SOI Group Plots New Course For Business With NetSuite Cloud

LONDON and SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that SOI Group, a managerial holding company for the marine companies at the University of St Andrews, has moved from Sage 100 to NetSuite OneWorld. SOI Group turned to NetSuite OneWorld in order to improve the business visibility and agility of its six subsidiaries around the world, enabling the company to manage growth and rapidly scale to meet the needs of new subsidiaries with a flexible platform. SOI Group is now using NetSuite OneWorld for all aspects of its business including financials, multi-currency, financial consolidation, customer relationship management (CRM), inventory management, order management, and resource management.

Created to grow the commercial interests of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, the SOI Group of companies, which include SMRU Marine and St Andrews Instrumentation, offer innovative, robust and environmentally sound product and service solutions to clients active in the marine environment. Its six subsidiaries operate across a diverse range of markets, including Asia Pacific, North America, Canada and the U.K. In addition to managing the organic growth of its existing holdings, SOI Group is frequently tasked with launching new business ventures for the university – often within time frames of less than two months. With this in mind, SOI Group was keen to move from an on-premise business support system to a cloud model. Lacking confidence in Sage's ability to provide a true cloud solution, the organisation decided to turn to NetSuite OneWorld to run their entire business with a single unified solution.    

NetSuite OneWorld is a comprehensive cloud-based business management software suite that allows businesses to manage multiple subsidiaries, business units and legal entities from a single, centralised point. The cloud platform enables services that can be supplied without the high capital costs, painful upgrades, manual data-entry and spreadsheet reconciliations, and ongoing troubleshooting typical of on-premise environments with disparate applications. NetSuite OneWorld, with support for 190 currencies, 19 languages and automated tax compliance in more than 50 countries, enables SOI Group to manage its six subsidiaries and seamlessly conduct business around the globe.

With the Sage 100 system, SOI Group could only view business information from one subsidiary at a time, and users had to log in to multiple interfaces simply to track transactions. This long and inefficient approach slowed down the group's reporting process and limited the finance team's ability to gain a full overview of the company's performance. SOI Group quickly realised that, in order to grow, it needed to make its back-office system leaner and more efficient. By selecting NetSuite OneWorld, the team is now able to access a real-time summary of all subsidiaries — regardless of market or currency — on a single cloud business solution. Streamlining the system means that reporting timescales have already reduced from 10 days to six, while NetSuite provides the finance team with a more meaningful real-time overview of the entire group's results. And with all its mission-critical information and processes now in the cloud, SOI Group is able to access the data remotely from any device, at any time.

Paul Drummond, Group Financial Accountant at SOI Group explained: "Put simply, Sage 100 was unable to cope with the velocity and variety of our business. Having to provision an IT environment within such a short timeframe and then manage it alongside a number of other subsidiaries as a separate business entity required a level of agility that Sage couldn't offer. The move to NetSuite has given us a comprehensive, real-time view into the financial health of SOI Group, freeing up resources that can be put into growing the organisation, and helping us to make better business decisions as we continue to deploy subsidiaries into new markets and verticals."

Pete Daffern, NetSuite President of EMEA and Executive Vice President of Verticals said: "SOI Group is part of a larger trend of businesses who have found that Sage's outdated software is hindering, rather than helping, their ambitions. A cloud-based platform is an essential tool for businesses looking to accelerate their growth, with the need for rapidly deployed IT that doesn't compromise on functionality. As more and more UK businesses start to operate across multiple geographies, their leaders need a system that can accommodate and manage large numbers of subsidiaries, satellite offices and remote workers, and cloud is the key to this."

Today, more than 16,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission–critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise–class cloud financials/ERP suites for divisions of large enterprises and mid-sized organisations seeking to upgrade their antiquated client/server ERP systems. NetSuite excels at streamlining business operations as demonstrated in a recent Gartner study naming NetSuite as the fastest growing financial management software vendor on a global basis. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud ERP/financials suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud is accelerating.

About SOI Group
SOI Group Ltd was formed in 2011 as the holding company for the marine related commercial companies at the University of St Andrews, all of which are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the University. The companies were created to provide a business friendly interface between the University and industry for projects in sectors including offshore renewables energy, marine civil engineering and Oil & Gas. Through marine mammal consultancy, research and product development (such as PAMBuoy™), they deliver innovative, robust and environmentally sound solutions to clients active in the marine environment. SOI Group Ltd provides invaluable managerial and financial services to the companies, allowing them to focus on product and service delivery. 

The University of St Andrews is Scotland's first university and the third oldest in the English-speaking world, founded in 1413. Over six centuries, it has established a reputation as one of Europe's leading and most distinctive centres for teaching and research.

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