How Astrak built a foundation for growth with NetSuite

For many growing businesses, the systems that worked at the start eventually begin to hold them back. Data sits in separate places, processes rely on paper and manual work, and every new site or acquisition adds another layer of complexity.

Astrak, a UK-based global specialist supplier and manufacturer of undercarriage parts, wear components and attachments for heavy earthmoving and tracked construction machinery, has spent the past several years moving away from that model. Astrak replaced an on-premises ERP system with Oracle NetSuite and now runs finance, operations and CRM on a single cloud platform.

Modernising the tech stack

Before Stephen Cope, Astrak’s Chief Information Officer, joined the business, the company ran a full vendor selection process to modernise its technology. It chose NetSuite because it was a cloud-based ERP.

“When I first joined Astrak, they were already one and a half years into that journey”, Cope says. “They had implemented NetSuite and had all this data, but they didn’t really know what to do with it. I joined the business and built out the processes and reporting from there.”

Cope later became head of IT, then CIO when private equity bought the business.

The full rollout took around nine months, led by a UK implementation partner and focused on the UK first. At the time, Astrak also had entities in Ireland, France, Germany and Denmark.

Shaping the system around the business

Astrak hasn’t forced its operations to fit a standard template. It has its own in-house business transformation team of developers and administrators, who tailor NetSuite to the company’s needs.

“We do customise a lot to fit our needs, and that’s one of the benefits with NetSuite. It’s so flexible. The connectivity is there as well, so we can plug it into other systems with APIs.”

Faster closes and a paperless warehouse

Finance has seen one of the biggest gains. “It’s so much easier now to do the month-end close,” Cope explains. “It’s getting quicker and quicker as we approach zero-day close with AI.”

Operations comes next. Astrak’s warehouse, logistics and workshop teams all use NetSuite’s built-in warehouse management capabilities. “It’s all digital,” Cope says. “There’s no longer paper going around the warehouse getting lost.”

Senior leaders also have much better visibility. Every Astrak site has dashboards showing profitability in real time, and sales reps are now targeted on profitability rather than revenue alone.

“That insight straight away is a game changer,” he says.

Turning overstock into targeted campaigns

One of the clearest examples of AI benefits comes from marketing. Astrak uses an agentic AI tool across its digital marketing stack and connects it to NetSuite through the NetSuite AI Connector Service. This lets it identify overstocked and obsolete parts, which Cope describes as “cash sitting on shelves”.

The business can then match those parts to the customers whose machines they fit.

“Rather than saying ‘here’s a promo on all our items’, we can be really personalised,” Cope says. “We can say: we have this item for your machine, in stock, ready next day.”

Astrak’s use of AI reflects NetSuite’s ‘AI Your Way’ approach, which gives customers a choice in how they work with AI. They can connect the external AI tools they already know and use to NetSuite’s business data and workflows, or work directly within NetSuite with AI built into the experience.

Scaling without growing overheads

When asked for one result that sums up NetSuite’s value, Cope points to growth.

“Seven years ago, when I joined the business, we were turning over £30 million. We more than doubled that to around £65 million, sold a majority stake to private equity, and have since nearly doubled the business again to around £125 million.”

That modern infrastructure also counted when private equity invested. “They were so impressed that we had a modern tech stack and a modern ERP, and had all the data, all the reporting and all the insights,” he says.

Since then, Astrak has moved every business it has acquired straight onto NetSuite.

“We keep that one source of truth, that one process,” Cope explains. “It means we don’t need to grow the overheads, because we’re not managing all these different systems. We’re just managing one.”

What comes next

Several of the new capabilities NetSuite announced at SuiteWorld, its annual user event, align to what Cope wants to see. SuiteAgent Studio will let users create their own agents and refine their instructions, tools, triggers and execution roles before switching them on. These agents can run on a schedule or respond to business events within the permissions and approval requirements the business sets. AI Workspaces will bring people, agents, information and approvals together in one place. The Autonomous Close workspace, for example, is designed to help finance teams find and fix accounting issues throughout the period, moving towards a zero-day close.

“I’m really excited about NetSuite Next and the agents,” Cope says. “Having a workspace where our finance and operations teams can create their own agents to go into workflows will hopefully remove some of the manual work they currently have to do.”

Advice for growing businesses

For business owners wondering whether they have outgrown their systems, Cope’s advice is straightforward.

“Definitely go with an ERP system that’s cloud-based. That’s number one. Then connectivity is really key as well,” he advises. “Businesses make the mistake of buying an off-the-shelf ERP and then having to adapt to its processes. You should never have to shoehorn your operations into the system, because it’ll never line up perfectly.”

As AI moves from answering questions to doing the work, Astrak’s experience points to a practical lesson for SMEs. The businesses that get the most from autonomous ERP are likely to be the ones that have already brought their data, processes and teams onto one platform.

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