California Apparel News

Mountain Khakis was just a few years old when Chief Executive Officer Ross Saldarini realized he needed more than the combination of QuickBooks, Microsoft Excel and Outlook to run the business.

The then-3-year-old company has seen its business grow rapidly, Saldarini said, adding that the company had expanded to 350 SKUs—today it’s well over 1,000—and over 10,000 customers, including retail accounts and distributors, as well as direct consumers.

Saldarini began looking for an Enterprise Resource Planning solution but said he was concerned about the costs as a small-business owner.

“The standard options are systems that the entry points are $50,000 plus and lots of cost and time to customize, probably a major-league step back in terms of reporting and responsiveness, and there’s training,” he said.

Founded in 2003, Mountain Khakis is based in Jackson Hole, Wyo., with operations in Colorado and North Carolina and production in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and the United States.

“I was interested in finding a tool we can access from anywhere—because we have staff members in three different states and warehouse in a fourth location, and I’ve got people overseas, as well,” he said. “It was important for me to have all the data in one place online—in the cloud, per se.”

Saldarini found what he was looking for in NetSuite, a cloud-based ERP solution founded in Mountain View, Calif., in 1998.

“It wasn’t called cloud computing back then, but it’s called cloud computing today,” said Paul Turner, senior director of technology markets for NetSuite.

“The vision of the company was to enable fast-growing businesses with the ability to manage their software as a service. It enables them to run everything from their accounting all the way through to their website or e-commerce to their marketing and sales activities—all as a cloud-based web service.

Canadian flash-sale site Beyond the Rack began using NetSuite after outgrowing its previous accounting software.

Beyond the Rack needed a system that could manage business and e-commerce operations and grow with the company.

“Businesses are looking to increase their integration between the website and their ERP system, and that’s what Beyond the Rack got with NetSuite,” Turner said. “They streamlined the order process to take the order through the website all the way through to fulfillment and processing and invoicing—all the way through the chain.”

Beyond the Rack is running NetSuite One World, which allows the flash-sale site to handle multiple currencies and languages.

“It has all the same financials, the inventory management, sales, marketing automation and e-commerce management capabilities,” Turner said. “It enables companies to grow globally without creating a mess of ERP systems or onpremises IT resources in different countries.”

NetSuite also runs a “marketplace” called SuiteApp.com, which features more than 1,000 “SuiteApps” that plug into the NetSuite, allowing companies to integrate the system with other software systems, such as warehouse- management systems, EDI providers or PLM (product lifecycle management) solutions.

The company also recently introduced a Demand Planning module, which allows a company to forecast inventory levels based on historical or projected demand.

Although Mountain Khakis does not use NetSuite’s e-commerce applications and doesn’t need to integrate NetSuite with a PLM system, Saldarini said the company has implemented some of NetSuite’s modules and was able to customize the solution for his business’s needs.

“That’s why no one wants to move away from QuickBooks— until you discover that there is a QuickBooks-like next step that performs tremendously well and is customizable and doesn’t take a lot of training,” he said. “In addition to having those [modules, NetSuite is] very customizable, and they’re very user friendly— so, low friction in terms of training and very high and quick uptake in terms of learning and customizing the system.”

For more information, visit www.netsuite.com.