Unita Streamlines High Growth Interior Construction Business with NetSuite OneWorld

SYDNEY, Oct. 21, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that Unita, a planning, design and project delivery interior construction company that manages and installs commercial fit-outs, has deployed NetSuite OneWorld as its cloud-based business management platform to streamline its core processes and gain a 360-degree real-time view of its business operations in Australia and New Zealand. Unita replaced eight instances of MYOB, Accentus and numerous Excel spreadsheets with a single instance of NetSuite OneWorld to manage its core business processes, including financial consolidation, tax compliance, accounting, multi-subsidiary and multi-currency support for two currencies (AUD and NZD). NetSuite OneWorld now supports the Unita principal trading company and seven operating subsidiaries in six Australian locations – Tu Projects, Round Peg Design, Arc Joinery, Shopsteel, Focus Floorcoverings, Equipment One and Rowe Shopfitting.

Headquartered in Brisbane, Unita was founded in 2004 by 23-year-old Robert Rowe, who identified a gap in the market for modern systems and technology to create a more cost-effective and transparent way to deliver commercial fit-outs. The company, which provides planning, design, consulting and project delivery services for businesses involved in hospitality, retail, health and commercial industries, including Guzman Y Gomez and Ray White, has a turnover of over AU$80 million with a projected aggregated group turnover of $100 million for 2016. As a testament to the rapid success of this business, Rowe was recently named EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Northern Region in the Services category with Unita's key subsidiary, Tu Projects, named the Queensland medium-sized business award winner in the Telstra Business Awards.

TuTrack, a proprietary software developed by Unita, allows clients to visibly see the cost of their project and follow progress step by step. The company has over 180 employees working across 350 to 400 projects per year, from three offices in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as three factories in the greater Brisbane area producing joinery and stainless steel products. It also works closely with local shop fitters in Auckland and Wellington to help Australian brands enter the New Zealand market.

Unita increased its turnover by 25 percent and 56 percent in the last two financial years respectively due to both organic and acquisitive growth. As the company expanded, it struggled to gain a complete view of its operations in a timely manner, particularly as some of its factories could not be accessed through a remote server. Despite being a data rich company, it was highly labour intensive to create the manual reports that were required to gain true insight, which in turn led to missed opportunities to boost margins, reduce costs and gain purchasing efficiencies. Unita also wanted to centralise its accounting team, with the potential to offshore the function in the future, which could not be achieved with its previous system. After evaluating Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Pronto, Unita selected NetSuite as a single, unified system that would enable the company to seamlessly coordinate processes and gain breakthrough visibility into its group of companies.

"As a high growth company, we needed to move to a more sophisticated and integrated business management solution that could deliver meaningful reporting across the group," said Matt Geldard, chief financial officer of Unita. "Since moving to NetSuite, the reporting functionality and capability has transformed our ability to gain intelligent insights into our business and will help us better manage our growth, as we move to the next level in our business development."

NetSuite OneWorld, which Unita implemented in April 2015, provides the company with the following key features and benefits:

• Real-time analytics and whole-of-business intelligence. NetSuite's dashboards enable Unita to better monitor, report and analyse its group performance in real-time and drive informed business decisions across all of its subsidiary operations.
• Transform reporting timeframes. Unita can now perform a monthly calculation of all work in progress across the group with NetSuite OneWorld's reporting functionality. This process used to take two to three days, but has now been reduced to a few hours. Once deployment is finalised, the company anticipates that it will be able to reduce its month-end cycle time from the 12 days it previously took to seven days using NetSuite, a saving of a full business week.
• Scalable international expansion. With operations currently in Australia and New Zealand, NetSuite OneWorld will enable Unita to rapidly enter new international markets over the medium term, without the need to invest in costly infrastructure development or technical consultants.
• Improved invoicing efficiency and customer service. Unita processes over 18,000 invoices a year from over 3,000 vendors. NetSuite OneWorld is helping Unita significantly reduce payment times by enabling project managers responsible for collection to instantly generate customisable status reports.
• Seamless integration with proprietary software. Leveraging the powerful NetSuite SuiteCloud development platform, NetSuite OneWorld has been integrated with Unita's proprietary project management and procurement software TuTrack to provide the company with the insights that it needs to drive further efficiencies. While TuTrack successfully delivers its client base with complete visibility into ongoing projects, it previously lacked any reporting capabilities.
• Refocusing IT on value driven projects. Before deploying NetSuite OneWorld, poor integration between MYOB and its proprietary TuTrack software resulted in frequent system crashes, which required the regular attention of IT. NetSuite OneWorld has enabled Unita's IT team to move beyond troubleshooting activities to focus on creating value across the business.

"Given our business is primarily driven by revenue and margins, we are consequently extremely data driven and we are really impressed by our ability to customise NetSuite's reporting functionality to our specific needs, especially as they continue to evolve," added Mr Geldard. "While our previous system did not allow us to effectively manipulate our data, NetSuite now gives us precisely the information that we need in a fraction of the time and at the push of a button. As a cloud-based system, it also allows our management team to access it anytime and from anywhere."

According to Mark Troselj, vice president and general manager for ANZ at NetSuite: "High growth businesses with multiple subsidiaries and plans for future international expansion, like Unita, are embracing cloud-based solutions to gain the flexibility and scalability to expand. The insights that real-time visibility delivers gives businesses of any size the ability and agility to really take their business strategy and operations to the next level 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.

For more information about NetSuite please visit www.netsuite.com.au.

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SOURCE NetSuite Inc.

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