Knowledge Universe Reduces Costs By 70% With NetSuite OneWorld

SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 3, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading vendor of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced that Knowledge Universe, a global education company with over 3,700 locations interacting with more than five million students daily, has deployed NetSuite OneWorld for its enterprise financial management needs. By implementing NetSuite OneWorld, Knowledge Universe reduced its ongoing systems costs by 70 percent, while gaining advanced multi-currency consolidation and increased organizational flexibility. Knowledge Universe was able to meet an aggressive four-month timetable for its initial rollout across 6 subsidiaries in its Asia Pacific region, and is expanding the use of NetSuite OneWorld through its global organization for financial management, reporting and analysis, international consolidation, and ERP operations.

Knowledge Universe, headquartered in Singapore, is the parent company of internationally known early childhood education, K through 12, and post-secondary organizations such as KinderCare, Busy Bees and GlobalScholar. An aggressive campaign of both natural growth and acquisition has built a portfolio of brands and services covering learners around the world, from early childhood to higher education. With this rapid expansion came the challenges of operating such a diverse group of global businesses. NetSuite OneWorld's powerful multi-company/multi-currency capabilities combined with its broad suite of functionality enables Knowledge Universe to deliver a powerful cloud-based solution at the subsidiary level while delivering a real-time consolidated view of all business lines.

Because of the unique requirements of each business, and in order to address local, country-specific tax and business requirements of each subsidiary, senior management needed a way to consistently measure the performance of each brand and territory, without forcing subsidiaries to adopt cookie-cutter processes. NetSuite's flexible SuiteCloud platform enabled Knowledge Universe to customize the solution to the needs of each brand and market while still meeting the needs of the parent company. As the system evolves, many future customizations can be made by financial and operational staff rather than costly IT professionals, adding to the productivity gains of deploying NetSuite. Knowledge Universe could double size in its existing businesses without adding any operational staff to support its NetSuite deployment.

Knowledge Universe was able to transform its Asia Pacific region in record time with a four month implementation schedule. After a successful Phase One launch in January 2010, the company has rapidly expanded NetSuite to more than 6 brands and 5 currencies.  Knowledge Universe expects that because NetSuite can be used from virtually any Internet-enabled device, deploying the solution to new businesses and territories is far less expensive than on-premise software, and concurrent rollouts to multiple territories will be much easier to manage. And because of NetSuite's ease-of-use, Knowledge Universe has been able to significantly reduce training time and cost.

"One of the key reasons we chose NetSuite OneWorld was the combination of its powerful multi-entity consolidation functionality combined with the capability to tailor the system to meet unique business process requirements of each individual subsidiary," said Reginald Singh, Knowledge Universe CFO. "To be able to roll-out this level of sophisticated functionality in only four months is quite exceptional, and really shows the power of NetSuite and the Cloud."

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

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SOURCE NetSuite Inc.