Who is ZERONORTH?
ZeroNorth is a technology company that develops digital solutions designed to help the global shipping industry cut emissions and reduce its impact on the climate, whilst improving commercial performance and maximizing earnings.
The company was founded in 2020 and is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Today, ZeroNorth has more than 200 employees in 5 more locations besides HQ, namely India, Bulgaria, Singapore, Greece and the USA.
The reason for change
From its vision to optimise the global shipping industry and fueled by a $50 million Series B investment in 2022, ZeroNorth needed to scale fast while maintaining control over its growth and continue to operate in an agile way. The strategic decision was taken mid 2022 to insource all accounting operations to regain full control, where this had been managed previously by an external service provider. ZeroNorth selected NetSuite as the central hub for all information on projects and products, employees, customers as well as vendors. All invoicing processes including advanced revenue recognition scenarios needed to be automated. Other domains included in this digital transformation project were intercompany management, fixed assets with lease accounting, and multi-GAAP and multi-tax accounting for 5 companies in 4 countries.
Why choosing NetSuite, and why Novutech as a partner?
The main reasons why ZeroNorth selected NetSuite as their ERP solution, were:
- A cloud-based ERP system implemented fast and deployed globally across all entities.
- A full suite of financial and accounting modules including multi-tax, multi-GAAP and multi-currency
- Fully automated intercompany management and financial consolidation
- Unlimited scalability to support the projected exponential growth of the business and its needs
- NetSuite has a rich set of business processes built-in, removing the need to “build from scratch” and allows for extremely rapid implementation
- Third-party systems integration capabilities based on standard APIs and web technology
The ZeroNorth team spent a few months researching and talking to Finance leaders within the fast growing SaaS network in Copenhagen. From this analysis, Novutech was identified as a strong candidate to become ZeroNorth’s NetSuite implementation partner, and soon after meeting in person with the Novutech team, the decision became final. From the first encounter throughout the entire project, it felt to ZeroNorth as if the Novutech consultants were an extension of their own team. The Novutech team acted as sparring partners, challenging initial requirements and design options, to ensure the right decisions were taken for ZeroNorth’s context and company.
About the NetSuite implementation
Based on their extensive technical NetSuite knowledge and expertise on how to run an ERP operationally day to day, the Novutech team guided ZeroNorth’s project team towards an ERP configuration exactly fit for purpose. Included in the primary implementation were a few third-party-built SuiteApps, like Zone & Co’s Bank Reconciliation and AP Automation, a.o., where Novutech acted as intermediary to the supplier and supported ZeroNorth during the implementation.
With the first phase of the ERP project now live, phase 2 is to be kicked off after the summer of 2023 and will include enhancements like a Salesforce CPQ integration, advanced billing, planning and budgeting and additional localizations as the company expands internationally.
“Throughout the entire project, from scoping through to go-live, the Novutech team have been professional, diligent, incredibly communicative and very flexible, leading us through to live operations exactly as scheduled in the original project plan, despite the company changing and growing constantly in the same period.”
Kelly Marie Møllgaard, VP of Accounting & Control
“We chose NetSuite to be our new inhouse ERP system, mainly because of the need for ZeroNorth to scale fast globally as well as continue to work agile and flexible.”
Marinela Draganova, Accounting Manager
Do you want to know more about our expertise and how we run NetSuite implementations? Contact us!
