CRM Software

Asahi Kasei is a subsidiary of Asahi Kasei Fibers Corporation, a manufacturer of poly-elastane filament fibers mainly for textiles. They're located in Charleston, South Carolina with corporate headquarters in Tokyo.

A while back they came to find that their SAP (News - Alert) products' lack of flexibility forced the company to adjust businesses processes to the software rather than the other way around. Generating key financial reports could take up to 30 days, company officials say, adding that SAP's complexity required expensive, specially trained consultants and a $20,000- per-month wide area network.

"We were spending three percent of our revenue on SAP," said David Stover, Chief Financial Officer Asahi Kasei's Dorlastan fiber division, who added that by switching that to NetSuite (News - Alert), they reduced that cost to 0.1 percent.

"SAP didn't have CRM or a very flexible standard for conducting marketing or customer analysis,' he noted.

Stover said SAP was "too rigid. We're slaves to fashion here. When fashion changes, we've got to change quickly.'

Asahi Kasei is still implementing the full palette of NetSuite's integrated software suite, but already the company, which develops and produces brand fibers for applications of textile production, estimates that it will save about $1 million in costs over its previous SAP R/3 software, including licenses and the need for three additional employees.

Since the company was acquired by Asahi Kasei Fibers Corp., a publicly traded company headquartered in Tokyo, Chief Financial Officer David Stover says NetSuite provides him the financial visibility to work with multiple reporting options.

The flexibility of NetSuite through its SuiteFlex platform allows the Dorlastan operation to customize NetSuite to its unique operations, Stover says: "The flexibility is decidedly different from the rigid SAP approach. SAP is a dictated business strategy where NetSuite is an open strategy."

SuiteFlex also helps the company react immediately to customer concerns, such as when it converted weights to the metric system, only to find U.S. customers in a lather. Very quickly, NetSuite allowed Dorlastan to issue domestic invoices in pounds and international invoices in kilograms.

To download a free customer case study and learn more about how NetSuite's cloud-based CRM software helped improve Asahi Kasei's operations, click here.