Case Study: Recovering a Failed NetSuite ERP Implementation for a PE-Backed Company

Summary

A PE-backed field services company engaged Pemeco to lead its ERP selection project, resulting in our client’s selection of NetSuite. The company chose to work with a NetSuite integration partner with whom it had prior experience. When the project missed its targeted go-live, the company reengaged Pemeco to assess and recover the program. Pemeco rapidly audited the NetSuite implementation and successfully delivered the project, enabling our client to build a platform that supported its U.S. and U.K. expansion plans.

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Company Overview

The company is a private equity-backed, lower-middle-market platform field services business intended to scale in the U.S. through add-on acquisitions and organic growth, and by expansion to the U.K. To deliver its investment thesis, our client needed standardized, scalable back-office finance and accounting processes so it could rapidly onboard new entities and enable centralized sales, procurement, and finance.

Challenges

The company’s NetSuite implementation missed a critical go-live date and the integrator appeared to be unable to deliver business processes critical to the investment thesis. This setback put the company’s acquisition strategy at risk. The primary issue related to the system integrator’s inability to convert critical business needs into an effective system process. Specifically, the firm was unable to deliver systematic processes capable of supporting the automation of high-volume vendor invoice processing, accounts payable, customer invoicing, and finance processes.

Without highly automated, standardized back-office processes and centralized transaction controls, the company would be unable to support its high-velocity acquisition strategy without adding significant headcount to its lean central finance and accounting team.

Solution

Immediately upon reengagement, Pemeco performed a rapid implementation audit and delivered a targeted recovery plan:
  • Business requirements, business process blueprint, and system configuration: 
  • Testing and UAT execution:
  • Data migration:
  • Organizational change management:
Pemeco facilitated four targeted workshops to crystallize the mission-critical business requirements. Our client signed off on the business blueprint of the future state NetSuite processes, which formed the foundation of system design and configuration.
Because of client personnel capacity constraints, Pemeco created and executed the test scripts to validate system design and configuration.
Pemeco led critical data workstreams, transforming and migrating vendor, customer, service item, and open order data to ensure a clean data bill of health at cutover.
To ensure successful cutover and adoption, Pemeco managed critical organizational change management workstreams, including end-user training, cutover readiness and support, and provided post-go-live adoption support.

Results

Pemeco successfully recovered our client’s NetSuite implementation and delivered a solution aligned with its investment thesis and business strategy. The newly enabled platform had the backbone to support add-on acquisitions at scale and the expansion to the U.K.

Key outcomes include:

Fund-level transparency and control:

The PE sponsor benefits from comprehensive real-time financial and operational visibility, data integrity, and process controls.

A playbook for acquisition conversions:

Pemeco provided our client with conversion playbooks that include project delivery and governance plans, standard operating procedures, system configurations, training guides, and data migration templates.

A platform built for scale:

The standard processes and back-office finance and accounting automations enable branch support at scale, without a need for incremental headcount.

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