Treading water with standalone systems
VMG adopted NetSuite as their ERP solution in 2012 because they needed to move away from standalone on-premise financial and CRM solutions, and slow manual processes for inventory management and purchasing.
As well as struggling with the lack of visibility caused by unintegrated systems, it was difficult for VMG staff to access live real-time information while out of the office. This proved a major drawback for a rapidly growing company, heavily dependent on their international sales team to generate and place orders from afar.
Plain sailing with a cloud solution
Howard George, General Manager of VMG says there are only about 10 major players in the high-end yachting apparel space worldwide. “We are part of an exclusive group. The rest are all based in the Mediterranean or in America - or both. So, there is nobody on this side of the world but us.”
While New Zealand’s yachting heritage is a marketing advantage to VMG, their geographical distance from most of their market is not. Being able to access their business systems remotely 24/7 is essential to further growth.
“One of the big drivers for our move to NetSuite is that it’s cloud-based,” said Howard. “We can access it from anywhere in the world. As an example, I’ve recently spent three weeks in the UK and did most of my job from there.”
Howard is a veteran of several ERP implementations, but NetSuite is the first true cloud business solution he’s worked with. Now he doubts he’d recommend implementing on-premise ERPs for companies who compete offshore “When you have an international business, being able to access your ERP system anywhere in the world is a very attractive proposition.”
