Ripple’s Digital Transformation
About Ripples
Ripples™, officially established on 2015, is the pioneer of bev-top media, an innovative platform that offers creative solutions for increasing sales and engagement in the Hospitality, Food & Beverage, Event, and Media industries perfectly suited to current digital, mobile and social era. Businesses serving foam-topped drinks such as draft beer, cocktails, and lattes can create drink designs and messages that are customized in real-time to support promotional activities, as well as location-based social media shares, and long-term brand awareness. The images are imprinted on foam. Ripples platform features a dynamic content feed and big data analytics tools to measure the impact of bev-top media on bottom-line business results. www.drinkripples.com
Main Products
Ripple Makers – 3D beverages printer, Ripple PODs – disposal use POD’s that feed the Ripple Maker with “ink”, software tools and services.
Growing company with new operational needs
Following an increase in sales and the establishment of 3 subsidiaries, Ripples decided it was time to make some changes in the operational process of the company in house and towards its customers to make it flow easily and enable business growth. As Ripples scaled from a startup company to a mature product delivery company, the sales and all adequate processes required standardization in order to enable the company to maximize its business potential. Ripples was looking for a one whole cloud system based solution that would fit its growth and enable larger scalability, effective integration with all company’s systems and fit the company’s diversified business model and its international structure.
Choosing the right partner
Once the company decided to have this major change, the first stage was to find the right partner to manage this move forward. iCloudius provided this need being a professional, highly experienced boutique Cloud solutions vendor, delivering tailored services focusing on top of the line, field proven CRM and ERP cloud technologies. iCloudius offered complete personalized process of design of an efficient business flow, system customization, development, implementation and support for NetSuite leveraging its CRM capabilities as a solution to complement Ripples needs.
Some challenges for NetSuite development and adaptation
Ripples is a fast growing company, selling worldwide with global partners, logistics hubs and outsource manufacturing. Ripples required supporting IT systems that are structured to match its unique business needs.
- 360-degree view of the customer
A main part of the solution iCloudius adopted based on Ripples’ needs was a solution which is based on the concept of being able to view and analyze all the data gathered about every single customer in one location. Implementation of NetSuite presented the perfect tool for such concept.
- Top of the line Integration
As a fast growing and complicated company a major pain point of the company became its multiple different systems per business area (Sales, Engineering, Operations, Support and Finance). There was no automatic integration and synchronization between the different systems used, therefore, no allowing one point of creation and management of a single entity including potential leads, customers, products and invoices.
There was no visibility of transactions progress in the current systems, which lead to manual maintenance and management of billing, collections, shipping, inventory and manufacturing. Integration was required with many tools like Hubspot (Marketing automation), Zendesk (Customer Support), Bluesnap (Payments) and Microsoft Power BI.
- Improve customer monitoring and inventory tracking
Ripples manage several revenue streams based on the products offered to end customers including Ripple Maker machines, PODs, service and hardware warranty. There was a need to verify that customers’ requirements for PODs were managed precisely. By development of 360⁰ view of customers’ activities and history and better management of tracking inventory it was expected that the company could show improved profitability.
- Financial & Accounting management
Ripples conducts business in several territories as well as several business models. The different business models require different revenue treatment and the different territories require local accounting practices. These two financial challenges have been addressed in the Netsuite roll out, as a result of the globalization of Netsuite ERP which supports advanced revenue management (ASC606) and multinational local tax requirements. Thanks to the strong financial team within Ripples finance department, we were able to accurately define the financial challenge and cover all requirements.
iCloudius NetSuite structuring
One of the design challenges was managing a mutual language for deal flows across all departments in Ripples organization (Sales, Engineering, Marketing, Operations and Finance). The idea in the item structuring was to manage different types of items in Netsuite which have different impacts on the books and different controls and gates in terms of management.
Process standardization was suggested in many different areas and proposed one single language for product types, SKU’s, Serial numbers and customer identification. The project aimed to cover the full process order to cash, from the CRM sub processes through the cash collected on the accounting perspective.
On the procurement and logistics level, the project covered managing the turn key production of the Ripple Maker machine, and assembly of the Ripple maker Pods as ink cartridges. As Ripples is a physical product driven company many aspects of fulfillment and serialized inventory were also to be managed in Netsuite.
The project aim was to achieve a common language across departments of engineering through marketing and maintain a logical relationship between items to be engineered and sold to the end customer via sales efforts.
NetSuite was successfully implemented
The cooperation of iCloudius and Ripples in this project achieved successful implementation of NetSuite one stop solution into Ripples’ business process including Sales, Engineering, Marketing, Operations and Finance departments. Following this change, the company is able to maintain clearer business flow through sales process which improves Ripples’ performance in all aspects including high profits, keeping satisfied customers, managing effective inventory and fulfilling its business growth potential.
