Posted by Ian McCue, Content Manager

Precision Medical Products experienced the early success every startup covets, growing exponentially every year.

But as the company, which sells gloves for medical and industrial workers as well as durable medical equipment like braces, boots and crutches, shipped more and more product out of its warehouses every day, it struggled to keep operational costs down. To avoid increasing headcount, Precision Medical needed to automate everyday processes that required manual data entry and consumed hours of employees’ time every day.

Shipping costs were also a major issue for Precision Medical. The Northern California-based business promises to deliver orders to customers within two days, which became cost-prohibitive when it shipped its large and heavy products across the country.

The company brought in Bruce Capagli as COO in late 2016 to build a plan for sustainable growth. Capagli knew Precision Medical needed to replace its entry-level business systems with more robust technology to reduce operational costs. And he needed a rapid solution – these problems would only become more urgent as order volume continued to climb.

A seasoned IT veteran, Capagli knew the months- or even years-long ERP implementations with major cost overruns he had endured in the past were not an option. But the world of software had changed dramatically and there were now a number of cloud solutions that would not require the extensive hardware and IT staff investment of his previous projects. He sought a business platform that could scale with rapid growth and be implemented quickly.

SuiteSuccess proves a perfect fit

Precision Medical found a cloud platform that would support its expansion while allowing it to stay nimble in NetSuite. It could get financials, customer relationship management (CRM) order management and inventory management systems up and running quickly with NetSuite’s SuiteSuccess methodology, which leverages the experience of thousands of deployments and leading practices to launch solutions on an accelerated timeline.

The supplier of medical goods was up and running with the new platform just 59 days later.

“I’m all about just getting stuff done fast, I don’t like things to linger, and we had immediate need, so when that was offered to us, we definitely wanted to take advantage of it,” Capagli said.

“I’ve just really enjoyed and appreciated the commitment to meeting timelines and deliverables. That’s a refreshing change from previous experiences when people would throw out a date, and the date would come and go, and it would be nothing but excuses.”

Order fulfillment became much more efficient and NetSuite’s Advanced Order Management module solved the problem with shipping costs, routing orders to whichever warehouse offers the best shipping costs based on zip code. That allows the organization to meet customer expectations for rapid delivery.

Soon after, Precision Medical continued its move up the stairway and unified ecommerce with financials, CRM and order and inventory management, eliminating manual data entry with online orders. A SuiteSuccess for Commerce implementation got the new web store live in only 23 days.

The upgraded site offers consumers and B2B buyers a better customer experience with a cleaner look and feel, improved navigation and product suggestions for bestsellers or related items. Wholesale buyers can request a quote or quickly add an item to their cart by SKU or product name.

On the back-end, Capagli uses drag-and-drop site management tools to add new products, swap pictures and make other changes as the business evolves.

“I think the biggest benefit is not needing a developer or highly-compensated IT resource on staff to build, maintain and keep the system up and running,” he said. “I’m able to make changes and updates, maintain it, do everything that needs to be done with the changing of the business without any training or anything. It’s just very intuitive and easy to use.”

Revenue climbs without increasing operational costs

Precision Medical’s revenue climbed 70 percent year-over-year from the beginning of 2017 to the start of 2018 and online sales are responsible for much of that revenue growth. Today, the business sends out an average of 40 orders per day, up from about 15 per day early on. Over that same period, operational costs remained flat due to the scalability of their system, which did not require additional resources to support that growth.

The company will soon open a third warehouse in the central U.S. (its current facilities are on the East and West Coast) and hopes to ramp up its wholesale business as it manufactures more items.

Precision Medical is evidence that a rapid business transformation is more feasible than ever before with the technology available today. Fast-growing companies can quickly reimagine their operations to support growth.

“For us being a small, lean company and growing as quickly as we are, this solution helped us take our business to the next level,” Capagli said. “We could not feel more confident about our future in this industry.”