The Challenge: Scaling Amid Complexity
(A Use Case Story)
In 2024, Summit Supply Co., a mid-sized consumer goods company based in California, found itself at a crossroads. With a diverse product line catering to both B2C and B2B markets, the company had experienced rapid growth over the past three years but now is flatlining. Meanwhile, this expansion brought about unforeseen challenges:
- Flatlined Growth: After 3-years of accelerated growth and ramping – the business unexpectedly slowed down dramatically.
- Cash Flow Uncertainty: The recent sales slowdown had the company facing liquidity issues, struggling to forecast cash positions accurately.
- Margin Erosion: Rising operational costs and inefficient supply chain management began to erode profit margins.
- Limited Scalability: Their NetSuite configuration needed to be optimized to speed-up transaction processing and reduce bottlenecks as the business scaled.
The leadership team grappled with three pressing questions:
- Where can we find sustainable growth opportunities?
- How do we protect and improve our profit margins?
- Is our current ERP system optimized to support our business and help us scale and pivot?
The Solution: Implementing Cauzzy AI for NetSuite
Recognizing the need for an integrated solution, Summit Supply Co. turned to Cauzzy AI, an AI-powered analytics platform purpose-built for NetSuite. Cauzzy AI connects directly to NetSuite, capturing all standard and custom data with 100% reconciliation accuracy. Within two weeks, the company had a fully operational AI co-pilot, providing real-time insights, predictions, and actionable recommendations across their business.
1. Identifying Growth Opportunities
Cauzzy AI's virtual executive team—comprising AI agents modeled after roles like CEO, CFO, CRO, and COO—continuously analyzed Summit Supply Co.'s NetSuite data. This allowed the leadership team to:
- Analyze Sales Trends: Inform as at to “why” certain products, customers, segments and sales channels were top and emerging.
- Monitor Customer Behavior: Understand purchasing patterns across B2C and B2B segments, including leveraging public web search data on our top customers to help explain and predict their behavior.
- Improve Marketing $ Allocation: Assess the effectiveness of campaigns and recommend how to allocate resources strategically going forward.
- Improve Sales Rep Performance: Analyze and identify process variation in sales rep performance to promote the best practices for all sales reps to deploy.
This data-driven approach enabled the company to focus on high-growth areas and tailor offerings to meet customer needs – returning them to prior growth levels.
2. Protecting and Enhancing Margins
With Cauzzy AI's advanced analytics, Summit Supply Co. achieved:
- Pricing Recommendations: Recommendations on pricing and bundling strategies based on historical performance, executive ideas and external competitor analysis.
- COGS Allocation: Automating the allocation of key costs to fully understand the profitability picture across key business drivers and the how/why variances in transactions and process happened – with actionable remediation plans.
- Inventory Optimization: Enhanced visibility into stock levels prevented overstocking and stockouts, reducing holding costs – plus enhanced supply plan forecasts.
- Optimize Working Capital: Optimize $MMs in cash flow (AP, AR and Inventory) by identifying AR and AP process variances plus stronger supply plan forecasting
These improvements led to a 15% increase in gross margins within six months.
3. Optimizing NetSuite for Scale-Up and Down Years
Cauzzy AI provided real-time insights into NetSuite performance, enabling:
- Improve NetSuite Performance and Automations: Process time and variation analysis with quantitative and qualitative recommendations (i.e. workflow recommendations).
- Change Impact Analysis - Evaluates downstream impacts of changes in NetSuite to processes to measure success of changes to NetSuite and the resulting financial/operational results.
- Scalable Infrastructure: As a cloud-based solution, Cauzzy AI easily accommodated the company's growth without significant additional IT investments.
The result was an optimized NetSuite that allowed the business to scale up and pivot without having to add future FTEs due to system automation gains. And allows the business to re-purpose existing FTEs to be more productive in underserved parts of the business.
The Outcome: A Transformed Business Landscape
Within months of implementing Cauzzy AI, Summit Supply Co. experienced:
- Enhanced Decision-Making: Unified data and analytics empowered leaders to make informed strategic choices.
- Operational Efficiency: Automated processes and optimized NetSuite reduced overhead and improved productivity.
- Financial Stability: Improved cash flow and protected margins ensured the company's financial health.
- Scalable Growth: A flexible AI-enhanced ERP system positioned the company to seize new market opportunities confidently.
- And Most Importantly, Leadership Enablement: Faster, clearer, smarter decision-making and communications at all levels
By addressing their core challenges through Cauzzy AI, Summit Supply Co. not only stabilized their operations but also set the stage for sustainable, long-term growth.
For more information on how Cauzzy AI can transform your business operations, visit www.cauzzy.ai.
