NetSuite Integration With Sage 500
At My ERP Partner, our extensive expertise and knowledge about multiple ERP platform allows us to create solutions that solve critical business problems for our clients. A common challenge experienced by companies that use multiple ERP platforms in their organization is the interoperability between these systems. Organizations find themselves unable to extricate themselves out of legacy ERP platforms due to heavy customization and prior investment or inability to undertake significant migration effort. This blog post covers one such scenario – NetSuite Integration with Sage 500 API through a custom developed integration for quote to cash process.
Background
A confidential client of ours uses Sage 500, a old workhorse legacy platform from Sage in their manufacturing operations. This on-premise system built in Visual Basic does not have modern API frontend that can be utilized to communicate with partner or other subsidiaries. While the platform is sufficient to manage their day to day manufacturing operations, it fell short in its ability to work in a modern e-commerce environment.
The client also has a subsidiary that focuses on e-commerce sales and owns multiple branded online stores through which they sell their tools directly to clients. While the modern ERP works well with the e-commerce portals and electronic commerce, the inter-subsidiary transactions were entirely manual in nature.
Business Challenge
The business was experiencing significant challenges due to the manual nature of inter-subsidiary inventory management and order placement. The entire quote to cash process was performed via email where the e-commerce subsidiary would send emails to check on inventory to manually update e-commerce store inventories. Another team would take electronic orders and convert them to emails to the manufacturing subsidiary for fulfillment. The two teams would manually track open orders, track shipping information and invoices.
As one would expect, this presented many challenges including error prone orders, missing orders, incorrect inventory level reporting, missing shipments or shipping information and delayed invoicing.
The Solution
The ideal solution for this client would be a way for the two systems, NetSuite and Sage 500 to be able to communicate with each other electronically. So, we built a Web API that would allow any external system to request inventory levels, send purchase orders, get shipment and invoice information all without manual intervention. The RESTful Web API allows any external system to transmit and then receive data electronically.
This resulted in instantaneous, real time inventory information available in NetSuite when a customer order was being fulfilled. The resulting inventory information would allow the company to respond back to customers with timely, accurate inventory data and update stores in real time. Additionally, any orders placed by customers in the e-commerce store would be sent to the manufacturing subsidiary in real time. Information from manufacturing subsidiary would be sent back as shipment and invoice information keeping the customer updated about their order status.
Finally, because all the communication would happen electronically, the teams at both subsidiaries could fulfill customer orders accurately and quickly allowing both entities to scale up their operation and focus on sales rather than fulfillment challenges.
Final Thoughts
In today’s fast paced e-commerce world where customer expectations and buying behavior need a set of modern solutions so companies can succeed. Utilizing your existing technology investment in legacy systems can let companies continue to benefit from these platforms and extend their useful life. My ERP Partner consulted with the client to understand the problem, propose and build a solution due to expertise in business processes, multiple ERP platforms and development and technology capabilities. A legacy system such as Sage 500 need not put your company at a disadvantage and can be modernized to keep up with the changing pace of technology.
