Overview

Location
Head office and test kitchen: Victoria, Australia
Showrooms: Victoria and Sydney, Australia

Industries
Food equipment, especially for bakeries

Services
Equipment demonstrations, sales, installation, repairs, warranty, and maintenance

Field and Warehouse Technicians
10

Subcontractors
90

About Vanrooy Machinery

In 1978, a bakery in Melbourne, Australia needed a new oven. The owner bought two ovens from a top-tier European manufacturer and sold one to another Australian bakery. Sensing a market opportunity, the owner launched a new company—Vanrooy Machinery—with the mission of supplying quality bakery equipment for businesses to improve their product quality and efficiency.

David Van Rooy runs the thriving family business today. Vanrooy Machinery has supplied thousands of commercial food industry businesses with the best brands of European equipment. Prospective customers can try out any piece of equipment in the company’s test kitchen.

David Van Rooy firmly believes that to stay relevant, his company must continually innovate and meet higher standards of excellence in everything it does. Customer satisfaction, in particular, requires all employees to strive to improve with the market’s changing needs.

However, David saw a huge barrier to achieving excellence: his family business was being “burned” by a cumbersome enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from a global software company.

Business Challenges

In 2017, Vanrooy Machinery shopped for ERP software to replace old systems that were functional but siloed. Installation of the ERP vendor’s software, starting in 2017, began what David calls “three years of torture.”

He listed the major pain points:

• The vendor’s level of customer service and support was poor.
• The vendor’s Australian partner was unstable. There was never a clear implementation plan establishing key milestones, timelines, and resources. Turnover in the implementation team further eroded the implementation experience.
• Operational modules—such as field service and inventory—were clunky and poorly integrated with financial modules. The field service module was just “bolted on,” David said. “The software’s bridges and links were supposed to make things work together, but they didn’t.”
• Inventory costs could not be directly recorded and tracked within the ERP system. The inventory function could not effectively track the service history of the equipment sold to customers.
• Vanrooy Machinery had little confidence in the numbers it was getting from the ERP system’s financial reports. The company’s prior stand-alone systems could produce accurate financials within three days of month-end—but with the ERP system, weeks of data clean-up efforts were needed to make the financial reports accurate.
• For complex orders of equipment, it might take an hour to produce an invoice. If the order changed, staff had to re-enter the entire order.
• Remote access to the server was cumbersome, requiring dongles and rotating passwords.

Why Vanrooy Machinery Chose NetSuite + NextService

In 2020, David Van Rooy called for an end to the three-year nightmare. “We decided to bite the bullet and dump the ERP system. We looked at available software and selected NetSuite and NextService. Their native integration was the key selling point.”

A demonstration showed Vanrooy Machinery how NetSuite and NextService would perform using the company’s data and products. “We saw how NetSuite and NextService would work directly in our business from start to finish. The demo gave us better information than what we were getting live from the ERP system. That was a big, big confidence builder and convinced us to jump on board,” said David.

“For any business, upgrading major operational systems can be a nightmare. Working with the NextService implementation team, however, has been a refreshing change to the norm. They were at all times professional, approachable, and honest. If something wasn’t quite right, they just fixed it. No hiding behind excuses such as ‘not in scope.’ And the NextService product genuinely works within NetSuite. It is seamless. It is not a bolt-on product. It just works.”

~ David Van Rooy

Business Impact of Implementing NextService

David Van Rooy knows from experience that business success with technology springs from implementation success. That is why he was delighted with the implementation of NextService and NetSuite.

“It was 100 times better than the ERP vendor’s implementation,” said David. “The level of detail NextService went into was extraordinary. We had a detailed, six-month plan of what would happen on what day.”

“ works so seamlessly and effortlessly with NetSuite. And the mobile app makes technicians’ jobs easier. They want to work from their phones, not a cumbersome tablet or laptop. It’s user-friendly and the techs love it. They are very, very happy with it.”

~ David Van Rooy

Field service

NextService has lived up to all the company’s criteria for a mobile field service app, David Van Rooy said. Management is happy, too. The information the company is getting from its technicians at job sites is better and clearer.

Technicians and their managers see the value of the app’s checklists. When they arrive on-site, techs go through a checklist that includes equipment, health, and safety items. Not only are the checklists a valuable tool for enforcing best practices, David noted, but they also prompt technicians on details they could easily overlook. Moreover, confirming items on a checklist saves tedious data entry of what the job entailed.

Because NextService went “live” during the pandemic, Vanrooy Machinery has capitalized on the checklists to confirm its technicians are complying with customers’ social distancing and mask protocols.

Other features of the mobile app highly valued by Vanrooy Machinery include signature capture and photo attaching. Photos of new installations come in handy, David stated, for new installations when a customer thinks some tasks have not been completed. Often the photos prove otherwise.

“When you look at the totality of a job—from the time it’s assigned by a service manager, completed and all administrative aspects finished—NextService is generating a big savings in time.”

~ David Van Rooy

Scheduling

Bakeries, David noted, often ignore preventive maintenance and then expect rapid repairs when a machine fails. As a result, scheduling changes are frequent. NextService’s scheduler makes it easy for Vanrooy Machinery to accommodate them.

Vanrooy Machinery has five traveling technicians and five technicians in the warehouse. The company relies extensively on a network of subcontractors, especially for remote locations.

Even for subcontractors, the service manager has full visibility into job assignments—including who the job was given to, when it was assigned, and any information sent to or received from the subcontractor.

“The service manager loves that he can just drag and drop assignments onto the schedule and move them as needed.”

~ David Van Rooy

Financial reporting

After transitioning historical data to NextService and NetSuite, Vanrooy Machinery personnel were getting the right numbers immediately—without taking any of the corrective measures that were previously needed for the ERP system’s reporting.

Errors are now easily corrected with minimal data entry. Billing is much easier, especially for jobs completed by employed technicians.

“The financial information we’re getting is accurate and easy to access by any of our team wherever they are working. My dashboard shows bank balance, cost of goods sold, inventory, current sales trends, and what’s in the pipeline. In seconds of opening my screen, I’ve got an instant snapshot of the health of the company.”

~ David Van Rooy

Asset management

With NextService and NetSuite, Vanrooy Machinery has been able to substantially improve its asset management. In addition to accurate lists of equipment installed at all customer locations, company personnel can access what services have been performed, when, and by which employee. Data captured by subcontractors is captured too.

“If we’re seeing repeated issues with a customer’s equipment, we have visibility into the service history of that asset. This is proving to be a massive benefit.”

~ David Van Rooy

Inventory

Equipment and parts inventory work smoothly because NextService exists on the NetSuite platform with no integration required. When equipment is sold to a customer, it automatically becomes part of the NextService asset management records for that customer.

As technicians use spare parts, they can easily record this usage in the NextService mobile app. The parts are automatically processed onto Sales Orders in NetSuite. Stock levels are automatically fulfilled, and the order is ready for invoicing. This gives all staff members live visibility into each van’s inventory.

“We’ve had a monumentally different experience with NextService than we had with the ERP vendor. Everyone is super happy. I don’t hear one grumble in the building.”

~ David Van Rooy

Future plans for NextService

David Van Rooy is proud of what his company has already accomplished with NextService—and excited about the path ahead. “We know that we can keep growing our business and continue to stay on the same platform,” he said. “We’re still learning all the things that NextService can do for us. We’re eager to find new ways to exploit its power.”

Key Business Outcomes for Vanrooy Machinery

Since implementing NextService and NetSuite, Vanrooy Machinery finally has tightly integrated field service, inventory, and financial systems that give the company a sound platform for growth. Here are some of the challenges the staff faced and the results they are now achieving.