How a Global Omnichannel Retailer Cut Financial Close Time by 40% with NetSuite OneWorld

When Flowtaris first engaged this client, they were operating a patchwork of legacy systems that had accumulated over a decade of organic growth and five acquisitions. Their primary ERP — an on-premise solution deployed in 2011 — was no longer supported by its vendor. Month-end financial close required 22 calendar days, with six full-time finance analysts working exclusively on inter-company eliminations, FX revaluations, and manual reconciliation between 14 regional ledgers. The human cost was significant. Over 1,200 manual journal entries were posted per month, each creating compounding audit risk. During a pre-IPO readiness audit, external accountants identified 34 material reconciliation discrepancies — a direct consequence of data silos between Shopify Plus storefronts, regional POS terminals from three different vendors, and a central ledger that only updated nightly via SFTP batch files. Beyond finance, supply chain visibility was critically impaired. Procurement teams in Dubai and Singapore were making purchasing decisions based on inventory data that was 18–36 hours old. This led to a documented $3.2M overstock situation in FY2023 and concurrent stockouts in high-velocity SKU categories. The executive board had tied the planned IPO timeline directly to ERP modernisation — making this engagement one of the highest-stakes implementations Flowtaris had ever undertaken.

Flowtaris deployed a five-person senior engagement team: an ERP Architect, a NetSuite Functional Lead, two integration engineers, and a certified SuiteScript developer. The engagement ran across four phases over 11 months. Phase 1 — Blueprint & Data Architecture (Weeks 1–8): We conducted a full chart-of-accounts optimisation for OneWorld's multi-book, multi-currency, multi-subsidiary structure. A new inter-company elimination matrix was designed to support 14 subsidiaries across 9 currencies. Critical legacy data — 7 years of transactional history — was migrated via a custom ETL pipeline with dual-validation against the legacy system. Phase 2 — Core NetSuite Build (Weeks 9–20): The OneWorld instance was configured with Advanced Revenue Management, Multi-Book Accounting, and Advanced Inventory Management. Custom SuiteScript 2.1 scripts automated foreign currency revaluations, inter-company journal creation, and compliance-ready tax calculation across 11 tax jurisdictions. Phase 3 — Integration Layer (Weeks 21–30): A Celigo-based integration hub was engineered with 23 distinct integration flows. These covered: real-time POS-to-NetSuite inventory sync (sub-2-second latency), bi-directional Shopify Plus order-to-cash automation, automated 3PL ASN and receipt processing, and a consolidated supplier invoice pipeline that fed directly into a three-way matching engine. Phase 4 — Cutover, Hypercare & Optimisation (Weeks 31–44): A zero-downtime cutover was executed across all 14 markets simultaneously during a planned low-volume weekend. A 90-day hypercare period followed, during which Flowtaris engineers monitored all integration flows via a custom Celigo alerting dashboard and resolved 12 edge-case data transformation issues before they reached production.