NetSuite Transforms Watchdog Choice Into the Digital Age

"As a traditional magazine publisher, we needed to move into the digital age quickly or risk losing our subscribers to the swarm of free review sites easily accessible on the web. NetSuite has given us real-time visibility of our customers and our financials, which helps mitigate risk for a publishing company. We can now easily get an in-depth view of our data to see how our business is performing."

—Vivien Power, Finance Manager for Choice

Results:

Major reduction in manual data processing allows CHOICE to put greater emphasis on data quality, while channeling resources into more productive tasks
With a single application, CHOICE unified business processes to gain real-time visibility of subscribers and financial and operational performance
CHOICE reduced time spent on financial reporting saving 50 days per year
Comprehensive, accessible and easily mined data empowers CHOICE to spot business trends, and analyse and compare individual product performance
A single view of each subscriber across multiple platforms (print, online, mobile and tablets) supports better customer service, resulting in a more efficient, engaged call centre and superior customer support

Challenges:

Separate stand alone databases for finance and subscriptions required extensive manual processing to gain any visibility into subscriber levels or overall business performance
CHOICE's digital transformation was poorly supported by its systems, leading to rapid loss of visibility of its customers that were fragmenting across its diversifying product ranges and platforms
CHOICE had no automated tools for supporting business growth, such as membership renewal reminders, online marketing campaign systems or data analytics, making growing and even maintaining its subscriber base challenging

Solution:

Independent consultants recommended NetSuite as the best cloud-based ERP solution to deliver an integrated finance, CRM and media management system for its business model
CHOICE deployed NetSuite to support finance, CRM and subscriber management
Media performance dashboards provided real-time monitoring of revenue, circulations, site visitors and marketing effectiveness
Revenue recognition tools removed spreadsheets and risk by flexibly, reliably and efficiently managing multiple schedules across different CHOICE product lines.