Office Productivity Company Grows 10x While Expanding Globally With NetSuite
As offices evolve in form and function, Embrava is helping organisations optimise hot-desking and open-plan work environments. The company makes a range of hardware and software products aimed at boosting employee productivity. Its flagship device, Desk Sign, indicates whether a workspace in a hot-desking office is reserved, available, in use, or needs cleaning.
A trend toward shared workspaces drove growth at Embrava even before the pandemic, and the company set up subsidiaries in the United States and UK to serve a growing roster of customers across the globe. Then demand surged as employees returned to the office after the pandemic.
Solving Supply Chain Challenges
While Embrava saw increased demand, it faced huge supply chain disruptions, particularly in the microchip and electronic component sectors. Embrava was using spreadsheets to manage inventory and fulfilment, operating reactively and procuring only the exact amount of component parts required for each production order. If the delivery of a single part from a supplier was delayed, a customer’s entire order was affected.
Embrava CEO Tim Sone anticipated an even greater consumer appetite for their products and made the decision to upgrade to NetSuite OneWorld and NetSuite Work Orders & Assemblies. With the new system, Embrava orders component parts based on their specific lead times, each of which is tracked in NetSuite. The team uses detailed sales forecasts in NetSuite to add items to production orders as needed, meeting increasing demand even as supply chains falter.
“NetSuite allowed us to decouple our raw material sourcing and ordering from our broader production capability,” said Sone. “This means we now have buyers that can focus on obtaining the raw material or parts with long lead times, enabling us to stockpile and pre-order components and other inventory to use when we need it, instead of buying items just for a specific production run.”
A Single System to Support Global Scale
Embrava previously used Xero to manage its finances. But with subsidiaries in the United States and the UK, three global warehouses, and operations in four currencies, the company had to run the accounting software independently in each jurisdiction. Separate accounting software and inventory spreadsheets required manual work to determine simple metrics like the cost of goods sold.
Embrava recognised the limitations of its legacy system and the need for access to real-time data, both financial and operational. The company now uses NetSuite OneWorld to manage its international subsidiaries from a single solution and to expand into new markets faster.
“When we first took on NetSuite, it was for our operations in Australia and the US,” said Sone. “But it quickly became so easy to manage an international subsidiary with NetSuite OneWorld compared to how we used to do it that we decided to launch our UK subsidiary as well, effectively bringing forward plans that were already in the pipeline.”
Achieving 10x Growth While Reducing Costs
Since deploying NetSuite, Embrava has saved around $300,000 AUD each year in labour hours that were previously spent updating and analysing spreadsheets. It can better keep pace with demand from customers around the world, growing 10x since implementing its ERP system.
“We saw the demand coming, and we immediately put NetSuite in,” said Sone. “We did it as quickly as possible because, given the level of demand that we had, we knew we'd basically break in half if we kept trying to do things the way we were doing them.”
Find out how NetSuite OneWorld can support your business’s global growth.
