Fast Growing UK Exercise Retailer Joins the Wave of Companies Leaving Legacy Sage Line 50 and Salesforce.com for NetSuite's Integrated On-Demand Solution
LONDON, 31 May 2007—NetSuite, Inc., the leader in on-demand business management software suites, today announced that exercise retailer Totally Fitness Limited has abandoned Sage Line 50 back-office software, coupled with Salesforce.com, and implemented NetSuite to manage its financial operations, inventory, real-time reporting and customer records. With the integrated NetSuite solution for complete operational management, Totally Fitness can now focus its attention to customer service excellence and support its double-digit revenue growth. For more information about the NetSuite-Totally Fitness story, please visit www.netsuite.co.uk/totallyfitness
London-based Totally Fitness Limited is one of the UK's hottest and fastest-growing providers of exercise equipment and solutions, well-known for its hot-selling PowerPlate line and a wide variety of weights, trainers, and supplements. In its first decade the company has already established itself as a trusted supplier both to individual buyers as well as high-profile institutions from Diageo to Unilever, and to celebrities from Robert De Niro to the Saudi royal family. The company also has retail outlets throughout London, including its flagship store in Harrods. Backed by customer-friendly policies such as a universal seven-day "peace of mind" return policy on everything they sell, including shoes, Totally Fitness wanted to keep its operations as trim and sculpted as possible.
As the company established its retail presence in 2002, then grew to five store locations, it became painfully clear that its Sage-based accounting and stock management solution was inadequate, resulting in the loss of a significant amount of money on returns and faulty products. This was because Totally Fitness couldn't give customers the after service required due to the inability of Sage, as an ERP system, to log in the customer information. Also, as the company grew from one warehouse to multiple warehouses, Sage Line 50's client/server architecture made it difficult and expensive to access from multiple locations. In addition, the Sage Line 50 product lacked basic functionality required to address the Totally Fitness retail operational needs. For example, the company had no formal return procedure because Sage, being accounting focused, couldn't support that. And it was difficult to transfer products from one location to another because Sage Line 50 doesn't support multiple locations. Also, Sage was not capable of real-time reporting, limiting business insight, and hurting the productivity of executives and employees alike. In addition, with Sage Totally Fitness employees had to enter information twice — for example, re-entering details on sales and purchase orders — leading to wasted effort and errors.
The double-entry problem stemmed from Totally Fitness having previously brought on Salesforce.com to manage its sales force automation. As a separate piece of software, the choice of Salesforce.com proved a hassle because as soon as leads were entered into the system, they had to be transferred into another system — Sage Line 50. "It was a waste of time," said Rafael Muller, Financial Controller of Totally Fitness. "If the system isn't simple and straightforward then people will simply not use it — which was the case with Salesforce.com."
The answer for Totally Fitness was to leave behind the ineffective Sage software and turn to NetSuite. Working with NetSuite Professional Services, Totally Fitness relied on NetSuite's SuiteFlexTM customisation platform to cater the product to its specific needs — such as creating a link between sales orders and purchase orders; and allowing sales people to see the profit and net profit (for landed-cost purposes) on a deal every time they open a sales order. With these customisations added to the basic NetSuite features, Totally Fitness was able to quickly integrate its six locations with unified, completely visible multi-site inventory, eliminating the need for double-entry and its pick/pack/ship inefficiencies. Now, the company is poised to continue its growth by bringing sanity and consistency to its back-office processes.
Today, Totally Fitness has over two dozen employees using the NetSuite solution for everything from customer contacts to order processing and returns. NetSuite has given Totally Fitness the clarity and insight it needs to stay on mission — providing top-notch workout equipment to a diverse and discriminating customer base. Now, company executives see stock turnover and availability clearly, and understand margins at the individual product level — important to a specialty retailer that maintains over 500 different products in stock.
"And now that we know where we are and where we're going, we can proceed with our aggressive strategy of becoming the number one fitness retailer in the UK," said Muller. "NetSuite will help us get there."
About Totally Fitness
Totally Fitness is the UK's fastest growing retailer of fitness equipment. It has been trading for a decade and operates six showrooms across the UK, including the fitness concession in Harrods department store. Customers range from people looking for a yoga mat or nutritional supplement, through to those wanting to install an entire home gym. The website is accessed by many thousands of people each day, and a dedicated commercial team visits schools, hotels and companies looking for an in-house gym.
Totally Fitness has an enviable portfolio of private and corporate clients. Stars such as Julia Roberts, Robert De Niro and both Liam and Noel Gallagher have been clients of Totally Fitness and corporate clients range from London's most prominent property developers, hotels, schools and hospitals to the Metropolitan Police and BP.
Totally Fitness is a privately held, profitable company. It aims to be the UK's largest retailer of fitness equipment within five years.
For more information about NetSuite, visit: www.netsuite.co.uk
For more information about Totally Fitness, visit: www.totallyfitness.co.uk
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