Winning the Promotional Products Game: WOV-IN® Brands' NetSuite Strategy

Company: WOV-IN® Brands

Industry:  Promotional Products Manufacturing

Challenge:  An aging core business system wasn’t producing the performance data that the company needed for good decision-making and required a lot of third-party subscriptions and services to help “fill in” those gaps.

Solutions:  NetSuite - Record to Report, Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Manufacturing, WIP and Routing. eXtendTech - eXtendFiles, eXtendFrame and PromoStandards integration.

Results:   The company now has access to all of the data and insights that it needs for good decision-making. It has also replaced manual tasks with automated processes, effectively freeing up team members to focus on more strategic tasks.

As a third-generation family-run company, WOV-IN® Brands takes pride in being able to successfully bridge the gap between tradition and modernization. Founded in 1978, the Jackson, Wisconsin-based company manufactures and decorates a wide range of promotional and custom products under brands like Threads, Promopet, The Bandana Factory, and Tag Trends.

WOV-IN has posted impressive organic growth over the last 40+ years, during which time it has developed new product decoration methods, added a line of pet products and, more recently, moved into the home goods space. Its newest line includes tea towels, Swedish dishcloths, frames and pillows—a niche that the company hadn’t previously tapped.

It Was Time for a Change

Up until last year, WOV-IN was running on a proprietary business management platform with a text-based user interface.  It was a manufacturing-focused system modified and maintained for years by the company’s second-generation owners. “It became a limiting factor to our growth as it didn’t provide the tools we needed to manage our business effectively,” said Jessie Johnson, president of the 70-employee company. “It also didn’t provide the data and insights we needed to be able to make good decisions.”

For example, if a senior executive wanted a quick view of profitability-by-product or a report based on labor usage, getting that data into a digestible format was time consuming and, in some cases, impossible.

Joe Johnson, WOV-IN’s Director of Operations and Compliance, says one of his major “light bulb moments” on the technology front was the company’s use of third-party applications to make up for the deficits in its core system.

“We kept adding new subscriptions and services to cover for what our enterprise resource planning (ERP) couldn’t do,” Joe explains. “As we added service after service, everything became very disjointed and people were having to check multiple systems.”

Bouncing between those systems took time as associates would check a quote in one system, get a shipping estimate from another one and then put customer notes in yet another application. “That was one of the biggest tipping points for us in terms of knowing it was time for a change.”

Selecting the Right ERP

Working with a local consultant, WOV-IN evaluated NetSuite, Acumatica and the M1 platform before deciding on NetSuite, which stood out for several reasons. In particular, WOV-IN wanted to leverage the ERP’s direct connections with eXtendTech’s industry-specific bundles and integrations. The company also wanted to keep customizations to a minimum and instead maximize its new ERP’s out-of-the-box functionalities.

“In developing our company’s ‘future state,’ we really wanted to streamline our internal business processes and minimize our customizations and implementation expenses,” Jessie explains. “We knew the right tool would require minimal customizations if we actually did our part in cleaning up our processes and moving tribal knowledge  into the system.”

WOV-IN called on Bryant Park Consulting to help achieve these and other implementation goals. With multiple successful NetSuite implementations for promotional products companies under its belt, Bryant Park has a deep understanding of industry best practices and the ERP itself.

“Bryant Park came to us with an understanding of eXtendTech and made that integration seamless for us, to the point where we decided very quickly to pull the trigger and go with NetSuite,” says Jessie. “I can’t say enough good things about the individuals we worked with; we had some excellent consultants on our team and the process went extraordinarily well.”

A Strong Implementation Partner

With a strong understanding of WOV-IN’s industry-specific processes and challenges, Bryant Park created several automated workflows that have helped the company streamline processes it was previously handling manually. For example, WOV-IN is using NetSuite to automatically create purchase orders from sales orders and automatically close out work orders. Not only does this save the manufacturer time, but the company has also been able to reallocate human resources to more strategic projects.

The manufacturer is also using custom fields to house specific data, but has otherwise “minimized customizations and instead relied on the core NetSuite modules,” according to Jessie, whose team was immediately impressed with Bryant Park’s sales team, implementation approach and team of technical experts.

“The responsiveness and communication were both fantastic and culminated in a very good implementation experience,” Jessie points out, noting that the Johnson family itself decided very early in the process to learn how to use and optimize its new enterprise resource planning process. Bryant Park helped them achieve that goal, and more.

“We made the decision to commit ourselves right down to the details, with the goal of understanding how and why it functioned and also being able to do some of the post-go-live work ourselves,” Jessie adds. “That commitment proved fruitful because even today we’re making modifications and creating saved searches to address most of our needs without outside help.”

Expanding its Horizons with NetSuite and BPC

With NetSuite in place, WOV-IN’s leadership now has more accurate, accessible data right at its fingertips. All team members have been trained on the system, which is much more advanced than the manufacturer’s previous system, yet still very user-friendly and easy to learn. 

“NetSuite is much more of an advanced system than what we were used to, so I had some initial fears that the new ERP would be overwhelming,” Jessie says. “It's actually been the opposite. NetSuite has provided our team—even our less ‘technical’ associates—the ability to see more information and make better decisions about work and projects.”

Now, WOV-IN is leveraging Bryant Park’s Managed Services offering to create even better reports and make its dashboards more robust and useful. “We really want to drive more efficiency, and I think Managed Services will give us a proactive roadmap that we can use to further streamline our business.”

Joe concurs and says he’s looking forward to diving even further into NetSuite’s capabilities and functionalities right along with the Bryant Park team. “Bryant Park’s understanding of NetSuite is very extensive; I’ve learned a lot by working with them,” says Joe “In fact, I feel like somewhat of a ‘mini-NetSuite administrator’ myself, without even having to take any of the courses.”