In this series, entrepreneur and serial business founder Ron Efron shares his experiences and insights from using an all-in-one cloud ERP system to grow a business in China from a small startup in Beijing to a global business serving the Fortune 500 across APAC.

As a business owner who has used NetSuite’s cloud-based all-in-one business management software to run multiple businesses in China and Asia, I often get asked: what are the specific benefits a system like NetSuite for growing mid-sized companies?

In a way, this is quite a strange question to ask, because in my mind, these kinds of systems are not just beneficial; they are a necessity for companies with any ambition to grow and scale their operations.

Nobody would discuss the benefits of a company paying taxes, or renting an office with working electricity… these are just things you have to do! The same is true of a business management system.

In the same way that no serious company would evaluate whether to run an office with working air conditioning, I don’t think any serious company should weigh the advantages and disadvantages of implementing a proper business management system versus keeping everything in excel.  

Robust business management systems are not optional, in my view, especially if you are making the (often painful) transition from small to mid-size business. I think trying to expand as quickly as we did without a system to control data across multiple regions effectively would have been an incredibly risky thing to do.

So the question for any serious company should not be “whether” they should implement an integrated business data management system, but “when”.

Simply put, the success we achieved in growing a business across the APAC region would not have been possible without NetSuite, our integrated platform for managing business operations. Below are just a few of the main ways in which NetSuite facilitated global expansion will controlling costs and business risk for a professional services business that I founded in 1999.

Headcount savings and employee productivity

First, we were able to expand our business globally and multiply our revenue while keeping the number of employees in each back-office department more or less the same. The headcount of the procurement team has not increased and is essentially the same team as it was 8 years ago. We did add headcount to the finance team, but I would estimate that NetSuite helped us to avoid hiring double the number of new finance staff by automating a lot of the accounting work processes. Profitability per employee also increased significantly after we deployed NetSuite. Of course, NetSuite wasn’t the only factor behind this but it did make a significant contribution to ongoing management efforts to improve this performance indicator.

The amount of time it took to close a month for the entire company also dropped from more than a week to just about 1 working day, which helped us achieve huge time cost savings.

Global visibility on operations

The amount of time it took to gather reports on the status of all our global projects was also reduced from a couple of days to a couple of hours with NetSuite. And after we implemented global inventory management, staff were also able to immediately access records to see available inventory across an entire region, which made procurement much more efficient.

Painless expansion

Another big advantage of using NetSuite was that it made it so much easier to manage our expansion globally. Apart from anything else, being able to just activate another subsidiary in the system when you expand to another location, rather than buying and installing a local accounting software application each time was a huge plus. So each time we opened a new branch, all we needed was the office, computers and an internet connection and we were ready to do business! And each time we set up a new subsidiary, the tax rules for that region are pre-configured in the system. This meant that even though we had offices in multiple global regions, the entire finance team was in Beijing and could do accounting for the entire company, including Singapore, India, Japan and other regions.

Improved control

NetSuite allowed us to expand quickly and easily, but equally importantly was the control it allowed us to retain over the business.

When a business expands to different regions, control and the ability to check what’s going on in each region is hugely important. As an executive that is about to expand a business into other regions, you inevitably ask yourself a whole bunch of questons: How are we going to check what’s going on in each of the global offices? Are people doing their jobs right? Are they managing company data responsibly?

With NetSuite, If a manager logs into the system and sees that in one office, project statuses aren’t getting updated, or people aren’t logging sales activities or generating quotes or submitting expense reports, then they know there is a problem. This visibility and control wouldn’t be possible without a globally centralized system.

Process driven, not people driven

Another key benefit of systems like NetSuite is that your company becomes less reliant on people, which reduces business risk in so many ways. If you can automate business processes and manage data with robust system controls, the organization becomes much less vulnerable to staff turnover or individuals not acting in good faith.

Avoiding the headaches of on-premise solutions

Another crucial point to make is that nowadays, cloud architecture is just as essential as all-in-one functionality for business management systems. All the benefits mentioned above would almost certainly not been realized if we were using an all-in-one platform that used on-premise hardware and client server software architecture.

The benefits of NetSuite’s SaaS cloud architecture compared with traditional software architecture are almost too numerous to mention: we never have to manually upgrade anything or maintain expensive IT servers; our IT headcount is still low; anyone work on the system anywhere with an internet connection; the system basically never crashes because it’s synchronized across multiple NetSuite data centers; we never have to worry about the system slowing down because too many people are logging on; our business data is protected by world class security measures… I could go on and on!

I know that a lot of ERP systems offer all in one functionality but use on-premise servers. But I can’t imagine how cumbersome it would have been to have an on-premise system in each global office. Once you get used to cloud, it’s unthinkable to do things any other way. I don’t know how other companies manage with on-premise solutions!

To sum up, we gained almost incalculable benefits from choosing a cloud-based integrated business management platform at an early stage in the company’s growth. I strongly believe that fast growing mid-size companies should view cloud-based all-in-one business management platforms as an absolutely essential component of their growth strategies.