Bespoke NetSuite implementation for Trams Ltd; a leading IT solutions provider in the UK

As one of the leading IT solutions providers in the UK, Trams Ltd require to consistently work at the highest level in order to stay ahead of their competitors. With a recent increase in product and service demand, Trams Ltd sought an internal software solution to improve reporting and administration.

Find out how Nolan Business Solutions implemented NetSuite for Trams Ltd to provide a cloud based solution to assist with their accounting requirements and project management.

The customer:

Trams Ltd has been delivering an extensive range of technology solutions to businesses for over 25 years. They are a leading business-to-business IT systems and services provider, with experienced specialist consultants in Storage & Creative Workflows, New Media, Commercial IT, and Education. Trams Ltd has two sites, with their head office in South London and their Technical and Operations in Battersea.

Trams Ltd maintains accreditation's with over 50 leading suppliers which include their long standing partnership as an Apple Authorised Reseller, Apple Solution Expert for Education, Apple Authorised Service Provider, Quantum StorNext Platinum Partner and Adobe Gold Partner.

Over the last three years Trams Ltd have made three acquisitions, the final one was in August 2017 where Trams Ltd acquired NMR, a media technology solutions provider. NMR develop and deploy bespoke and integrated solutions for Media Asset Management (MAM), intelligent tiered storage and workflow automation, post-production, multi-channel ingest and playout, and content all being managed externally.

The challenge:

The recent acquisitions that Trams Ltd have made are all heavily reliant on running projects thus making their current project management solution archaic and difficult to manage. Having key elements of the projects running outside of NetSuite presented the following issues / challenges:

• Poor project visibility
• Profitability and utilisation was very disjointed
• Lack of control over the running of projects
• Time entry was difficult to report and track against the project tasks
• There was no link between projects and support cases
• Running Trams Ltd and the three acquisitions projects externally is a labour intensive job
• Issues tracking and raising accurate customer invoices
• Accurate and timely resource allocation of engineers

The solution and outcome:

Nolan Business Solutions worked to consolidate all project and resourcing activities into NetSuite providing full visibility of the start to end project process. This was done by first scheduling a discovery workshop to gain an understanding of Trams Ltd requirements and document these for clarity.

Nolan Business Solutions provided the consultancy in order to set up NetSuite SRP and train the trainers for the project and resource management life-cycle.

Trams Ltd now has the ability to create a project with a schedule of tasks and easily report on their budget vs actual figures. Due to the flexibility of how projects can be setup, the billing process becomes a rule-based automated process, taking the stress out of month end billing.

Assigning resources to the project allows for accurate costing and using the allocation chart allows both internal employees and vendors to be allocated to projects based on their availability and skill set.

Customised roles and centres have been created in order to enhance the users experience by using key metrics and reminders in order to become a more proactive user.

Additional functionality has been developed and implemented into NetSuite allowing a report to be generated showing the real-time availability of engineers down to the minute. This gives an accurate overview of resource allocation, allowing the Resource Manager to schedule in the engineers workload accordingly.