Overview
Stages Cycling LLC, with offices in Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado, launched the Stages Power Meter in 2012, immediately making waves in the power measurement category. Stages has expanded into the commercial and home fitness category with the SC3 commercial indoor cycling bike, with groundbreaking features designed to improve rider experience and increase durability. In 2016, Stages completed the power training ecosystem with Stages Dash, a performance GPS head unit, and Stages Link, a cloud-based training service, guiding athletes to their best performances on the road and indoors through easy analytics, education and custom coaching. Stages Flight has an unrivaled suite of comprehensive indoor cycling experiences and management tools. Featuring webbased administration and instructor tools for the creation, scheduling and management of Stages Flight classes, as well as participant accounts with user histories and robust workout tracking tools, Stages Flight is powered by in-studio software and hardware featuring precise power measurement via the world-class SC3 indoor bike.
Background
When Stages Cycling came to RSM, it had three primary pain points within its rapidly growing organization: order management, accounting and inventory accountability. The original e-commerce platform needed extensive manual efforts in order to synchronize inventory, fulfillment and pricing. Integration limitations resulted in manual reclassifications of all warranty, sales and giveaway orders. Additionally, the marketing team didn’t have the ability to run abandoned cart reports and retargeted advertising, a real issue when pushing direct sales growth. Accounting issues began with a lack of e-commerce integration and an accounting platform that couldn’t support the company’s need to pull discounts from e-commerce. This issue caused manual downloads, increased effort and timing issues on processing inventory movement. The company’s biggest manufacturing subsidiary, Stages Cycling, processes thousands of transactions a day, inciting increased risk of error by the manual efforts required.
Maintaining inventory accountability was another primary facet of the organization that was coming up short. To answer key questions such as, “How many indoor power meters do we have at our Boulder location?” required searching three systems. Inventory needed to be manually transacted between three platforms and it was confusing to create accurate reports at any one time.
A lack of connection between systems created a lot of manual work with room for error for Stages Cycling and it wanted to automate, focusing on its primary directives and growth.
Project
With a laundry list of manual processes for Stages Cycling, RSM proposed a NetSuite enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation with SuiteCommerce Advanced. The proposed solution focused on creating automated processes to juggle the company’s multiple subsidiaries, managing its financials and inventory, and tracking activity on its manufacturing floor. When it came to managing multiple subsidiaries, Stages Cycling chose the OneWorld module for real-time consolidated financial reporting for multiple currencies, global customer relationship management (CRM) and sales support, and local functional currency reporting for each subsidiary.
Upgrading its accounting system with the Financial Management module brings complementary financial management functionality including budgeting, expense allocations and amortization, flexible billing management and statistical accounts. The module provides automatic generation of purchase orders and work orders based on historical or forecasted demand. In addition, Inventory Management automatically manages multiple line items and serialized inventory, a manual process Stages previously struggled with.
Several key processes are also now possible with the Manufacturing WIP and Routing module, including tracking manufacturing activities by sequence of operations; labor, machine and material cost accumulated with work in process while recording labor; machine direct time; and overhead costs during operation completion.
Outcomes
RSM understood Stages Cycling’s goals and concerns and successfully implemented NetSuite on time and under budget. Stages now has the automated abilities for all facets of its corporation from production routing, warranty and financial reporting, automated inventory reporting and management, to providing more effective inventory and serial number tracking with automated consolidated reporting.
With the tremendous growth of its high-end brands, Stages Cycling has begun working on its fully integrated e-commerce platform, which will provide a complete cloud commerce solution for delivering a unified customer experience, increased efficiency and streamlined operations.
