How NetSuite and the Cloud helped support CED Stone
CED Stone
With over 40 years industry experience, CED Stone Group, the UK’s leading supplier of natural stones, paving stones and hard landscaping materials for both private and commercial landscape projects.
Established in 1978, CED is a family-run business that spans three generations, with a unique heritage of developing, growing, and investing in its product range and people.
The Background
CED Stone wanted to transform operations and provide visibility in a way which their legacy system, hosted on an internal server did not support. With depots and offices throughout the UK, a cloud-based solution was favoured to support remote access, instant visibility and a scalable solution which could handle the demands of both the retail and commercial divisions.
Any ERP project requires effective change management to ensure adoption, but a strong focus was placed upon the requirements gathering stage to ensure both 3RP and CED stakeholders were comfortable with the proposed solution ensuring it addressed any concerns or sensitivities around the migration to NetSuite.
The brief
CED Stone needed a unified system that could provide a real-time view of all business transactions and a solution which ensured that processes across their retail and commercial divisions ran seamlessly. Ultimately the brief was to improve operational efficiency, removing unnecessary manual tasks through automation and have instant access to data which can be used to make proactive strategic decisions.
The Solution
In conjunction with Jerry Owen-Lee (Senior Account Executive from Oracle NetSuite, who has extensive experience within the manufacturing and distribution sector) we identified NetSuite’s Wholesale Distribution edition as the right solution for this project, with Fixed Assets and Work Orders built in to provide the functionality to manage all front and back-end operations in a single fully integrated system.
With the scoping phase starting in April 2023 and a go-live target of January 2024, this was an ambitious target for a project of this complexity.
Highlights
- The smooth running of this project, and some early quick wins, including the automation of multiple payment options, and the consolidation of all elements required for large haulage orders, helped us demonstrate the benefits NetSuite can bring.
- Hitting an ambitious 2nd January go-live date, and rolling out a programme of in-person training across five UK-wide depots was also a real achievement, particularly in the shadow of the ‘holiday season’ with a lot of credit being due to the flexibility and determination of the CED Stone team who worked so collaboratively with our project team.
- One incidental, but huge cost saving for CED Stone was the digitalisation of systems previously managed in paper format. With PDFs available for every single action, CED’s printing and paper costs have been dramatically reduced.
“It has been a pleasure working with the CED Stone team through from initial evaluation to a successful Go Live. The whole team were dynamic and enthusiastic from the start, and I have no doubt that CED will go from strength to strength exploiting technology & business efficiency”
Julian Griffiths – Co-Founder & Director 3RP
What's next for CED?
Over the next six months, the new system will become fully embedded into the business, with any day-to-day queries being address by our managed services consultants who are there to support CED.
A 2nd phase for the project is in the pipeline and will be defined later in the year to gain further efficiencies from the NetSuite platform including the introduction of a Warehouse Management System and Customer Relationship Management amongst others.
"We are very pleased with the implementation of NetSuite and our partnership with 3RP, and can now look forward with confidence to developing the system further, enabling CED to adapt quickly to a constantly changing world."
Giles Heap, MD CED Stone Group
