Global Contract Furniture Consultancy Streamlines its Operations with NetSuite
Founded in 2020, Avanto specializes in back-office transactional automation, outsourcing and financial operations support. Headquartered in Hartford, Conn., the 34-employee company works with customers in the contract furniture industry that need help streamlining their procurement transactions and achieving their overall digital transformation goals.
“Our objective is to help the contract furniture industry move forward in both process and technology,” said Matthew Danyliw, Partner. “We evaluate processes, identify pain points and provide solutions that range from outsourced processing to software platforms to automation solutions.”
Not an Ideal Situation
After years of using QuickBooks Online to run its business, Avanto began looking for a system that could handle its multifaceted, growing operations. “QuickBooks Online was too limited; we needed something that offered a more powerful and flexible customer relationship management (CRM) solution,” said Danyliw.
Initially attracted by Zoho’s various modules and low cost, Avanto switched to that system for a short time. It soon realized that the platform wasn’t robust enough to manage its international operations, which includes employees in the US, India and South America.
“We were using all these different Zoho modules, but they were in all different databases,” recalled Danyliw. “It was difficult to bring all the data together, analyze it, and make it cohesive. The tools were pretty helpful, but it just wasn’t the ideal situation for us.”
A Perfect Match
About two years ago, Danyliw was introduced to ERP Success Partners by a mutual networking connection. Realizing that both Avanto and ERP Success Partners worked frequently with customers in the contract furniture industry, Danyliw began exploring NetSuite as a potential replacement for its current systems.
With ERP Success Partners, Avanto not only got an experienced implementation partner to work with, but it also got a partner that understands the nuances of the contract furniture industry. This, in turn, could help Avanto confidently extend NetSuite’s capabilities out to its own customers.
With NetSuite, Avanto would also be able to bring its financial management, management services, processing services and professional services departments onto a single, cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.
Easy Integrations
Today, Avanto uses NetSuite for financial reporting, CRM, time tracking and project management. A project management-centric enterprise, the company sets up all of its ongoing projects and related tasks on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and/or annual basis.
“We also have professional services projects, so we use NetSuite to track the beginning and end of those tasks,” Danyliw added. “We need to know what our associates around the globe are doing at any given time, so the ability to track that information in their local time has been very helpful.”
Avanto also integrated the Avalara automated sales tax platform with NetSuite—a process that Danyliw said took about three hours from start to finish. “I’ve done Avalara implementations for Khameleon and other systems and it was painful,” he recalls. “This was pretty easy. The SuiteApp was just an easy download setup.”
More NetSuite Ahead
Looking ahead, Danyliw said Avanto is considering adding NetSuite’s Project Management module and the solution’s cash management and automatic ACH capabilities. It may at some point implement OneWorld in order to bring all of its international subsidiaries onto a single ERP, but Danyliw said the company is happy with the results of its NetSuite implementation.
“Eventually our plan is to get the entire company onto NetSuite, but for now everyone is using their local ERP solutions. We’re going to consolidate that at some point.”