Street Furniture Australia: TIG’s NetSuite Integration Unlocks Savings

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About Street Furniture Australia

Street Furniture Australia designs and manufactures highly durable furniture for the public realm and their mission is to bring enjoyment to all those who create, build, maintain and use public spaces. They uniquely run both an R&D program and a factory under one roof in Western Sydney, and while they have a prime ERP, NetSuite, they didn’t have NetSuite integration.

Since 1986 they have supplied more than 30,000 places in Australia and around the globe including all of Asia Pacific, the Middle East, the US and Europe. All products are made-to-order, finished, quality-controlled and dispatched from the factory floor to ISO standards.

The Challenge: Isolated Systems

Delivering predominately to construction sites with a made-to-order product comes with some unique distribution challenges. As their product is one the last to be installed, Street Furniture’s deliveries are directly affected by site access, weather, forklift capability and most of all, the variability of construction deadlines.

Managing the constant variables with multiple transport providers was a time-consuming process, and even though Street Furniture was using a modern 3rd party FMS (Freight Management System), it wasn’t up to scratch. What’s more, Street Furniture had a best-of-class ERP, NetSuite, however, the systems weren’t talking and the integration was basic at best.

The result was a double-entry of data, key-in errors and checking multiple systems for information, which they need at their fingertips to manage their business effectively.

“TIG’s proactive approach to the training, implementation and ongoing support has been nothing short of excellent”

The Solution: System Communication and NetSuite Integration

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As usual, our first step was an analysis of Street Furniture’s freight requirements. From here we could implement a managed freight solution with tailored transport carriers to suit their needs. Street Furniture could then take advantage of TIG’s full-service offering, with TIG managing their freight distribution and providing account management, customer service, consolidated invoicing, shipping integration and a world-class Freight Management System, OpenFreight. 

TIG then fully integrated this into NetSuite, so Street Furniture could finally rely on a single source of truth, with up-to-date shipping data and a two-way integration between NetSuite and OpenFreight. Reducing key-in errors, the time to key in and despatch orders and having freight costs back in NetSuite has been game-changing for Street Furniture.

“Implementing TIG’s managed freight service along with their NetSuite integration was considerably smoother than implementing our previous Freight Management System on its own”

The Results

  • Integration –Street Furniture saved many hours of manual entry or 25% of key-in time
  • Consolidated approach – a single contact for freight reduced their customer service load by 40 % and freed their time to “service their clients and get answers back to clients much quicker.
  • Freight Costs – using best-fit carriers & least-cost routing has saved Street Furniture 18% on their bottom line.

“The proven experience and knowledge that TIG brought to the table, paired with their customer service, freight management and integration capabilities has made this one of the smoothest changes to Street Furniture’s business to date.”