Case study: NetSuite implementation with advanced financials

A pre-revenue life sciences organization with multiple entities developing biomedical therapies for various diseases with 50–100 employees.

The situation

The client was running a legacy accounting system for multiple entities with no ability to provide consolidated financial reporting. This made it very difficult to make real-time decisions to meet business objectives.

Their system did not provide custom approval workflows to support purchase order (PO) amendments and electronic data interchange (EDI) integration with suppliers utilizing a Punchout procurement system. Finally, existing roles and permissions were not set up to be compliant with proper segregation of duties (SOD) rules.

The solution and results

The firm provided a comprehensive review of business process needs and documentation of business requirements for procurement automation. To provide the needed capabilities, we determined NetSuite would be the right fit for their ERP needs and implemented the system. Additionally, we recommended a vendor EDI integration (punchout) solution and coordinated with the vendor to implement the solution.

Furthermore, we performed a gap assessment of conflicts in the segregation of duties, recommendations for roles and permissions, and mitigating controls to remediate identified issues.

After implementation, the client gained:

• A fully integrated procurement process plus EDI with supplier for automatic creation of POs from shopping cart and electronic transmission of POs. This eliminated manual process and human error in the exchange of critical purchasing data.
• Improved controls around system access and proper segregation of duties for roles and permissions. This provided controls that would allow both internal and external audits to be passed.