Hestra Gloves USA - Case Study
Hestra Gloves USA is a top glove manufacturer with headquarters in Hestra, Sweden. Founded in 1936, the company takes pride in owning all parts of the supply chain, from purchasing their own materials, owning their factories, websites, brick and mortar stores, and handling customer service in-house. Hestra produced 2 million gloves worldwide in 2021 and has been growing since, offering gloves in over 400 styles for all types of applications: skiing and snowboarding, biking, dress, job, and more.
For the USA arm of the organization, Hestra has been using NetSuite for over 10 years. Serious praise should be given to President Dino Dardano for such an instrumental decision. Since then, they’ve benefited from streamlined operations, starting with order processing, customer service and returns, items master creation and maintenance, vendors and payables management, and full fledged financial and accounting capabilities. NetSuite has always been the system of truth for Hestra USA, however, during the Summer of 2023 it was clear to Dino that they would need more outside support and expertise in NetSuite to take on strategic projects and continue to support end users. Hestra USA then decided to partner with Racette Consulting to continue to grow the platform.
The first order of business for this engagement was to turn on the Supply Allocation module. Hestra had struggled with the native commitment engine ahead of the “busy season” every year. The busy season is during the Fall, right before the snow comes down and skiers and snowboarders take to the mountains to enjoy the slopes. Wholesalers and retailers need inventory ahead of the coming winter, and regular customers place a lot more orders on the website, which leads to the bulk of the orders being shipped out in the Fall. Hestra had tried to implement the Supply Allocation module in their Sandbox environment for 2 seasons before giving up and deciding to focus on shipping products out. The time commitment for implementing the feature and understanding its nuances was simply too much for the time-strapped organization. This was understandable given the complexity of the module and the expertise needed to implement it.
This was the background given to Emile Le Saux-Racette before taking this project on. Armed with the knowledge after several Discovery sessions, Emile proposed a plan with a timeline and list of tasks needed to implement the project (link to a similar template can be found in another blog post here). And at the beginning of September, a month before the official start of the Busy Season, Hestra USA was able to turn on the module. And since then the warehouse has been shipping products accurately and the Order Management team now has access to a completely new Supply Allocation module to plan out the supply of its products to its orders. Not only is the current supply considered when allocating items to Sales Orders, but incoming Purchase Order supply as well, allowing the team to allocate on products that are on the way to the warehouse. A top priority project for Hestra = Completed.
A second priority item for the organization was for its users to go through an extensive training program to better use the system and be better equipped to answer their own questions. A strong belief from Racette Consulting is that its consultants should always be teaching customers to be self-reliant. We have a number of training videos, templates and guides dedicated to this very topic. More specifically, we identified that Hestra USA needed to bolster the knowledge of its users in the following areas: General Navigation, which would be applicable to every user of the organization, Accounting, and finally Sales/CRM. Various sessions for each topic were held with the appropriate team members, and each session was recorded so that current and future team members could review later on their own time. This led to greater productivity and to a certain extent users are now equipped to trouble-shoot errors and processes on their own as they come up before raising their hand. Issues are now resolved quicker and with more accuracy. Plus, users are empowered to find the answer to their own question! Another top priority for Hestra was checked off the list, although we fully acknowledge that this will be an ongoing project.
Dashboards and reporting also needed to be touched up. Completely new Dashboards were designed with the eCommerce Manager, and after gathering a list of requirements for the KPIs, saved searches were created to keep track of custom metrics. See this video here for an overview on creating new metrics. These custom metrics were then added to the dashboard and the users take great pride in seeing the number of web orders increase as the snow starts to fall here in Colorado.
And, lastly, Hestra USA engaged with Racette Consulting to help on a more ad-hoc basis. End NetSuite users have a direct line of communication with Emile for all support activities such as creating a new report or saved search, adding values to custom lists, creating workflow automations, talking through key projects, and much more. Invoicing automation was needed, and a workflow was quickly created, tested, and deployed to automatically invoice Sales Orders that met a certain Saved Search criteria. This led to the eCommerce manager expressing:
“Emile, you sir, are a wizard. Fixed!”
And although we cannot speak to the Wizard comment, we certainly get a certain amount of satisfaction from helping end users with automating business processes and helping them save some time in their day. All we can do is give a good “Thumbs Up” and be glad for the help we provide to our clients!
Emile snowboarding at Arapahoe Basin in the Hestra “Freeride CZone 3-finger” glove