The Image Group's Business Transformation

Through acquisitions and organic growth, The Image Group's legacy systems — four e-commerce platforms and three ERP platforms — weren't holding up. "We needed more flexibility for everyone," explained Jay Nathanson, Managing Partner at The Image Group. "We have multiple offices, remote team members, and a growing business. Flexibility is critical to where we are going next."

The company needed to remotely access all data and features from mobile devices or a non-central office, streamline the Finance department's month-end reporting, give sales reps flexibility, and reach a single version of the truth with consolidated financials. Having acquired another promotional-marketing company six months before implementation began, it also needed a partner who could unify two very different teams.

After looking at several solutions, The Image Group chose NetSuite. "It really came down to the flexibility of the database," said Nathanson. "NetSuite was the clear winner." It selected us as a partner that would take the time to "teach us to fish" — one that knew every aspect of NetSuite inside and out.

The Image Group mostly distributes goods but also manufactures and assembles, so all three functions had to be accounted for. We developed custom scripts to pull live data from external sources, automatically route and update sales orders, enhance native PDF rendering with images for dynamic items, calculate commissions in seconds instead of manual tallying, and integrate shipping and credit-card processing.

Since the January 2019 go-live, the team created 1,700 projects, 1,500 sales orders, 1,200 POs, and 500 quotes in the first month alone. Quoting went from a half hour to 5–7 minutes, the leadership team relies on NetSuite dashboards for key business decisions, and the company saves hundreds of man-hours that used to be required to connect the data of disparate systems.

"Overall, NetSuite is a business system that's allowing us, for the first time, to communicate across two companies that are now merged," said Nathanson. "With a unified system, people can put everything in a single source of truth: NetSuite."