Sportswear maker Canterbury to deploy integrated business management suite

Sportswear wholesaler Canterbury plans to roll out an on-demand integrated business management suite across the business after saving £55,000 in 2007 through implementing the software for its online business.

The software from Netsuite includes ERP, CRM and online trading functionality in a single, standard, on-demand package.

Dave Adamson, e-commerce manager for Canterbury Europe, said the other e-commerce applications the company had evaluated would have required costly integration with back-end systems and would have carried additional licensing costs.

"Netsuite is also web-based, which means I can access the system from wherever I am, which improves visibility and enables us to be more responsive to changes rather than purely reactive," said Adamson.

The system replaced a bespoke e-commerce application that Canterbury was forced to abandon because of its inability to support the company's 65% growth in online sales in the past year.

Adamson said the bespoke application was not very stable and "imploded" with increased demand at Christmas in 2006, forcing the company to look for a replacement.

The company's e-commerce division deployed the Nesuite software in July 2007 to enable the division to handle

more than a million hits a month in September 2007 and the two months following the rugby world cup.

"We experienced no issues whatsoever with the Netsuite system despite the increased demand," said Adamson.

Canterbury plans to roll the software out across the whole business to consolidate its existing four business systems into one by the end of 2008.