Seven Miles Coffee Roasters employees were still punching in customer credit card details manually four years ago. Reporting, too, was no holiday. All those spreadsheets were tied to legacy systems that CFO James Burt says were bound for obsolescence.
James was central in replacing the speciality coffee roaster’s separate business systems with a unified cloud platform found in NetSuite
NetSuite enables Seven Miles to use a single system for its financials, customer relationship management (CRM), inventory management, payroll and B2C website.
“It wasn’t just a transformation where we said, ‘Oh, let’s put in a new system.’ It was also a transformation of all the processes the business was undertaking at the time,” says James.
The transformation is paying off. Seven Miles has automated its credit card inputs and consolidates its financial records in a morning instead of three weeks. The business is effectively running without an accounts receivable person which was previously a full-time job. The company has vastly improved monitoring the 2000 grinders and coffee machines it provides to cafes across the country and its employees who use NetSuite all have real-time access to a single source of business information.
“We had different systems and it was all pretty clunky, so it was a fairly important transformation to make,” James says.
Seven Miles is one of about 40,000 companies that use NetSuite globally to help run their businesses today. Fifty five of Seven Miles’ sixty odd employees use NetSuite. James says it was clear that Seven Miles had strong potential to grow when he joined in 2014 and he recognised that a best-of-class platform was therefore required to cope with the growth of the company.
Given the heartache and effort that goes into a transformation like Seven Miles’, James says it’s especially important to avoid choosing a product that becomes obsolete in a matter of a few years. He adds that part of NetSuite’s appeal is its propensity to stay current in a fast changing IT world.
NetSuite provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model for Seven Miles Coffee Roasters. According to Gartner, spending on cloud services is forecast to increase 18.5 percent year-on-year in 2018 and the majority of the allocation will go to SaaS delivery.
Using Software as a Service (SaaS) means Seven Miles has access to various extra features NetSuite regularly adds. According to James, it’s also relatively easy to bolt new technology on to an already contemporary platform.
