A Commercial Construction Manufacturer Gets More For Less By Switching To NetSuite

When RedBuilt split from Weyerhaeuser, its corporate parent, in August 2009, the engineered-wood supplier’s new management had just six months to adopt its own enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. At the time, management had long hoped to change its existing ERP solution due to the high costs of maintenance and upgrades. The old system had never been a good fit for RedBuilt’s industrial client needs; rigid processes and heavy interdependencies needlessly complicated every change order or information request.

Estimating margins upfront was a near impossibility with the old system, and RedBuilt was lucky if it saw what had happened with a job well after the work had been invoiced and paid for. Worse yet, testing a business decision usually meant asking an overburdened IT staff to pull numbers and create a report. The company was relying on historic assumptions of critical business data, such as freight costs or raw materials.

After considering a number of software providers to replace the old system, RedBuilt quickly chose to work with NetSuite, which recommended a cloud-based ERP suite offering real-time visibility, integrated manufacturing and inventory management and accounting, improving RedBuilt’s efficiency while lowering costs.

“At just a fraction of the cost of keeping [our former software provider], we have a solution that is much more flexible and dynamic,” says Kurt Liebich, RedBuilt CEO.

To ensure the best functionality, says Dallas Anderson, RedBuilt’s director of IT, NetSuite consulted with his company to “fully understand our vision as well as how we wanted the new business to operate.”

The result was a “dynamic, easy-to-use solution,” Anderson says. “NetSuite had been a proven winner for the customer-facing aspects of the RedBuilt business, so it quickly rose to the top of the accelerated selection process.”

NetSuite was a “proven winner” because RedBuilt had used its software since 2005 for such needs as managing sales processes. This also meant the upgrade could be implemented and maintained for one-third the overall annual cost of installing a newer package from its former provider. “We wanted a solution with proven sophistication and ready acceptance within the organization,” Anderson says. “Moving to NetSuite enabled us to cut IT costs by nearly $300,000 and focus our resources on adapting our ERP to supporting rapid change.”

RedBuilt transitioned its entire back office in just 86 days and uses NetSuite to manage its corporate office and four production plants, including all accounting, inventory management, sales, marketing and payroll activities. The software’s flexibility and ease of configuration allowed RedBuilt to tailor the system to fit its processes, solving its change-order challenges and eliminating double-entry and rekeying errors.

The new system not only allowed RedBuilt to assemble an international sales force, but the company also forecasts that by the end of 2013 it will have grown its business 62 percent since installing NetSuite financials.