In a competitive race, runners strive to gain a decisive edge—training regimens, gear, nutrition, and race-day preparations all factor into an athlete’s performance. As a world-leading supplier of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that times runner performance, global manufacturer IPICO is similarly focused on gaining an edge in a competitive business environment.

IPICO supplies RFID chips, tags, software, and related technologies used in sports timekeeping as well as for electronic vehicle identification, paper and packaging, railways and mining. Headquartered in Ontario, Canada, the company has operations in the US, South Africa, Europe, and Asia and runs a complex network of suppliers, contract manufacturers, and distributors around the world.

Spanning six continents, IPICO’s business challenges and complexity are considerable. Inventory optimization and forecasting are essential to profitability and customer satisfaction. Contract manufacturers and suppliers need to be managed with precision and real-time visibility, as do IPICO’s subsidiaries and worldwide logistics. The company’s previous IT platform of disparate, on-premise Sage, QuickBooks, and custom-built legacy applications was poorly suited for success.

Efficiency and Visibility on a Global Scale
IPICO has gained the competitive edge it needs in the cloud with NetSuite OneWorld and the NetSuite Manufacturing Edition. First implemented in 2007 to support a corporate restructuring, NetSuite technology enabled IPICO to avoid substantial up-front investments in servers and software while positioning the company to weather the economic downturn that began in 2009.

“Getting into the NetSuite cloud has allowed us to reduce our fixed costs as a business, while increasing our communications and visibility across the globe,” says Gordon Westwater, IPICO President and CEO. “We had a logistics nightmare, and our disconnected business software wasn’t helping. NetSuite now links our logistics planning with financials and lets us access all our business information from anywhere in the world.”

A Focus on Innovation and Opportunities
Today, IPICO is focused on product innovation and capitalizing on business opportunities in the growing RFID market, not running an IT shop and manually reconciling data from standalone systems.

The company estimates savings of $300,000 a year in administrative costs and a 5 to 10 percent reduction in shipping costs through more accurate production planning.

Better inventory forecasting has helped reduce purchasing costs 10 percent by enabling placement of higher volume orders with contract manufacturers, and monthly financial consolidation across subsidiaries has been reduced from 30 days to five. NetSuite CRM gives sales personnel and channel partners powerful tools to drive revenue, while customer data links seamlessly with NetSuite Financials.

Visibility into real-time accounting information helps managers track costs more closely than before, and NetSuite’s multi-level bill of materials (BOM) functionality helps IPICO manage components with different lead times or volume-sales conditions. And with NetSuite, IPICO saved about $100,000 over an equivalent on-premise system.

“We didn’t have to worry about putting in place a hardware-intensive solution for a global business with data center management expenses,” says Westwater.

NetSuite’s anywhere, anytime information access has proved vital to IPICO’s distributed operations and managers traveling between facilities around the world. Westwater concludes, “We are very effective and connected around the world by using NetSuite to manage operations. We are able to make decisions globally regardless of location.”