Cloud ERP empowers YWCA’s mission with a unified NetSuite solution
At a glance
Explore the ways our NetSuite ERP solution supported YWCA Australia with a centralised system - across eight divisions – to streamline its processes and gain a 360 degree view of the organisation.
Industry
Products
Services
Replaced systems
- MYOB
- Xero
- Excel spreadsheets
- SAP
The client
YWCA Australia is a leading national feminist organisation working towards a future where all women, young women and girls are equal, safe and respected. With a goal of achieving true gender equality, they operate Australia-wide offering local programs and services in areas such as leadership, housing, homelessness, safety and wellbeing.
We wanted a system flexible enough to meet the needs of the organisation, and a partner who could connect NetSuite with external systems. Annexa provided that flexibility.Faisal Mukhtar, National CFO, YWCA Australia
The challenge
Previously, YWCA’s accounting, financial and inventory systems were running in silos, making it challenging to gain visibility of their operations and financial health across eight distinct businesses and three subsidiaries. This was creating significant operational complexity. Annexa replaced their web of disconnected systems -spanning eight divisions, each with their own systems, processes and teams - with a solution able to centralise and standardise business processes, improve operational efficiency, optimise resourcing, and provide management with a single source of truth in real-time. Looking forward, they required a solution that could seamlessly integrate with external systems such as payroll, NDIS, social housing management (Chintaro), hotel property management and POS solutions.
To meet these demands, they selected NetSuite, and engaged the expertise of Annexa to assist with the design, implementation and development of their NetSuite solution.
3 subsidiaries
7 business divisions
21 operating locations
More than 100 cost centres
The results
Working closely with Annexa, YWCA is undertaking a phased approach to delivery. The initial phase involved a 12-week deployment of NetSuite Financials. During this phase, Annexa helped streamline YWCA’s accounting and compliance processes by using NetSuite Financials to unify all 8 scattered systems into a single integrated back-end system, enabling management to make timely, insight-driven business decisions. This phase also deliberately involved minimal customisations to allow staff to familiarise themselves with the system and provide feedback to build out specific functionality around their needs in future phases.
With centralised financial management and procurement complete with electronic approval, YWCA has effectively streamlined operations, enhanced their data extraction and reporting capabilities, freed up staff to focus on more value-adding activities, and all while experiencing high levels of user adoption.
The time spent on month end reporting has also been drastically reduced. Prior to NetSuite, it would take weeks to consolidate group reports, now reporting is real-time so they always know exactly how each business unit in fairing. Reporting is far more flexible too. Through the use of ‘segments’, data is captured in more granular detail providing YWCA diverse ways of slicing and dicing data for reporting purposes.
NetSuite now enables YWCA to easily maintain accounting records by business units to cost centres and by subsidiary.
It gave me comfort, as the CFO, to have a complete visibility and very strong internal controls. With 500 staff working out of many different locations, it no longer made sense to have supplier payments being processed in separate locations. NetSuite allows payments to be processed in one system, providing a centralised AP service to the entire organisation. NetSuite has really strengthened YWCA Australia's shared services functionFaisal Mukhtar, CFO, YWCA Australia
