at a glance
New Zealand salt manufacturer, Dominion Salt, selected NetSuite and Annexa after a company-wide staff consultation, replacing an unsupported ERP and spreadsheets with a single platform spanning finance, inventory, manufacturing, procurement, warehousing and sales.
- Microsoft Dynamics AX
- Spreadsheets
-
Unit cost report from five hours to five minutes
-
Month-end close halved from four days to two
-
Streamlined budget process and output
the client
About Dominion Salt
Dominion Salt is a New Zealand salt manufacturer with operations at Lake Grassmere in Marlborough and Mount Maunganui in the Bay of Plenty. The company was founded in 1942 and harvests 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes of solar salt from seawater each year.
Its product range covers agricultural and animal nutrition salts, food and sea salts, industrial and water treatment grades and pharmaceutical-grade sodium chloride, which it has manufactured since 1977 on a GMP-certified line. Customers span New Zealand and export markets.
The pharmaceutical certification means the company operates to medicines-manufacturing standards for traceability and quality, with batch and lot control running through inventory, production and distribution.
The fact that you've got people that are wanting to listen to your problems and help you solve them. This is what we're facing in the real world, where we can do it better. It's not go away, sort it out. It's, hey, jump in. We had people from Annexa on site on go live, back in the office since then, numerous calls and meetings trying to fine-tune details as we've gone. It was like we're part of the family in that Annexa wanted to help us go forward, solve problems and to look forward. And that hasn't changed from day one.Michael KartonRetired CFO, Dominion Salt
the challenge
An unsupported ERP opens the door to a better way of working
When Microsoft moved its customers towards Dynamics 365, the version of Dynamics AX running Dominion Salt fell out of support. The business could have followed the upgrade path. Instead, the finance team treated the moment as a chance to look at the whole operation and ask what a manufacturer with two sites, bulk inventory and a pharmaceutical line should expect from its systems in the years ahead.
At that time, day-to-day work depended on manual entry. Sales orders and supplier invoices were keyed by hand, reports were written by a business analyst on request and the annual budget took around four months to assemble through linked spreadsheets. With a number of long-serving staff due to retire in the coming years, CFO Michael Karton wanted to leave the business running on a system the next generation could pick up and build on.
The company began by talking to its people. Staff in every department, from the factory floor to finance, were asked what took up their day and what they wanted to change. The solution was a system where people could get their own information, where orders and invoices went in automatically, where maintenance data flowed into finance and where everyone worked from the same numbers.
Two vendors presented their solutions and after a second round of staff consultation, the answer came back clearly for NetSuite and Annexa.
We were doing 20% in the system and 80% off the system. I wanted to turn that around so it’s 80% inside the system and 20% outside.
– Michael Karton, Retired CFO, Dominion Salt
the results
A foundation the next generation can build on
Dominion Salt now runs most of its business inside the system. Finance, lot-controlled inventory, manufacturing, procurement, warehousing and sales sit on a single NetSuite platform that went live in mid-2025, with RF-SMART, Prodoc and the maintenance system connected to the same record.
Getting there took work on both sides. The go-live was demanding for a pharmaceutical-certified manufacturer with bulk medical grade inventory, and Annexa had people on site for go-live, back in the office afterwards and on call as processes were adjusted.
For Dominion Salt, the clearest measure of the change is time. A unit cost report that analyses each factory’s throughput against budget took five hours to produce in the old environment. In NetSuite it takes five minutes. Month-end close has come down from four days to two in a straightforward month. Around 70 per cent of sales orders now enter the system automatically through Smart UI, leaving customer service to check them and move on.
The budget cycle has changed most of all. Under the previous process, sales forecasts, expenses, raw material costs and depreciation were fed through a chain of spreadsheets, and each revision after a review meeting took more than a week to flow through. This year the EBIT figure was agreed on a Saturday and, using NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, the final reports were finished on the Monday, two weeks faster than before.
“That’s a massive, massive change,” Karton said, “and I’m happy that’s going to be one of my legacies when I leave.”
Karton has worked with technology vendors across a long career and says the Annexa relationship stands apart. From the first sales conversations through go-live and the months of tuning that followed, the same people have stayed on the account, and each meeting picks up as if the last one were yesterday.
“My dealings with Annexa, and I’ve said it many times before, I felt part of the family. I haven’t seen that with any IT company I’ve been involved with up until Annexa,” Karton says.
The company is now in a consolidation year. Accounts payable is the next automation target, with CRM, EDI and capacity planning to follow and natural-language AI over the NetSuite database expected to take much of the remaining report design off the finance team.
Outstanding. Full stop. Best partner I've ever worked with in my life.Michael KartonRetired CFO, Dominion Salt