Growing Promotional Products Company Uses NetSuite for Data-Driven Decision Making
Looking to replace outdated legacy systems, ePromos teams up with ERP Success Partners to streamline its inventory, accounting, sales and merchandising operations.
Founded in 1997 in a New York City apartment, ePromos® has grown significantly since its early beginnings. Now one of the top 40 promotional products distributors in the US., ePromos has 130 employees and offers more than 15,000 product options.
An industry pioneer that’s been selling its products online since inception, the company was using a few different software systems to run its operations. Those solutions included a homegrown website that ePromos was managing internally plus industry-specific accounting software.
“Our systems were old and outdated; we’d just outgrown them,” said Steven Stanley, Senior VP of Technology. “We were looking to start building a real foundation with something new. That’s how we discovered and implemented NetSuite.”
Choosing a Solution
Prior to selecting NetSuite as its new enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and ERP Success Partners as its implementation provider, ePromos looked at options like Microsoft Dynamics. After talking to an industry professional about the viable options and potential implementation partners, the company decided that NetSuite would be its top choice.
“We got introduced to the ERP Success Partners team, kicked off the project and came up with a very thorough project plan and timelines,” said Stanley. At that point, the company was focused on using NetSuite for inventory management, but also wanted to expand the ERP’s usage across the enterprise over time.
“We did a lot of discovery sessions throughout the company, all with an eye on what it would look like once the whole company moved onto NetSuite,” said Stanley. Working with ERP Success Partners, ePromos built out custom fields and workflows in NetSuite based on those discovery sessions.
“We really got into demoing and training the teams as we moved toward our January 2021 launch,” said Stanley, “at which point we had our inventory management division fully functional on NetSuite.”
Putting NetSuite to Use
For now, ePromos is using NetSuite primarily for inventory management and some financials. Its accounting team is completing a full transition over to the system and the merchandising team will be next in line to adopt the ERP. “It’s going to be our system of record for all our product information and stock keeping units (SKUs),” said Stanley, who appreciates ERP Success Partners’ depth of experience and knowledge of its industry and of NetSuite as a whole.
“Any time we ran into an issue, ERP Success Partners brought someone to the table who had the knowledge that we needed to move forward,” he added. “They also reached out to other industry professionals that they’d worked with in the past to bring them in on some projects, too (e.g., a NetSuite financial expert was brought in to consult with ePromos’ CFO).”
With its new ERP in place, ePromos has been able to use a combination of pre-built packages and integrations, the latter of which allow it to connect with outside applications. For instance, it can submit orders from its industry-specific/legacy systems directly to NetSuite.
Purchase orders (POs) are created for the product decorations, the products are taken out of stock, and then the “live inventory” is sent back to the legacy system users, who have 100% visibility over inventory at all times.
Data-Driven Business Decisions
Going forward, ePromos plans to connect even more of its outside applications with NetSuite while also extending the ERP’s use across the broader enterprise.
“It’s going to be the core of our business. The accounting team’s moving in now, merchandising will be shortly after that, and then our sales support organization will move in,” Stanley explained.
“At that point, all orders, customer information and product information will be in one system,” he continued, “thus enabling more data-driven business decisions.”