Food and Beverage Manufacturers Primed for Growth, Positioned for Success with NetSuite

NEW YORK, Feb. 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- SUITECONNECT, Oracle NetSuite, one of the world's leading providers of cloud-based financials / ERP, HR, Professional Services Automation (PSA) and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that three food and beverage manufacturers have implemented the NetSuite SuiteSuccess Manufacturing edition, enabling their businesses to grow, scale and adapt to change at the pace of modern business. Aspire Food Group, which raises crickets for a wide variety of uses including high protein snacks and food additives, Dyla, maker of Forto all natural ready-to-drink coffee shots and Stur water flavor enhancers, and PUR, a fast-growing manufacturer of aspartame-free gum, were all able to take advantage of NetSuite's decades of experience with thousands of manufacturers to get their businesses up and running quickly with a leading cloud ERP system.

Food and beverage manufacturers like Aspire, Dyla and PUR confront a wide array of challenges that can hinder growth and customer satisfaction. Consumers increasingly demand more choice and information around the ingredients they're consuming from GMO-free, to locally sourced and other health-based requirements. Meanwhile, governments are imposing stricter regulations and manufacturers still confront increased global competition and complex supply chains. As they seek to address these challenges, food and beverage manufacturers are concerned about the time and capital required to fix their back-end systems. However, they realize that the ability to rapidly adapt and scale is critical to their success. Companies looking to overcome these challenges to grow and diversify can be held back by entry-level systems that do not have the functionality to manage business at scale, or older, on-premise systems built before the internet that cannot take full advantage of the cloud. NetSuite SuiteSuccess for Manufacturing delivers a unique set of processes, activities and systems specifically designed to deliver rapid value. It provides customers with a strong foundation to transform their business with a pre-configured solution and methodology.

Aspire Food Group Grows from Idea to Prize to Enterprise

In 2013, five MBA students from McGill University came up with an idea to help solve the problem of food insecurity, which ultimately won the Hult Prize Competition, besting 10,000 other teams from around the world. That prize-winning idea gave birth to Aspire Food Group (www.aspirefg.com), a social enterprise specializing in farming insects for human consumption. Crickets and palm weevils, the two insect species Aspire is currently raising and researching, provide an excellent source of protein without the resource-intensive demands of other proteins like beef or chicken. With a palm weevil facility in Ghana and a cricket-raising facility in Austin, Texas, Aspire is focused not only on raising awareness around the possibilities of insect-based protein, but developing a way to farm insects year-round in an efficient and scalable manner. The company currently provides cricket-based additives for protein powders, flavored and roasted whole crickets, which are currently being sold at sports stadiums, as well as a handful of restaurants and other food service customers. As demand for its products emerged quicker than the company anticipated, it soon discovered that its existing financial management system based on QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheets would not keep up with its growth. It selected NetSuite after an extensive selection process and in just four months went live using SuiteSuccess for Manufacturing to run financials, CRM and inventory management. As a result, the company is now efficiently processing payments with the click of a button, tracking customers and invoices and it has substantially improved its budgeting process. Reports that used to take six hours to create are now done in under an hour. Aspire has plans to implement additional manufacturing functionality to better track the costs associated with the manufacturing process and livestock processes in a second phase.

"A year from now, I know the volume of orders is only going to increase and our capacity to track the business is going to be critical," said Abir Syed, Aspire's Director of Finance. "I wanted to get ahead of it and NetSuite and SuiteSuccess ensured we have a scalable, modern system in place quickly to continue our growth without interruption."

Specialty Drink Manufacturer Manages Rapid Growth with NetSuite

Dyla LLC saw rapid growth after its Forto ready-to-drink coffee shots and Stur water flavor enhancers struck a chord with a market thirsty for more natural alternatives to energy-boosting and healthy drinks. The West New York, NJ-based company saw growth of 500 percent year-over-year in 2017, becoming one of the fastest growing businesses in New Jersey. As Forto expanded across airports and convenience stores, and Stur attracted major retailers, running two separate businesses on QuickBooks wasn't sustainable. Dyla's operations team spent half its time in spreadsheets synchronizing inventory, order and customer information, even manually entering EDI transactions. After a comprehensive evaluation process, Dyla selected NetSuite over SAP and Microsoft Dynamics, swayed by its ease of use, customization and cloud architecture that would allow real-time information sharing by its employees located throughout the U.S. With SuiteSuccess, Dyla went live on NetSuite in May 2017 in just 90 days to manage contract manufacturers, a distribution hub and 117 SKUs across the two brands and tens of thousands of locations. Just a month after go-live, Dyla had processed a record number of orders processed in the same period the year before. With NetSuite, Dyla has streamlined its month-end close from five days to three hours and automated communication with 3PL providers.

"We have grown 500 percent year-over-year because we were able to put our resources into selling the product, not the backend," said Justin Lawrence, Head of Supply Chain/Operations and Finance, Dyla LLC.

Aspartame-free Gum Maker Sweetens its Business Growth

Founded in 2010 with a business plan based on direct contact with retail locations, The PUR Company saw its business explode as demand for its aspartame-free gum grew. The company expanded rapidly, from 33 retail partner locations in its first month to 500 only a few months later. But, as it grew beyond Canada to the US, UK, Australia and Germany, PUR knew it would need a modern system to manage that growth and adapt to future business demands. When new leadership was hired to advance the company to its next stage of growth, they quickly determined that the company needed to replace its existing QuickBooks and Excel-based processes. After evaluating SAP, The PUR Company selected NetSuite and implemented it in just 100 days with SuiteSuccess. The PUR Company now has complete traceability across products in its Toronto warehouse while the unified ERP and CRM gives better insights into customer service and sales strategy. Meanwhile, OneWorld lets PUR transact in Canadian and US dollars and Swiss franc. NetSuite can continue to scale as the company grows while NetSuite's unified platform combines financial, inventory and customer data – vital for a company heavily focused on customer loyalty.

"NetSuite is helping us transition our dreams into realities by building a better organization that is more structured and organized and advanced, bringing science to our art," said Jay Klein, Founder and CEO of The PUR Company.

SuiteSuccess is the culmination of a multi-year transformation effort to combine the NetSuite unified suite, 20 years of industry leading practices, a new customer engagement model, and business optimization methods into a unified, industry cloud solution. SuiteSuccess was engineered to solve unique industry challenges that historically have limited a company's ability to grow, scale and adapt to change. Most ERP vendors have tried to solve the industry solution problem with templates, rapid implementation methodologies, and custom code. NetSuite took a holistic approach to the problem and productized domain knowledge, leading practices, KPIs, and an agile approach to product adoption. The benefits of this are faster time to value, increased business efficiency, flexibility, and greater customer success.

The key components of SuiteSuccess for Manufacturing include:

• Tailored roles with built-in workflows specific to wholesale distribution such as supply chain manager, warehouse operations and production manager.
• Industry leading best practices built into the system spanning inventory utilization and visibility, order orchestration and more.
• More than 150 Pre-built KPIs and reports, giving manufacturers real-time insight into the business from Day 1.

For more information on SuiteSuccess for Manufacturers, visit: http://www.netsuite.com/portal/services/suitesuccess/manufacturing.shtml

About Oracle NetSuite
Oracle NetSuite pioneered the Cloud Computing revolution in 1998, establishing the world's first company dedicated to delivering business applications over the internet. Today, it provides a suite of cloud-based financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR and omnichannel commerce software that runs the business of companies in more than 100 countries. For more information, please visit http://www.netsuite.com.

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