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 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 by a recent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing top 10 financial management systems vendor in the world. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud ERP/financial suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud accelerates.
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