Australian Furniture and Design Brand Chooses NetSuite Over SAP and Pronto To Replace Multiple On-Premise Applications to Manage Omni-Channel Business Across B2B, B2C and Multiple Retail Stores
Sydney, Australia—9 October 2012—NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced Australia's leading furniture retailer and design brand Coco Republic, has selected NetSuite SuiteCommerce to transform its business for the digital age. Coco Republic chose NetSuite's cloud based end-to-end commerce solution over SAP, Pronto and Options, to manage its expanding range of businesses. This includes six retail stores, a design school, a property styling service and an interior design business. Coco Republic plans to have NetSuite SuiteCommerce replace multiple on-premise software applications, including MYOB for financials and Options for POS and inventory management, to run its entire business, including financials, multiple B2B and B2C eCommerce, POS, inventory management, order management, distribution, marketing, and customer relationship management. Coco Republic is currently targeting a go live date for NetSuite SuiteCommerce of April 2013.
Adopting SuiteCommerce can allow Coco Republic to run a true omni-channel business operation, with distinct touchpoints to suit both B2C and B2B customer buying preferences. Coco Republic will create a portal for in-store consultants to access via iPads, to show customers a complete range of furniture and homewares. This can allow consultants to suggest accessory items that finish a customer's home, as well as move products to a shopping cart, wish list, or request-a-quote service. Commercial clients including interior designers, architects, property developers and real estate agents, can have a similar portal, allowing them to purchase items for their interior design projects or rent property for the styling of properties for sale. Each site can also allow buyers to review purchases, track order delivery, quickly re-order items, and correspond with Coco Republic.
SuiteCommerce offers Coco Republic significant benefits, including real-time financial consolidation and reporting across its operations, enhanced marketing capabilities and improved inventory, order management and warehouse management, among other benefits. Coco Republic can also leverage SuiteCommerce to introduce multiple innovations, ranging from in-store consultants using iPads to show customers the full range of Coco Republic furniture and homewares products, to selling its TAFE-accredited design courses online to an international market.
Among its many capabilities, SuiteCommerce Order Management is paramount in enabling commerce transactions regardless of touchpoint or currency. The SuiteCommerce Order Management System (OMS) offers unmatched billing capabilities such as payment capture, refunds, invoiced billing, usage-based, and recurring billing to support any type of desired customer interaction for B2B and B2C environments. In addition, SuiteCommerce OMS provides a robust, rules-based workflow technology to manage the lifecycle of a transaction – order-to-fulfilment-to-payment capture-to-repurchase. It reduces fraudulent orders and the amount of time spent reviewing them by providing intelligent review and exception capabilities that raises red flags and can place a hold on orders. It provides powerful back-office technology such as warehouse management capabilities including bin and lot tracking, pick/pack/ship fulfilment process, support for multiple warehouse locations, and the intelligence to select the appropriate warehouse based on each merchant's business logic. SuiteCommerce is integrated with most major and regional carriers such as Australia Post, DHL, Startrack, Toll, and TNT, and many others, to generate real-time rates, print shipping labels, and automatically send package tracking information to shoppers. And all of these capabilities are delivered with the multi-currency and multi-tax support required to deliver seamless global commerce.
"Since our business began 30 years ago, Coco Republic has grown by nurturing a unique Australian style that combines classic with contemporary design," says Michael Hills, operations director at Coco Republic. "As our business continues to grow across all four divisions, we have begun searching for one solid, integrated IT solution. NetSuite's scalable, all-in-one business management system can give us the real-time financial and business analytics we have always wanted, providing the right level of support for our future growth."
Formerly trading as Town & Country Living, Coco Republic has gradually expanded its brand beyond its Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane retail stores, which sell sophisticated furniture and homewares. Coco Republic Property Styling is now one of the fastest growing divisions of the business and the Coco Republic Design School has graduated over 1,000 students since 2010. This fast growth period stretched Coco Republic's on-premise software applications, resulting in rising IT maintenance costs. Switching to NetSuite SuiteCommerce marks an ambitious digital undertaking for Coco Republic.
The Coco Republic bricks and mortar stores will continue to be the main touchpoint for B2C customers. "While our digital strategy is important to our future, we expect our retail stores to continue to be at the core of our brand for years to come. Many of our customers still want to see, feel and experience our bespoke furniture items in store before they purchase," said Mr. Hills.
Beyond Coco Republic's traditional furniture business, NetSuite can also support the Coco Republic Design School, which plans to launch distant learning courses online this summer. Launched in 2010, the Coco Republic Design School hosts fully accredited interior design courses in partnership with the Sydney Institute of TAFE's Design Centre Enmore.
Mark Troselj, managing director of APAC for NetSuite, commented: "Coco Republic's move to NetSuite is the equivalent of a complete architectural renovation. It's replacing many of the systems it had with a single system that can allow it to provide a truly intuitive, quality, personalised brand experience to customers across multiple touchpoints. At the same time, it can gain a deeper insight into its business performance to remain nimble and better capitalise on growth opportunities."
Today, more than 12,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-class cloud ERP suites for divisions of large enterprises and mid-sized organisations seeking to upgrade outdated client/server ERP systems. NetSuite excels at streamlining business operations, as demonstrated in a recent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing top ten financial management systems vendor in the world. NetSuite has continued its success in delivering the best cloud financials/ERP suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of cloud is accelerating.
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