Essential Products
Summary
Essential Products, Inc. is a technology company focused on creating consumer technology products for the 21st century. They wanted to centralize their business processes from multiple disparate systems onto the NetSuite ERP to eliminate the hassle they were facing due to manual data input and reconciliation and lack of real-time visibility into key areas of their operation. Folio3 migrated Essential’s entire back office to Oracle NetSuite, thanks to which the company has experienced a significant jump in operational efficiency, with month-end financial close times cut in half, a 40% reduction in staff overhead and the company leadership getting real-time visibility into the manufacturing process at multiple locations.
Customer
Essential Products was founded in 2015 by Andy Rubin, with the vision of changing the landscape of connected devices, by utilizing cutting edge hardware and software technologies ecosystem such as IoT, AI and machine learning. The company is more popularly known for the Essential Phone which it released in 2017.
Challenge
Essential Products’ back office was managed on multiple disparate systems and applications including Quickbooks. Maintaining data on multiple systems was both labor intensive and time consuming, due to which the company had to maintain extra staff and even then, they often failed to meet their month end financial close deadlines. The company’s management also lacked real-time visibility into their operations particularly inventory management, since they sourced a lot of components from other vendors via a 3PL system, which was not integrated with their other systems. To eliminate these and a host of other problems, the company wanted to consolidate all of their back office processes in one system by shifting to the Oracle NetSuite ERP, and approached Folio3 to assist them with this transition.
Solution
Folio3 moved Essential’s entire back office to NetSuite along with migrating all their historical data, well within the specified 14 week timeline. The Folio3 team also developed and implemented a number of features in NetSuite that are not supported out of the box.
Result
Thanks to the Folio3’s efforts, Essential Products has experienced a substantial improvement in their operations since moving to NetSuite. Within two months of the move, they were able to cut their month-end financial close times in half and subsequently, have reduced their back office staff from four to two. Having every aspect of their business integrated within NetSuite also gives them better visibility into their operations, with management now able to accurately forecast and source JIT (just in time) inventory from vendors via 3PL.
