With slimmer operating margins, increased competition and giant copier manufacturers attempting to eliminate their niche, Polek and Polek had to re-think its core strategy and how they did business.

Naturally, the success of the new is largely dependent on a company’s ability to execute, and in today’s environment, that starts and ends with IT. How does a mid-market organization transform a legacy business when it doesn’t know all the ways in which it will need to adapt?

Well Polek and Polek faced these challenges and many others as they needed to streamline all phases of the business process, while at the same time confront the challenges implied by shrinking margins and their effect on the resources available to fund and more importantly sustain the revamped business profile.

Specifically that meant the following:

Less inventory on hand and more drop shipments.

On the surface, this sounds great, but the flip side is managing more paperwork and higher transaction admin costs. It also means doing so with fewer errors and greater speed. Fortunately by leveraging inherent capability for NetSuite to manage “blind” drop shipment process and workflow automation, the MIBAR team efficiently configured this to process which his now paying huge dividends in labor reduction and administrative costs.

Better forecasting of sales and products.

Smaller inventory does not imply no inventory, and moving to a new location meant every square inch needs to be optimized. Therefore having the right mix of products on the shelf when drop shipment is not economically viable, is essential in sustaining profitability and customers.

Extending the reach of the enterprise to more closely collaborate and reduce transactional friction with their vendors and customers.

Support for electronic integration with buying groups and enabling smaller customers to interact with the business in more ways must now be the norm, if they were going to complete with the likes of the giant manufacturers now looking to go direct!. That means options for on line payment processing, quoting and ordering, e commerce, e marketing and e mail notifications without increasing IT servers and IT footprint; as well as having the agility to deploy on a foundation that didn’t need to be built from bare bones. While Polek had all of these things; it was rudimentary at best. And certainly not even in the same league as what they could achieve via the built in NetSuite framework at a fraction of the cost in their legacy environment. If ever!

Shrinking office and administrative headcount.

Do more with less resources, yet interact in a more meaningful way.

Shrinking IT infrastructure budget – reduction in servers and various applications to support.

This implies a need to reduce all that integration and spaghetti into a single system with a unified database. One that would that would replace the independent CRM and e commerce databases and all of that code that kept them communicating with each other (sort of).

Finally get serious about CRM and truly giving the sales team a unified version of the truth so that the forecasting and pipeline engine is embedded within the ERP and financial application. No easy task!

Well, thanks to NetSuite, the ingenuity of the combined effort of the MIBAR and Polek team, and a genuine commitment to their vision via NetSuite, and this pipedream is now a reality.

But don’t take our word for it. Check out what Chris Polek (Owner and CEO) of Polek and Polek copier parts had to say about the transition, and take a glimpse of his team in action with NetSuite.