TransQuip equip themselves for the future with NetSuite

Like so many Kiwi success stories, TransQuip sprang from humble beginnings.

In 1973, Brian Townshend opened Motorwell Services, a small garage just outside Rangiora. His sons, Richard, Mark, and Lincoln, joined the team in the 1990s, and by 1994 the business had pivoted from vehicle repair work to selling innovative truck and machinery parts under the name TransQuip. Recognising where their passion lay, the family sold Motorwell Services in 2002. 

Over the last few decades, TransQuip has expanded across the country, and now has staff based in offices in Christchurch, Auckland, Dunedin, Wellington, Tauranga, and Thames. Their mission is to be New Zealand’s leading supplier of innovative, high-quality reliable products to the civil construction and transport industries.  

Growing aches and pains

After years of being run by a tightly-knit family team, new TransQuip staff struggled to get up to speed as there were few systems in place – and most processes were still manual. As is often the case with growing SMEs, a few important players who knew the business well were spending a lot of their time in the day-to-day processes, creating a bottleneck. Plus, a lack of systems infrastructure bogged down staff with dated paperwork processes and complications with stock control. 

As the business expanded to new territories, they knew they had most definitely outgrown the MYOB package they’d relied on for so long. TransQuip needed a refined, scalable system that could match their agility and ambition.

Plus, they saw the urgent need for a cloud-based system – something that was increasingly obvious to the team as they heard stories of businesses forced to gain permission to retrieve servers from earthquake-damaged offices in Christchurch.

“We’d hit a ceiling,” says Richard Townshend, MD and co-owner of TransQuip. “We stepped back and saw that we needed to grow – and that we needed a system that we could grow with.” 

Finding a way forward

After much research and trialing other options, including Xero, TransQuip decided to implement NetSuite. Richard says that a friend recommended NetSuite, but at the time TransQuip were worried that the ERP would be too big for them.

In the end, they decided that NetSuite was the right solution, and critically, would support their future plans.

The next step for TransQuip was to find a local partner to implement the solution for them. While the implementation was successful, after a couple of years TransQuip felt they needed more help to harness the full potential of NetSuite. They wanted a partner that was more hands on and experienced with the SME market and requirements, rather than the enterprise-level service they’d experienced to date – so they turned to Fusion5 (formerly Liberate I.T.).

Overcoming the challenges

NetSuite’s cloud-based system solved a serious pain point for TransQuip: the need for flexible access to their data. As a company who is in the process of expanding across New Zealand, NetSuite’s scalability allows operations to meet the team’s ever-changing needs. The move from an in-house server to the cloud was a core requirement for TransQuip after weathering the Christchurch earthquake. 

“Knowing that if you had to leave the building in a hurry, that your files and tools are safe is a huge plus,” says Samantha Morton, Management Accountant for TransQuip. 

NetSuite has also streamlined TransQuip's processes, taking them from an outdated and cumbersome manual approach to a modern infrastructure which means nothing slips through the cracks.  

“NetSuite forces you to have a process,” says Morton. “The more we’ve expanded, the more we’ve been able to get out of NetSuite – and it’s helped us rationalise a lot of our processes and refine what we do better.” 

Another benefit has been NetSuite’s ability to provide data visibility. Morton explains that this has enabled TransQuip’s three owners to focus on different areas – sales, operations and finance – while still having access to the big picture. TransQuip’s management team now receives up-to-date and actionable insights from their data for improved decision-making. This increased level of business intelligence is also ripe for transformation into graphs and reports. 

"If we’re getting relevant data and reports – and make them available to the team – then we know if they’re achieving things.”

Richard Townshend | MD and co-owner, TransQuip

TransQuip now has a skilled team of 16 core staff, alongside a network of remote workers and subcontractors – 21 of which are full-time NetSuite users.