"I love to look at the dashboard and being able to see the immediate numbers. We can stay completely on-top of our critical KPI's. NetSuite has increased our ability to understand what is happening in our business."
Duval Partners Case Study - NetSuite CRM - NetReturn
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| At a glance | |
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| Company: | Duval Partners |
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| Location: | Melbourne |
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| Industry: | Full accountancy services including technology consulting |
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| Challenges: |
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| Software switched from: | MYOB Premier & Solution 6 Practice Management System |
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| Results with NetSuite: |
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The Company:
Duval Partners was established fifteen years ago by Leon Duval after he resigned as a principal in an eight partner mid tier traditional accounting firm.
Initially services were aimed at the corporate sector, however Duval Partners ultimately evolved into a multi service accounting and consulting practice capable of delivering high level strategic management advice to large corporate clients as well as to family businesses and individuals.
Duval Partners is heavily client focused and manages multiple projects and products simultaneously.
The Challenge:
As Duval Partners grew and evolved, the combination of MYOB and a Solution 6 Practice management package increasingly "fell over". It just couldn't handle the volume or complexity of data that the new business required.
"I'm fairly sure the original package was built in Access, although they (original vendor) deny it. Whatever, it was inadequate, and increasingly fell over," said Leon Duval.
The applications we were trying to use may have been ok for smaller businesses, but as our database grew, so did the number of problems we encountered, he added.
"We had persisted with the Solution Six application for 18 months. Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately - it turned out to be one of the few mistakes that we made with the business," said Duval.
The nature of their business, demanded connectivity from more than one location with multiple users across the system. This was difficult and expensive to achieve with the previous system. Another major issue was the ability to control cycle time which measures the ability to turn work around quickly. Whatever solution Duval Partners implemented they needed to ensure that it had the capability to track this critical performance indicator.
The Solution:
After 18 months of frustration with software that was never going to provide the required control and information needs, Duval Partners were definitely in the market to upgrade their applications.
In this period, Duval Partners had also established a technology division, to advise clients on their management information needs This gave them the opportunity to evaluate many applications and vendors.
"We have a different focus to many other firms, in that we looked for a solution with a "commercial" focus. We wanted to be able to grow the business with the application, rather than patch holes. We also realised that it is very difficult to fulfil 100% of your system criteria objectives and compromise is always mandatory. You need to put some effort in to get results," said Duval.
A major factor in choosing NetSuite over other accounting and ERP packages was the streamlined implementation. "We were struck by the ease of implementation. It was not a painful process. Generally when you implement a system there is the inevitability of a tussle between the hardware and software vendors any problem is blamed on the other. It is a huge frustration as a third party," said Leon . "We don't have that here. It was one of the reasons we took NetSuite, we have removed complexity of hardware," he added.
"We took a lot of experience with us when we made the decision to go with NetSuite. I have been involved in implementations for more than thirty years," said Duval. "And this was fairly event free," he added. "The ability to import data was very very simple," he added.
The NetSuite implementation went so smoothly that plans to run NetSuite in parallel with the old system for a month were shelved after ten days. "Everyone adapted well," said Duval.
Still there were some concerns. "We had a major issue with connectivity. I'd recommend that anyone looking at NetSuite, look at their Internet bandwidth. You do need ADSL as a minimum," Duval said.
The Results:
"I love to look at the dashboard and being able to see the immediate numbers. We can stay completely on-top of our critical KPI's. NetSuite has increased our ability to understand what is happening in our business," Duval said
"I think the three main benefits we have received from NetSuite are immediate visibility of critical key performance indicators (KPI's), much better control of work in progress, and the ease of getting end of month information. Which all sounds quite simple, but does actually make a tremendous difference to the way you run your business," he added.
"NetSuite has a very powerful database; we have been able to achieve all that we set out to do and more.. You do need to put some effort in. NetSuite isn't for dummies, but if you do, you will be able to get all you want out of the system. We really are only beginning to see the true potential of NetSuite," Duval said.
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