Background
The founders of Palmetto State Armory had a passion for firearms, tactical gear and the great outdoors. Started as an ammunition and magazine website, Palmetto has grown into a full-service company with the website, multiple retail locations and its own personalized firearms brand.
Issue
Palmetto State Armory reached out to RSM when their existing systems were unable to keep up with the company’s rapid growth. They used SAP for core accounting, financial, inventory and warehouse management needs, and Google Docs for inventory tracking. Palmetto wanted to reduce the number of systems into a single platform that was scalable, cloud-based and cost-effective. Palmetto’s multiple tracking and reporting systems could not handle the company’s rapid growth, resulting in a backlog of website orders, which in turn was creating data issues with the warehouse management system. Additionally, their accounting department could not run financials without having an impact on the performance of the system for the rest of the company. Even with limited functionality, the reporting system could take hours to complete a single report.
SAP relied on an integration to report sales transactions from each store in batches. The integration was prone to delay and error, and often not synchronized. Management’s lack of visibility into how each store was operating resulted in inaccurate information and complicated planning and decisionmaking.
Solution
Palmetto turned to RSM to purchase NetSuite and assist the organization in implementing the Mid-Market Edition with several additional modules to address the issues. One of the critical modules was NetSuite’s Financial Management, a key interest for Palmetto. With budgeting and automated expense allocation, NetSuite’s Financial Management provided budgeting, expense management, flexible billing and statistical account functionality that Palmetto lacked. The company now has clear real-time visibility into budgets, spends less time on manual billing processes, and can calculate allocations dynamically using statistical accounts.
Results
Under budget and on time, RSM successfully transitioned Palmetto onto NetSuite to run their primary financials, inventory management and more. The new capabilities have improved Palmetto’s reporting capabilities and streamlined the repair process in NetSuite. NetSuite doesn’t hinder their daily operations, and the daily transaction volume limit is much higher. With greater visibility, the accounting and warehouse departments can both see the same data and have a real-time read on inventory. Buyers are able to view accurate information in NetSuite, allowing them to make better purchasing decisions. This gives Palmetto greater visibility into their inventory, reducing the amount of supplies needed on hand to support their customer sales demand.
