How Inari Medical Scaled on NetSuite

00:00hi everyone this is tom salemi welcome back to device talks tuesdays we have a great episode for you this week as you can see the title there is netsuite scalability flexibility access and compliance and a cloud-based erp we have a very robust and knowledgeable panel today it's going to have a really interesting conversation about uh about the benefits of cloud-based erp metal devices companies have struggled to find an erp to meet their rigorous requirements but this look looking for something allows them to flex and change and to meet their customer needs and netsuite today is really going to be gaining popularity and we're going to really talk with one of their customers about uh about what it can deliver and what are the benefits so before i get into into that i do want to just give you a introduction of course as we always do if this is as you know a virtual event and it is available on demand so

00:54this is completely shareable uh if you have friends and colleagues who would benefit from the insights that are coming please let them know they can find it at devicetalks.com we'll have that posted up there tomorrow just need to give them their give us their name and an email and such and it'll be available for them with the video the powerpoint everything that goes with it and they'll even be able to ask questions uh we well slides are available for you in the resource widget so you can follow along we'll have a brief introduction of luxent and of the issue but this will be primarily a conrad conversation based presentation i've got questions and i'm sure you have questions so if you do please uh put your questions in the inbox we'll uh we'll bring those in as uh as they fit or

01:42we'll save some for the end i always advise people just to ask them right when they come to mind number one so you don't forget number two so we know how how many questions there are to answer so we can sort of measure the end of the episode so please ask your questions as they come and again if you're watching this on demand thank you for doing that and you can still ask questions we'll make sure they get answered and if you're tweeting about this please use device talks tuesday it's quickly about device talks we have our in-person meetings next year we'll be meeting in boston minnesota and the west coast all this information is available on devicetalks.com we also have our podcast the weekly device hawks weekly podcast comes out on fridays each episode focuses on a specific area within medtech we'll be focused on urology this week

02:30we're going to have spine and orthopedics and surgical robotics coming up in coming weeks and this was on uh on magnetic surgery robotic robotic tools excuse me uh and you can find again everything on devicetalks.com we have our medtronic talks podcast where we talk to leaders of medtronic those will be coming out pretty much every week for the rest of the rest of the year so you can subscribe to all of these on most major podcast channels amazon spotify google apple etc and finally on friday we um we unveiled our newest podcast intuitive talks we'll be talking to leaders at intuitive for the uh for the rest of the year we'll have about one per month and uh we'll be looking at how cert intuitive we'll talked a bit about their past in this episode that's out with gary guther but in this episode in future episodes we'll be talking about their the future surgical robotics is a is a popular space be a lot of competition uh emerging

03:29it's already emerged and uh intuitive uh has thoughts on where things are headed so uh please check that out as well so with uh no further discussion about us i'd like to thank our sponsor election for bringing this panel together today and for bringing you all here on this episode of device talks tuesdays as i said we have a a road bus panel uh from luxent we have uh vivian keena she is the founder ceo we have ben katerberg he is chief solutions architect and uh they were kind enough to bring uh their car or colleagues from nari one of their uh one of their customers and we're gonna talk about the uh how they work together and uh and how an aria has benefited we're going to speak with as you can see there kashup savanni eric lau and luis buanellos uh the procurement manager eric is of course vice president of manufacturing and kashup is senior i.t manager so uh

04:27this is going to be an excellent panel but i want to give give luxent an opportunity to uh talk a few minutes about uh what they bring to uh to this problem and the solution they're offering so i'd like to hand this off to off to vivian great thanks tom um i could go forward there one more yeah yeah there you go there you go um so lucky's been around for um since 2009 and our focus has primarily been on manufacturing and distribution customers with um service um we've been really focused in the next three community and um our we're a full service partner so we're a full service partner and we also have an fdnr which means we can do development integrations in conjunction with the implementation and support we have serviced over 800 customers across the us and worldwide and we are located throughout our consultants are located and support is located out the united states um you can go forward um so

05:32we're full service partner so we help customers as we help donari and the important selection of their their new erp and really trying to align their software and their needs with with the netsuite solution and then helping them through the implementation any integrations needed and then the more important thing is the ongoing support and strength of their users and ensuring those users are adopted and educated and say and that solution continues to extend with them as they grow you can go forward um here's some manufacturers from the luxent community and you that you might know some of them medical device some of them in other medical fields but but we have focus in the medical device arena from the inception of luxent um so you might recognize some of those names there like a forward oh and i can give that to anari so thank you um

06:35we're excited to have you today um tasha if you can do a brief um introduction on inari medical sure thanks vivian um so as uh you know vivian alluded to and tom thanks so much for having us on this panel um we're you know excited and delighted to be here inari medical really is a young startup you know that was founded in 2013 we primarily specialize in treating venous [Music] venous clot indications and diseases and so we have done you know over 30 000 patients treated over our life of our company we have currently two fda cleared and marketed systems or products out there and um we've just you know experienced a tremendous amount of growth over the past couple of years and we continue to kind of you know look at our mission of treating um this disease state in a you know very very methodical fashion and and we religiously focus on as a company of kind of treating the patient first um with that i think i can hand it back to you tom to get us going on the discussion excellent

07:53well i was excited when anari was uh i was told in aria being a panel it's a it's an exciting story and and i i didn't realize you were founded uh in 2013 so you've experienced a lot of growth uh sticking to the topic i get asked a lot of questions about the company but what were some of the signs that an aria was ready and needed uh to consider an erp system what were you using at the time to run the business and maybe you can sort of explain where where it was falling short you want me to take that one kashup i'm sorry that was for kashup whoever would like to answer take it away i'm throwing it out to the ether sure maybe i i can kick that one off um i mean what we were using previously was quickbooks enterprise uh is what we we started with um and then we we implemented kind of a bolt-on to that in fishbowl um for inventory management uh those solutions worked

08:47well for us early on but as we we grew uh we needed a bit more i think we were outgrowing things on on the accounting side i don't know that i'm qualified to talk about about their issues but from a manufacturing perspective there are maybe three main areas that we needed some uh expanded functionality to keep up with the company's growth um i think the first was was really with mrp um in terms of planning we needed to move past uh excel spreadsheets to a more comprehensive and automated offering that that netsuite provided i think if there's anything that that that keeps a manufacturing or an ops guy up at night it's the prospect of running out of a material and facing down a a lying down situation or a back order i think really that the second thing we we needed was better real-time visibility to our raw materials and our work order statuses um and and really more detailed uh uh reporting um

09:47i think that the third thing we were really looking for was uh we needed a system that we could uh integrate or was compatible with the warehouse management system again as we were growing we wanted to ensure accuracy and efficiency within our work order picking um and processing and order fulfillment excellent i'm just curious was there oh kashup if we're going to add to that uh no i wasn't oh i'm sorry i thought i heard someone i thought i heard someone else talking i was just wondering eric was there uh uh was it a plan to move to an erp like this or do you sort of just sort of is it like a lobster in a pot you're kind of getting hotter and hotter and you realize you need to make a change i wonder what sort of when when does it become evidence like we gotta evident that we have to do something different i i i think we were uh effective in in kind of picking up on some of the early signs where things were headed and that we needed kind of a more uh elaborate solution um than what we had i wouldn't say that we brought it all the way to a a boiling point um to stay ahead of that a bit

10:59that's great kashup what were some of the requirements that you wanted in an erp system did you you sort of map that out in advance we we did um um we had a pretty um robust kind of selection process we were looking at different erps and we had you know even stood up sort of a selection committee within the company at the time as vivian will tell you you know pretty much it felt like the whole company was involved in selecting we had a you know pretty uh kind of detailed score card that we kept in terms of what factors we wanted to you know evaluate and some of the things that really you know looking back on that process some of the things that really jumped out where we were looking for a system that was first and foremost cloud-based we were not looking to host anything on-site or on-premise we were looking for a system that could sort of scale and grow because we knew that there was going to be you know if things broke right as a business we knew that

11:54there's going to be a long runway of growth in front of us and we wanted whatever system we picked to be able to keep up with that and and kind of hand in hand with that we had sort of a few you know connected pieces to our erp ecosystem already whether it be a tax solution eric mentioned kind of a you know a wms a warehouse management solution that we wanted to implement whether it's expense reporting with concur things like that that we were looking for a system that really could you know integrate well with other you know providers right and really give us that sort of plug-and-play feel that modern systems today do so that was a big part of our evaluation and then just you know reportability kind of ease of getting data back out modern sort of ui all of that played a you know not an insignificant role i would say in the evaluation process i only imagine i have trouble enough with my expense accounts i can't imagine all you have to manage with the with this system i imagine that

12:52there's a lot of uh kind of a lot of a la carte opportunities a lot of this system does this this system does that i mean were did you did netsuite sort of did were you looking for something that kind of came out of the box with all the functionality you needed and that that's we provide that yeah i mean for the most part i think you know we we did as part of our evaluation kind of look at sort of requirement by requirement or feature by feature you know what's out of the box and what's not and where could we you know extend the solution right and um one of the differences for us at least i felt like you know being at inari versus other places we sort of leaned into a couple of trends that most historically most medical device and med tech companies kind of shy away from you know first and foremost we leaned into the cloud trend right and we said hey we we really

13:43actually want the latest and greatest and and we want the sort of you know the ability to have that kind of constantly be updated right whether it's an erp or whatnot and then the second trend we lean into was you know the big bad word of customization right lots of companies lots of people shy away from that but for us it was one of those where we said you know we recognized the strengths and and weaknesses of all the different systems including nuts we knew that you know netflix played really well for us in sort of the accounting and finance and reporting side and we knew that it needed a little bit of assist here and there for the manufacturing and operations and quality side in terms of whether it's you know things like lot traceability which is huge in this industry right pushing down sort of that lot device record down to um you know the the individual transactions and so on and so we

14:36actually leaned into that with luxent as our partner who's great at sort of architecting those point you know customizations for us if you will these bolt-on scripts and things like that that helped kind of piece together the final picture but that was another part of our aspect of netsuite that we really liked was its extendability being able to sort of customize the system a little bit i imagine i mean this is the metal device energy industry so uh uh and you're developing cutting-edge therapeutics and and devices that need to be regulated or are regulated and need to be monitored by the fda uh how let's dive a little bit deeper into into that requirement uh is it i guess eric i'll ask this question to you is an aria required to buy the fda to perform software validation on netsuite software tell us a bit about the process and how that's yeah absolutely a lot of the software that we use is is subject to validation to ensure that

15:35it's it's performing um as intended um i mean i think uh uh though maybe a significant uh undertaking for an erp system um i think software validation is a fairly simple thing from a high level um i think you need to just define the requirements in terms of how the system needs to perform to to meet its intended purpose you need to design test cases around that to challenge those requirements and you need to execute on those test cases to ensure that the system performs exactly as as expected we we did that with netsuite i would say most of our requirements were related to various inventory transactions performing as as expected uh challenging traceability related to those transactions and we didn't really run into any issues there netsuite met all of our uh our established requirements interesting

16:33well tell us uh kashup and maybe lewis if you could uh tell us a bit lewis you haven't had a chance to uh to share yet tell us a bit about your relationship with uh with luxent how and maybe we can get into the whole selection process uh as we answer this question yeah well uh that the support from luxent has been fantastic uh obviously you know we we established a relationship early on right uh selecting the partner and and uh very aggressive implementation timeline and target and stuff and so that came with with the uh it's a selection of netsuite uh but yeah i mean luxent overall has been just a fantastic partner i think uh working with us and helping us understand uh um and customize some of some of the flows right um i think kashup but touched on this and obviously in our world in our field uh lottery's ability is key right in taking uh traceability from from from uh inventory detail to revisions

17:31and iterations and lot numbers and exploration dates all that stuff was um something that the luxent helped us kind of get and and grab out of the system i think that uh you know we have a great supporting cast and uh architects and and the folks that we've worked with that have really uh helped us get to to where we're at today um so i think yeah overall relationship with luxent has been fantastic support has been great um you know some of some of the early folks that we've been working with been uh we've been working with ben recently but we've got some other folks out there ryan and cassius and rachel uh vivian obviously has been great working with us so um yeah a little bit about the support and relationship there luxent and how about the selection process cache is i'm not quite sure who this question would go to it might be you uh what how did you select uh select them as your netsuite erp provider

18:23well um you know really the the provider selection was equally as important as the platform selection as well and the reason for that is we had a very aggressive timeline as luis alluded to so our our total time from sort of when we kicked the project off to say hey we want a erp system um to get going live was six months and that included about you know a couple of months of sort of evaluating different systems and then partners and then selecting one and and then three and a half months of implementation so it's critical for us to find a partner that could sort of live in in that you know and be comfortable with that timeline of three and a half months and that comfort level really only comes from a partner who's willing to work as you know um as nimble as as we would we were willing to work as sort of flexible and as as agile a manner as we would like right we sort of have a one of our kind of uh tenants of our our company here really is that we like to sort of um you know make decisions fast right um uh and iterate very quickly we if

19:32we're gonna fail we fail early right typical sort of startup mentality that you find in all successful startups and so we were looking for that from a partner standpoint as well somebody who could come in and kind of play in those areas and be comfortable and one of the other kind of you know hurdles that netsuite faced as well as luxent did was the whole validation piece we talked about right and that was a huge sort of hurdle going back to the time when we selected netsuite we needed to ensure that netsuite and luxent both as a whole would have sort of a pathway for us to be able to validate the solution and you know they came up with a uh a consultant who they brought on you know for validation and that was sort of the last bit that really kind of squared the deal for us and said yep you know what luxent seems to be the right partner we believe get to the end you know product with them in three four months or whatever our timeline was excellent

20:31we'll talk a bit about uh the the implementation experience how long did it take to uh to implement that suite and any lessons learned anything you would have done differently i don't know if that's for you or for uh eric perhaps you want to go ahead and kick it off kashup um sure so yeah as i said you know about three and a half months of the implementation and um you know it was just a sort of a clinic in in scope management we knew that kind of you know our timeline was aggressive and so our approach as a whole was to kind of replicate what we were doing before netsuite but just now within netsuite and all we were looking for was parity we were not looking to sort of improve just yet we knew that those improvements would come after we went live and that's been a big part of our relationship with luxent our ongoing relationship with luxent right over the past you know we

21:24we've been live since november of 2019 and and since then we've really focused on sort of deepening our our usage of netsuite um and and our experience with the platform overall and luxent's kind of continue to play a key role in doing that for us uh and if please feel free to add to the yeah yeah i don't have too much to add there i would say it was a uh the implementation well a lot of work was a surprisingly smooth uh process um we we did hit our hit our timelines like like kashup mentioned there the the the key was really kind of watching scope creep um kind of uh implementing uh in phase one what was critical and pushing other things out to subsequent uh phases um and i thought we we did a good job with that and luxent was was wonderful to work with during that uh implementation process it's probably great to have that in place you said november 2019

22:21i'm thinking march 2020 everything shut down in the world change i'm sure it was a great comfort to have to have that set up and ready to go yeah absolutely yeah excellent all right let's hear from the the luxent side uh ben katerberg ben uh does netsuite offer manufacturing and uh engineering solutions can you can you tell us a bit about uh about those uh those capabilities um yeah well um obviously uh you know netsuite has you know manufacturing functionality and um on a cloud erp we have two releases a year so they're continuously improving the functionality but as it relates to medical manufacturers um some of the kind of major benefits we've seen um with some of the releases in the manufacturing space are the availability of bill of material revisions which are critical to kind of that iterative design process within uh a plm system right so um you can design multiple versions of a bill of material um as um you go through that either iterative design with different effectivity dates right uh another feature within manufacturing

23:49that's been you know very helpful is component yields the ability to kind of allow for planned waste to be incorporated into the cost of the product um and then another real big one here is um the uh work and process features and uh the routings so being able to set up kind of more of a detailed assembly process with multiple work centers um that allows for kind of that working process over a longer manufacturing time interesting and manufacturing has gone through such such challenges over the last two years speaking of cove that i wonder is does and i don't know if this comes into play but what does netsuite have to allow the ease of traceability of material through the different stages of manufacturing yeah so i think as

24:38we've heard um you know from kashup and eric previously netsuite does offer um lot traceability um serialized inventory um as kind of a substructure of their item setup and um that function really exists from the receipt of raw materials all the way through you know sub-assemblies and the creation of finished goods and obviously that will translate into a lot of the reporting capabilities whether you need to do you know a forward trace to look at raw materials maybe this particular lot was defective and it got placed in some sub assemblies so you need to look forward or the backward traceability starting with the finished good and look to see all the components that went into that finish good eric i'm just curious how has an ari been impacted during the last two years on the manufacturing side of your supplies uh your supply chain's intact and working

25:46well the supply chain is is definitely uh intact i i wouldn't say that there hasn't been bumps in the road we've been uh fact affected just like uh look like everybody else um but i again i think utilizing the the systems to uh or netsuite to kind of set safety stocks at at levels that kind of protect us from from delayed shipments or or deliveries um has mitigated uh our risk a bit but there's definitely been been some some bumps along the along the road for sure i guess that it's great that you had that system in place ben uh how does netsuite's uh inspection process work um so really just kind of at a high level right um you're looking for the ability to inspect raw materials as

26:44you're coming in from vendors you need to inspect materials from the sub-assemblies or even the finished good assemblies process so really where that starts is um defining your tests up front in netsuite right you have certain tests that you perform and you may perform the same tests on many of the same items over and over but maybe just different standards item by item so you'll define those tests up front you'll assign those tests to essentially a specification record and then you'll start assigning out those specifications to different items and have different context where those should trigger inspections and those are going to be inspection notifications for your quality team to perform you know all of the inputs within a kind of tablet mode and then really after you have all that set up

27:42it's just normal day-to-day processing right receive my goods from my vendor that may trigger an inspection for my quality team to you know run a couple tests take a couple samples um and you know create my work orders you know maybe i stop at this workstation first that's the trigger for another inspection right and so it's kind of building that work list for my quality team and how about on on the the quality management process how does netsuite help automate that so some of the automation that's included within quality management is um first off the kind of system triggers for those inspections to be performed so as i mentioned um you know you're just processing everyday transactions right receiving goods from vendors those automatically trigger the work list for your quality team right so that's one of the biggest uh kind of automation features within quality

28:42and then secondly having the ability to have separate items that haven't been inspected yet or maybe they have been inspected and failed being able to have a quarantine strategy and ensure that you're still showing the products in your erp system and it's still on your financials right uh still see that product in the location but it's not necessarily available to be sent off to a customer or not available to be issued to another work order so that separation between uninspected or failed um kind of products inspections is one of the major benefits to having quality within your erp um and then obviously being able to have um some kind of output for um the quality inspections themselves so having a certificate of analysis for instance that can be generated out of netsuite that tells your customers here are all the products i'm sending you and here's the associated results from that specific lot that

29:51i'm sending to you interesting all right let's let's turn back to to inari uh before we do if there are questions from the audience it's now is a good time to to ask them to post them up there so uh but uh we'd love to turn this back to eric uh eric we've talked about the life of a startup anari is a fast-growing company it's grown very quickly uh since you brought in netsuite uh was there concern that netsuite wasn't gonna be able to support that sort of growth as you continue to scale no i don't i don't think there was ever a concern uh with that and there there still isn't um a concern i think netsuite is uh continuing to to scale with us well um ever since we we went live back in november of 2019 we we've always had some sort of project going to to increase the scope of our use of the system or adding functionality to it and

30:52we're continuing to do that today um so no i i don't have any specific concerns with netsuite's ability to continue to to grow and scale with us and and how do you what are your plans to to leverage the platform going forward uh supporting international growth overall business growth uh how does uh how does netsuite fit into that um i mean i think netsuite uh uh fits into all of those pieces i don't know that i can get into any any specific uh plans or around some of those things i can talk about maybe some of the projects that we do have going we've kicked off some some projects to uh implement an advanced uh bomb module um an advanced mrp module um i i think uh netsuite holds all of the pieces to support um some of those things you alluded to different locations business entities those sorts of things so i i don't see any any specific concerns there there either with with the system's ability to keep up with us great great let's just talk a bit about yes i was going to say sorry if i could add to it no please maybe that we didn't touch upon earlier um you know netsuite has this great ecosystem around it right

32:16and so some of the other projects and some of the other things we we look for is maybe there's a point solution to help automate or increase our efficiency of our ap processes right for instance and so we may go look for an ap tool accounts payable right tool that we could add and anytime we do one of these things we always kind of look at well what are the functionalities that netsuite core provides and if not you know netsuite does such a great job of just saying look we have something but you know you're better off going to this partner of ours that they partnered with all these different solution providers and it's just literally a plug and play at that point right you bring them on and you kind of bolt the solution on we did that last year with a non-inventory purchasing solution um we may you know do that in the future with some sort of a ap solution you know that helps the accounting and finance team out

33:09and so that's that's also part of what went into selecting netsuite and how we we believe that you know next we can continue to scale and grow with us luis you seem to have uh have some thoughts on that as well no idea i i'll just i think to a casual saying it was quite nice to be able to kind of plug and play other modules right uh uh so netsuite's built nicely with where we were able to kind of implement a couple of things and um what went very well and so just just i was just agreeing to what kashup was stated excellent that's always good to have a second opinion in agreement well let's just talk a bit about uh inari itself uh you i mentioned the last two years have been rough in a lot of uh obviously a lot of ways for the whole entire for the world but anari has had great success you went you really managed to go public and i think it was may 2020 uh so uh you know

33:58you're not going to speak directly to that but you folks have been has been moving forward i know luxent has talked about your your special culture uh to us can you tell us a bit about uh maybe maybe luis you can start since you're up on the screen tell us a bit about anari uh its culture and really what makes it uh what makes it special yeah i know i i think i can i can touch on that arnard is obviously a uh a very special very special company uh i've been a part of a couple of small startups and and whatnot uh but uh you know the vibe here the culture the the world here is is a lot different uh and it's really brought down from from our from our management uh we really do live and breathe everything we speak right and we really are focused on on not just the customer service part of it but we are we're focused and and we take to heart the the uh just the criticality of this disease and

34:53we're all focused on trying to just trying to march and build great wonderful products to save people's lives and and uh you know that that love and passion that that that you know starting from our from our ceo and on down uh is is i think uh spread across the entire company and organization and so uh yeah i mean it's a fantastic place and obviously i should be saying that because this is my employer but i absolutely 100 percent mean that right um yeah i love love what i do sunday evenings come and and and it's a thrill to come back and get ready for for monday mornings right and not many people can say hey we're not going to work on mondays right mondays are tough we all say that but we love our employer we love the culture we love the the stuff that we do here and uh it's all it's all uh really spread down from from above and so uh yeah great great uh great uh great uh great company great culture um what else can can we add to that right um

35:50i'm happy to tour i i shouldn't say this while being recorded but we had uh a holiday yesterday and uh last night i wasn't feeling super enthused about coming to work today i could use another day off so yeah if i'm to be honest here uh kashup i hope my ceo's not watching this this recording but yeah how about from your perspective have you worked at medical device companies before and and how did you come to work at an aria and what makes it uh what gives it its culture yeah um sure so i i have i've had the fortunate experience of working at other med device startups um and you know nre is i've been blessed with it's sort of the second unicorn if you will that i've you know been part of and i don't mean from the financial side i mean company and culture side right um it's a truly a unicorn in that things really sort of fit in place really well and part of that as louise alluded to is really coming from our leadership team

36:50there's a deep rooted humbleness and humility in this place and that really comes from our ceo bill hoffman he sets that tone and really we we can't help but follow because he's got such a great personality and an aura about him and it just flows down from there where every single person in this place i feel like is is tugging and pulling in the same direction is willing to kind of band together and and really help you know one another out it's sort of you know i always kind of liken it to i've got a family at home and then this is my inari family right it really feels like that um luis you hit it on the head i mean every whether it's sunday or even every night i never dread coming to work i in fact i look forward to it because it's just such a joy to work in this environment with with this you know family and myself you know i've been a consultant in ariacci

37:44that's how i started and ari's got this great track record of flipping consultants over we just kind of go about you know our our way of saying look this is what we are as a company this is how we operate there's no selling and there's none of that right it's just like full transparency how we want to work we want to be quick about our decisions we want our people to you know feel like they matter and the work they do matter and we tie it every single day to what's happening out there in in the hospitals for us right with our patients and how we're treating that that disease state so i think that's a great point i mean i think people outside the medic industry don't appreciate the people inside the medical industry really do take the the benefits of the devices and the care of the patients uh seriously as as seriously as they do i should say uh it definitely is is a major driver i eric

38:40i'll just wrap up with you in our report and then i have a question for for ben that sort of related to the medtech startup world but uh eric is a someone who's working with in charge of manufacturing at a at a medical device company uh what is that like for you i mean we i talk to so many startups where they maybe they get to the point of manufacturing for clinical trials but don't get it for commercialization i'm just curious from a manufacturing point of view work manufacturing medical devices how have you done that before and sort of how special is it to be part of of that process yeah i mean i i i've definitely worked in in organizations before uh within manufacturing and engineering um prior prior to inari um but it's specifically within inari it's it's been pretty incredible to see that the growth from

39:28basically no manufacturing to as you alluded to kind of early manufacturing to support our ide clinical trial um and watching that uh expand and grow as we launched our products uh commercially um into uh into what it what it is now which for us is is uh uh pretty high volume manufacturing um we've got we've got a great team and uh i've enjoyed every minute of it that's terrific so ben i'd like to ask you one thing that's fascinating to me covering medtech startups uh is an aria went public i mentioned that last year uh but ultimately smaller med tech companies not all of them but many of them get acquired by bigger companies and i'm always fascinated as to how the infrastructure of one sort of integrates with the infrastructure of the other if

40:19you're a big company and i mentioned the top the podcast we have focusing on the really big companies buying those smaller companies and i know the devil can really be in the details as to getting the data info from one to to play nice with the data in info and systems of the other uh how does uh uh how does netsuite sort of fit into that and how does it allow for m a and sort of future changes i'm sure there are other medical based companies will be hearing this and they'll want to know you know that they can say look we're we can transition easily because we got this how does that work for netsuite yeah i mean that's that's a fantastic question and obviously just from that scalability perspective um that's one of the major benefits of netsuite so i've worked in other erps i've implemented many other ones including kind of enterprise level sap we've

41:09actually had clients that run enterprise levels solutions come to netsuite to kind of set up a light erp specifically for that scalability when they're acquiring a new company and they need to stand it up on a platform immediately um that's that's how they'll use um netsuite so being able to kind of separate out those legal entities add additional locations extend products to all um potential locations that's really really easy to do in netsuite as well as kind of the inverse right you may have a particular structure set up in netsuite and then having kind of that structure set up in scale back if you were to have you know certain elements of your business sold off it's very easy to do in netsuite based on the organizational structure that we set up and especially once you go live on the system as an ari mentioned right they had like a six month implementation but from that point once everything else is already set up i mean you can stand up a new legal entity a new location in no time at all interesting interesting i'd love to circle back ben one more question for you

42:29and then i'd like to get some some sort of words of advice from the folks at avenari but i'm curious about it is there a minimum size company that you deal with looking for and that sweet product you deal with what's the what's the earliest day what what what is the early stage when a company should be considering this should they be waiting for the the they're seeing the the water stains on the proverbial walls and things are about to bust open or should they kind of connect with you or in earlier on and kind of get it get ahead of this what what is a good time for for a company to be thinking about a netsuite system so in in my in my humble opinion here i think organizations should have those conversations sooner rather than later because sure netsuite isn't necessarily designed to only be a one-size-fits-all solution right we offer solutions for

43:25you know startup organizations who are small right even the the mon paw shop kind of size we have kind of starter packages for them who don't necessarily require some of the more advanced features right so many organizations may start up just looking at financials they may start with financials and move into basic inventory management they may extend that further on into demand planning features and mrp they may continue to expand from that point into more advanced manufacturing concepts right going down the whole work in process and routings and then build on top of that um in the future to even expand into quality management right so you can get started with that conversation just simply tracking financials just from the very beginning and then continue to scale up with new features as you continue to grow excellent good stuff and from the nre team i guess uh any suggestions to other medical device manufacturing companies are looking for an erp let's start with the lewis

44:38we'll start with you any any words of advice in the process and just what others might learn from your uh your experience i think i think each one carries their own responsibility to kind of see what they're what they're trying to gather right and see uh you know one of our things is is a lot of traceability right as med device companies we've got to make sure that a a platform or a system is able to be able to attract track back from from from z to a right and obviously um you know most erp uh systems do that but some do it much better than others right and so i think that it's uh taking a look at i guess the business needs for one um and seeing where we're trying to get to what what what is the ultimate goal um yeah i i don't know if i have any other suggestions for them but i think that each one has a you know a cache of that state earlier i think we had a large committee and

45:30we're looking at uh what what what we needed for our business right and it took vivian was there it took the entire company right and make sure he addressed all the needs in all departments and cross-functionally so uh um that's yeah okay kashup probably any any words of advice um yeah i think you know mostly it's um being open and transparent about what you know the business is looking for at that time not every um company not every situation is gonna you know demand some of the things that perhaps we were looking for or placed value in but if you're just open um about kind of your selection process and what what you value in in that then i think you can come out with you know any system uh or a system that will more or less fit the needs right and i say more or less because every system is gonna have its pros and cons and it's gonna have its strengths and weaknesses and you just have to figure out a game for how

46:27you're going to mitigate some of those weaknesses um so to speak and and really you know for like i alluded to earlier for us you know some of the things that we placed a value on was being in the cloud having this large ecosystem of partners that we could you know really leverage not just the platform of netsuite but really have netsuite acting as our base around which we can build over time and so those are you know some of the things that that you value then you know by all means i think look for systems like netsuite to help meet those needs excellent and eric i'll let you uh have the final word on that question sure yeah i'm going to give give kashup some some props here because he really ran the process for us and i thought he did it really well in a really well uh an organized manner um i think something that he did that worked really

47:15well for us was kind of a scorecard approach where we met in in kind of cross-functional as a cross-functional team and we established requirements what did we have to have what was important to us what did we need the system to do um and then we weighted those requirements um and as we we looked at different systems uh we all filled out scorecards um and the scorecards and the scores really helped us kind of narrow down to kind of the best fit system uh for us which obviously ended up being that sweet terrific great advice all right a great conversation any final words ben do you want to uh any thoughts on on the process of choosing yourself yeah yeah actually that's that is a great question um so obviously you know making um an investment in an erp is a big decision for an organization and there are many many ways to implement an erp there are many ways to implement it incorrectly right so i think when it comes to choosing a partner i think

48:20it's very very helpful to choose a partner that has experience in that particular industry with some of the same challenges understands the solution and can guide you in the process because you know new new organizations moving towards an erp they don't know what they don't know right so that's why it is vital to choose a great strategic partner that can help grow with you um understand your challenges and know exactly what features are right for you fantastic all right i'm sorry i know we're trying to wrap um just no please it um coming from ben as a luxent service provider is one thing but i'll chime in from the other side as a client um he's absolutely right spot on i think you know one of the things that every sort of company that's looking to implement an erp should make sure it's in their scorecard is the implementation partner so i think that partner is as critical if not you know more so than the platform itself i as i mentioned you know when i was a consultant

49:25i've come across many implementation where the platform was fine but the partner themselves were just you know not with the program so to speak and the implementation would drag on i mean you can imagine for these startups if you're looking to kind of you know whether it's some sort of exit play financially driven or you're just trying to scale up your your company and operations you want to get live in months right i mean as soon as you cross that six-month threshold forget it at that point there's fatigue in the organization you know people just kind of mentally check out it just seems like the process is dragging on and so you really want to partner with somebody that can get you live very very quickly and still maintain some of those you know again the feature parody and maintain um and mitigate some of the risks that may be involved

50:14and so picking um you know a company like luxent that really you know can get you there and they've proven it with us they did a fantastic job in kind of you know getting us live in three and a half months i couldn't i couldn't you know uh speak more highly of them than that so i think ben you're spot on when you say you know choosing the right partner with the right experience specifically in that industry specifically knowing kind of the the requirements you know whether it's in this case regulated industry with the fda requirements um is really key yes thank you for that let's can't get add anything more to that that's a very powerful testimony so fantastic well this has been uh very informative and a great deal of insight shared it today thank you to our panelists for being part of this episode thank you thank you for having us thank you and uh and thanks of course to uh to luxent for putting this this all together and uh thanks to everyone who's attended uh this episode of device talks tuesdays

51:16we'll see you next time you