NetSuite for Telecommunications

Shipton Communications Case Study

"With NetSuite, we can make the changes to our system ourselves within minutes.” — Andy Turner, Managing Director and Owner Shipton Communications Limited

At A Glance:

• Company: Shipton Communications Limited
• Location: Hemel Hempstead, United Kingdom
• Industry: Telecommunications; Computer/IT Services
• Challenges: - Replace disparate legacy systems with a single hosted solution. Implement a new system quickly to make up for a false dawn using Microsoft Navision. Manage employees in remote locations
• Software switched from: GoldMine, Select, Microsoft Navision
• Other software considered: Microsoft Great Plains
• Results with NetSuite: - Improved efficiency by 25% through improved communications across the company, faster turnaround of cases and instant access to key data. Allows employees to work more efficiently on site and from home; one valuable employee who otherwise would have left was retained because she could log into NetSuite from home. A company accountant’s role was diversified to include facilities manager responsibilities, because with NetSuite more can be done. Accommodates rapid, ad-hoc changes to the system with minimum disruption and zero additional cost.

The Results:

In the two years that Shipton Communications Limited has been using NetSuite to support its business, it has seen a 25 percent improvement in efficiency and an upswing in its business fortunes.

“We’ve unified all our resources under a single system which has helped to pull us out of a rather difficult time,” says Andy Turner, Shipton Communications Managing Director and Owner. “NetSuite is the backbone of our company now. We use it for everything: case management support, CRM, reporting, activity generation, forecasting, accounting— you name it.”

NetSuite has enabled both office staff and engineers working remotely across the country to work so efficiently that some have diversified their roles, while others have returned to work more quickly following maternity leave by working from home.

The Challenges:

Shipton Communications is a reseller of telephone systems, offering sales, consultancy, installation and service support. In continuous business since 1890, the company is only a few years younger than the world’s first ever telephone—an entirely unique market position. “Our other key selling point is our engineering background,” says Turner. “Other telecommunications companies, including British Telecom, regularly call on our engineering skills.”

Supporting these skills was an outdated, DOS-based system called Select; so Shipton went shopping. After considering Microsoft’s Great Plains solution, they settled for Navision, also from Microsoft. It was not a success.

Turner explains, “Navision was a cumbersome and unworkable tool. It couldn’t be administered on site, we couldn’t make the changes we needed, and it was very expensive.” It was also only a partial solution, as he was still using GoldMine for sales, Select for logistics, and HEAT (a GoldMine spin-off) for support.

Shipton Communications decided to pull the plug at around the time that NetSuite moved into the UK market; shortly afterwards they replaced both Navision and all the old legacy systems with a single enterprise system—from NetSuite.

Two key reasons for this choice? “It was a hosted solution, which matched our existing business model as an IP service product, and it supported every element of our business, from sales to support.”

The Solution:

“NetSuite has been a huge benefit to our business. It’s so ingrained into how we work that we’ve almost forgotten how great it is,” says Turner. “You can make it do virtually anything you want, but after our Navision experience we wanted a super-fast implementation so we took an early, strategic decision to mould our business processes to the default NetSuite system. We have never regretted doing this.”

With the NetSuite dashboard, Shipton service staff can log in at any time and from anywhere across the country—“You could be in Timbuktu for that matter,” says Turner— whilst he is able to check the live status of every customer, case, KPI and transaction from his dashboard. To illustrate this point, he reads off various key, up-to-the-minute statistics, commenting, “In the past, I’d have had to ask someone else for most of these figures, and the answers might have come back two days later, already out of date.”

As a direct result, the accountant now has an extended role as a facilities manager. “We’ve been able to make many efficiencies of this kind because, using NetSuite, each person can do more,” says Turner.

Shipton also offers its customers an even better service than before. Without a telephone system, most companies’ business virtually closes down, so Shipton aims to fix problems within four hours. “It’s a dream to manage the turnaround of cases because NetSuite affords us such easy communication with our engineers,” says Turner. “I can track cases from start to finish, including timesheets which the engineers complete immediately.”

NetSuite also helps Shipton Communications to retain employees: “One of our best controllers, who allocates engineers to cases, was able to return to work far earlier than would previously have been possible because she can work from home using her own dashboard,” says Turner. “In this way we’ve retained several valuable employees that we might otherwise have lost.”

When the same homeworker rang in recently to say there was a problem in the system relating to engineers’ bonuses, Turner was able to change the system within thirty minutes so that payroll went ahead on time. On another occasion, the technical director wanted a new metric; within minutes a new KPI appeared on his dashboard.

“We’re always trying to do things better, and to improve our financial position, so things are changing all the time,” Turner says. “Using an outsource company, small changes to the system can cost thousands of pounds and take weeks to get right. Now we can make the changes ourselves within minutes.”

For more information regarding NetSuite please visit www.netsuite.co.uk