Klugo
Industry: Field Service Management
When Headland Machinery, the parent company of Klugo, a field service management and marketing software company, chose NetSuite's cloud-based ERP solution in 2011 to streamline its workflows and improve business efficiency, management already knew that having a fully-integrated field service management system was crucial to their business success. But that functionality was unavailable in NetSuite.
"We deliberated for a long time over whether to go with NetSuite because field service was our core business requirement," said Lucas Vear, General Manager at Klugo in Melbourne, Australia, "but we were convinced that the architecture and the cloud environment of NetSuite was the right decision for the business for the long term.
"We initially used a third-party vendor to assist us with field service, but felt after 18 months that having multiple systems was not working. We wanted one platform to run the entire business. So we made the decision to build a field service system within NetSuite."
This decision would lead the company to develop NextService, the only fully-integrated field service management system available on the SuiteCloud platform.
SuiteCloud's Customisation Environment Made Development Easy
Headland chose to embed its application into the SuiteCloud platform, allowing the company to take full advantage of existing functionality in the NetSuite architecture and SuiteCloud's comprehensive cloud customisation environment.
"This is the beauty of NetSuite," Vear said. "It's an open platform. Most people pick it up pretty quickly. You can do pretty much whatever you want."
SuiteCloud developer tools, such as SuiteScript, SuiteCloud IDE, and SuiteBuilder, enabled Headland to customise, extend, test, and build its application on NetSuite in about 12 months.
"SuiteScript was really simple to use because we already knew the language," said Jorge Iriarte, Applications and BI Developer at Headland. Built on industry-standard JavaScript for portability and rapid developer productivity, SuiteScript enabled the company to create flexible business logic within NetSuite tailored to their specific business needs.
"We also found SuiteCloud IDE very helpful because we could use an integrated system to develop our entire application," Iriarte said. "The SuiteScript debugger which is now included in the Suite IDE, allowed us to initially test how our scripts were running." This Eclipse-based integrated development environment made building SuiteApp functionality on top of the NetSuite infrastructure more efficient.
Transforming an Internal Application Into a Full-featured Commercial Product
Not long after Headland's internal field service management system was up and running, Lucas recognised that NextService, initially built as an internal product, had commercial potential.
"After going through the design and build experience, we thought, 'Listen, we can't be the only business in the world that wants that solution,' so I nominated it last year for the 2013 YOUR SUITEY award and we won," Vear said. "With the award I was able to get the right introductions within NetSuite and they evaluated the NextService product last year at SuiteWorld.
"They encouraged me to take the next step and become a NetSuite SDN partner. I ran through the business case with the Headland board and they supported it and so we then set up a business called Klugo in July 2013."
Klugo started off as an SDN partner, which gave it access to comprehensive technical services, product management collaboration and extensive co-marketing and lead generation programs. Klugo's development team took about six months to make NextService into a commercial product, modifying the user interface so customers could manage it, rather than having it hardcoded. Developers also used NetSuite SuiteBundler to bundle it into different databases so they could easily distribute NetSuite-based solutions to their end customers.
"To get NetSuite accreditation for NextService, we had to essentially do a rebuild on the product so we could become an end user product," Vear said. "We received accreditation in January this year. In September or October last year we locally became a NetSuite Solution Provider as well."
Vear noted that there are many other field service offerings and many other SDN partners offering field service. "Our differentiator is that it is built within the architecture of NetSuite, so you end up with one solution rather than two solutions joined together through web services," enabling customers to have a 360-degree view of their business, he said.
About Klugo
Klugo is a software and marketing services provider who helps companies transform by providing a complete, end-to-end view of their business in real-time. They offer NetSuite, NextService, and mpx for NetSuite. As a NetSuite Solution Provider and SuiteCloud Developer, they can deliver and tailor NetSuite to fit with their customers' requirements.
