Challenges
Most of Netcat's customers are much bigger than Netcat, a young and growing software company, but that does not excuse the firm from having a reliable, top-class business operations platform.
As Netcat's footprint extends across Australia and into India and Canada, with the UK slated for near-term expansion, the company needed a more powerful way not only to track its accounts, but to manage employees and projects as well.
Reporting was difficult because a complete picture of company performance was scattered across multiple systems, making analysis time-consuming and lagged as a result. Entering its second decade of operation, Netcat needed a powerful, integrated solution to keep growth on-pace and efficient.
"The company has been around for 10 years and we are growing quite quickly, so we needed a scalable option," says Sandra D'Souza, Chief Financial and Operations Officer, Netcat. "And we needed something which could be implemented quickly."
Solution
Netcat considered trying to support its business with Salesforce.com and satellite third-party applications but decided to trust its business to the end-to-end, single-source solution provided by NetSuite.
After deciding on the solution in February 2008, the implementation was complete by the end of April, meeting the company's requirement for a quick rollout.
"The NetSuite model was quite attractive compared to using five different systems that would be very good in one particular area but don't necessarily talk to each other," D'Souza says. "We didn't want to move from the low-end of QuickBooks into the middle-range, but wanted a solution that would provide us all the power and flexibility we need."
The unified NetSuite platform means that business insight is no longer hidden in multiple disconnected systems. "Certainly, the management of our information has improved because we are able to see so much of our business every time we log in through the dashboard," she says.
"Management can view sales and support activities and case escalation without intervention from the finance department, and when managers are not bogged down generating reports, they have the power to make better decisions."
NetSuite is giving Netcat all the room it needs to grow with confidence. "As we look at establishing more overseas entities, we feel comfortable knowing that our accounting and operations will be stable," D'Souza says. "NetSuite makes it easier to focus on the next steps of growing our business."
Results
Netcat relies on NetSuite for all of its employee time and reimbursement tracking, project management, and accounting needs.
Sandra D'Souza, chief financial and operations officer of Netcat, says that NetSuite has helped each new hire in the growing company become an instant contributor.
"Now, when we bring a new person on board, it is easy to get them going with time sheets and full access to our project system. Before NetSuite, that might have taken a few weeks and we would be losing precious time on a project."
Netcat relies on Employee Center to keep its more than two dozen professional staff and contractors organized and properly reimbursed for expenses across the country and overseas as well.
The seamless multi-currency support ensures that sales and expenditures are properly denominated and rolled up to the central office. "Our people can now simply scan receipts and submit, and they get paid much faster than they were before."
Replacing its legacy support case management system with NetSuite not only enables managers to track support issues more easily, but makes it possible for Netcat to extend customer logins to clients so they can track the status of open tickets.
"NetSuite's case and project management capabilities give us the transparency we need to understand where our resources are going and how efficiently they are being allocated."
NetSuite's on-demand model means that Netcat can simply pay for the licenses and capabilities it needs, without worrying about physical hardware and software maintenance and upkeep.
"Because NetSuite is software-as-a-service, we don't have to constantly worry about capital upkeep requirements or making additional capital investments to support new staff and new clients," concluded D'Souza.
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