Sea Harvest (formerly Mareterram) is a vertically integrated agribusiness, headquartered in Fremantle, Western Australia. They focus on providing premium quality and sustainable produce to both local and international customers. Mareterram has three divisions: Mareterram Limited (MTL), Mareterram Fishing (MTF) — which catches and processes seafood, and Mareterram Trading (MTT) — the company’s sales and marketing arm and the first point of contact with their customers. MTT also provides a range of other premium food brands, which complement the core seafood offering.
A tangle of business solutions
Previously, Mareterram managed the business financials and operations with four different, and largely non-integrated, business systems. Two of the divisions used MYOB, which allowed some degree of streamlining. But overall, spreadsheets populated with manually inputted data was the only viable way for the business to collate, process and share information. This is how accounts, reconciliations, orders and many more operations were run.
“Reporting was difficult, and just getting an overall picture of the company’s performance based on one source of the truth was close to impossible,” said Scott Razga, Mareterram’s project manager.
“At each month’s end it used to take 10-12 working days just to reconcile everything and make sure it was all in order. And the system we had in our fishing division was very basic and hadn’t been updated in ten years. It didn’t have stock control or bin locations, or even accounts receivables or payables functionality. We used MYOB to do our invoicing but that required a lot of double entry.”
This double handling contained room for error, slowed the AP process down and made any approval or allocation queries overly convoluted. The whole process was time-consuming and simply not sustainable.
Sounding out the options
Mareterram issued an RFP for a new business solution in December 2015. The company looked at several powerful options before deciding on NetSuite.
“One of our main criteria was that the solution should be an ERP system, providing us with consolidated accounting,” said Razga. “And it needed to be a full cloud solution. We didn’t want to employ IT staff to do updates and maintain services. By moving to the cloud we knew we wouldn’t have to worry about any of that.”
Being a relatively new, and geographically dispersed, business, affordability and accessibility was also important. “Being able to access our data from anywhere with your phone or from a web browser really appealed to us.
A confident partner choice
Once Mareterram had chosen NetSuite as the ideal business solution, they went to market for a suitable partner.
Razga said that Fusion5’s close relationship with NetSuite and their five-star partnership rating was a point of difference when evaluating their options. “We needed to have complete confidence in our partner. While from the outside our system doesn’t appear to be overly complicated, in reality it’s quite complex. We needed the ability to manage importing, exporting, local sales, projects and internal labour time as well as external contract labour, warehousing and more. We had quite an array of requirements for just one solution to replace.”
The project started in June 2016 and went live in December 2016. Fusion5 replaced MYOB and the other systems with NetSuite, and developed EDI integration with their warehouse and barcoding solutions.
Razga said Fusion5 was easy to work with, and the NetSuite project was delivered without any major issues or time delays. In fact, the project was delivered under budget so the outstanding balance is being allocated to post go-live support.
Success from day one
Mareterram were so impressed with the results that they decided to make an immediate and full cutover to NetSuite from their legacy systems. And their confidence in NetSuite and Fusion5 paid off.
“From day one we haven’t missed a sale - so that was key,” said Razga. “As soon as we went live we were processing orders, communicating with our cold store, distributing goods and operating as normal. That was a massive advantage for us, because December is our peak period for seafood sales. We discussed delaying, because it’s such an important time for us, but we were confident with the solution Fusion5 provided, and that we wouldn’t have any issues.”
Goodbye manual processes, hello business improvement
Mareterram’s users are delighted with NetSuite. “It’s noticeably better than the other system,” said Razga. “It saves our sales, trading and accounts team a lot of time by streamlining four steps down to one, and the feedback from the corporate division has been great.”
While Mareterram said goodbye to a tangled mass of manual processes and data entry it’s unlikely to change employee numbers. Instead, Razga says that staff are shifting to other, more strategic tasks that will improve the business. “We’ve freed up one whole person in the trading division. So now we’ve got the capacity to look at value-added tasks like producing more in-depth analysis around what product gets sold to whom, and evaluating our pricing and how effective our advertising campaigns are.”
Mareterram has never had a CRM before, so exploring how they can use NetSuite CRM to net more customers is on the company’s ‘finally able to do’ list.
Fusion5 were easy to work with, and the NetSuite project was delivered without any major issues or time delays. In fact, the project was delivered under budget!"
Scott Razga, Project Manager
