Innovative Australian Company Gains Immediate Operational Efficiency and Control Over its Business with One Unified Cloud Business Management Solution
SYDNEY, December 7, 2015—NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry’s leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that Seeing Machines Limited (SEE:LN), an innovative Australian developer of advanced driver fatigue and distraction detection technology, has deployed NetSuite OneWorld to power its business as it continues to disrupt the mining, fleet, automotive, aviation, rail and consumer electronics industries globally. Seeing Machines is using NetSuite OneWorld to manage its head office and warehouse in Canberra and its two subsidiaries: Seeing Machines Inc. in the U.S. (three offices and one warehouse) and Seeing Machines Latin America in Chile (one office). The company replaced Salesforce.com, MYOB, Excel and Outlook (for ordering) with a single instance of NetSuite OneWorld to manage its core business processes, including financial consolidation, CRM, inventory management, work orders and assemblies, project management and fixed asset management. NetSuite OneWorld also provides multi-currency (AUD, USD, CLP and GBP) functionality, which supports Seeing Machines’ growing export business into more than 10 countries.
Spun out of the Australian National University, Seeing Machines was founded by four researchers in 1997 and commercialised in 2000 to help machines understand driver fatigue and distraction in people by tracking and interpreting human faces and eyes. Today, the company has 158 employees and is listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM), recording AU$21.2 million in revenue for the 2015 financial year, an increase of 20 percent over 2014. Since January 2015, Seeing Machines’ technology has detected and intervened in over 120,000 fatigue events globally. Its disruptive innovation led the company to be awarded the Most Innovative Product, the Most Innovative Medium Sized Business and in the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Australia at BRW’s Most Innovative Company Awards 2015.
Seeing Machines is on a steep growth trajectory as it realises the potential of its technology across a broad spectrum of industries globally, which means that wherever these vertical markets operate, it will also need to have a presence. This growth potential was constrained by the company’s previous disparate software—which was not integrated, required extensive ongoing maintenance, did not easily support multiple subsidiaries or currencies and limited visibility across the business. In particular, Seeing Machines was using a heavily customised version of Salesforce.com for many functions it was not designed for, such as creating invoices, tracking inventory and more, which created problems each time there was a software update. Seeing Machines was looking for a fully integrated, cloud-based business management solution that could scale with the business as it grows and enable its team to work from any location globally.
After reviewing a number of solutions including Epicor, Sage X3, SYSPRO, Aggresso, Pronto and Microsoft Dynamics, Seeing Machines recognised that NetSuite was the only true, completely integrated cloud solution that could provide the flexibility and agility required to meet its growing business needs. It was particularly impressed with NetSuite OneWorld’s ability to run multiple entities on the same platform, its multi-currency environment, ease of navigation and its intuitive user interface.
“NetSuite OneWorld has given us a lot more control and visibility of what we are doing, which has enabled us to grow and diversify quickly, with considerably less pain than we could have done previously,” said James Walker, CFO of Seeing Machines. “We now know where our expenses are, what it costs to produce something and what we should be charging for our products and services. By capturing all of our business transactions in the one place, we can now see the impact of decisions on our bottom line and make more informed business decisions.”
NetSuite OneWorld provides Seeing Machines with the following key benefits:
Multi-subsidiary management – NetSuite OneWorld enables Seeing Machines to easily manage its subsidiaries in the U.S. and Chile by automating transactions between the businesses, eliminating double entry of data and helping to remove the possibility of human error. Consolidated reporting is also helping Seeing Machines gain real-time visibility across all of its subsidiaries to assess how each one is performing.
Superior Inventory Management – With real-time visibility into inventory globally, Seeing Machines can now better plan for how much inventory it needs, track the movement of goods and meet customer demand much quicker. With data previously in different systems, the company had issues knowing how much inventory it had in its warehouses and where it was located, which lead to the potential for error, as well as a three month lead time between the orders coming in and fulfilment. Since implementing NetSuite OneWorld, there is now a three week turnaround due to staff having access to all the data they need to do their jobs, which ensures the right equipment goes to the right customer at the right price.
Improved control and accountability – NetSuite OneWorld has given Seeing Machines much greater control over the customisation of user roles, with audit trails providing the ability to track each transaction and respond or intervene in the event of human errors. This real-time visibility has helped improve staff accountability.
Time savings and improved accuracy – NetSuite OneWorld’s reporting capabilities have given Seeing Machines real-time insight into how its bottom-line financials are tracking across its different currencies. The company was not able to achieve this with its previous system, which was a very manual process. What used to take the accounting team hours, extracting the required information from different files and convert currencies, can now be done automatically in a matter of minutes and at the click of a button in NetSuite.
Leveraging NetSuite’s partner ecosystem – Seeing Machines is also taking advantage of the Infinet Cloud SuiteApp for payroll, which was built on NetSuite’s SuiteCloud platform to complement its deployment of NetSuite OneWorld, with full integration.
“We have experienced 13 percent growth since implementing NetSuite, which has enabled us to better cope with our strong growth path, new products we are developing and new partnerships that we have,” added Mr Walker. “If we didn’t have NetSuite, we would have had a lot more pain trying to keep track of our growth and report on it, which would have had a flow on effect to what we could achieve. We probably wouldn’t have even known we had the 13 percent increase!”
According to Mark Troselj, vice president and general manager for ANZ at NetSuite: “Seeing Machines is a classic example of how cloud is helping innovative, disruptive businesses to gain much needed visibility across their organisations to make informed decisions, as well as the flexibility, scalability and agility needed to meet their immediate and future needs for growth and expansion on a global scale.”
Today, more than 24,000 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-ready cloud business management suites of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and ecommerce applications for businesses of all sizes. Many FORTUNE 100 companies rely on NetSuite to accelerate innovation and business transformation. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud business management 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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