NetSuite helps BMW ORACLE Racing find smooth sailing with expenses, reports for America’s Cup

BMW ORACLE Racing is running its entire financial operations on NetSuite, including its global accounts, payables, taxes, financial reporting and complete team expenses, leading up to the America’s Cup and the Louis Vuitton Cup races.

With NetSuite, BMW ORACLE Racing runs its global business smoothly around the clock across three continents — from Anacortes, Washington; where the hulls are built, to Valencia, Spain; where most of the team is headquartered; to Auckland, New Zealand, where BMW ORACLE Racing maintains an office.

“NetSuite brings the power to run a complex multi-national business
with unmatched ease of use and ease of administration,” said Zach
Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. “The deep functionality to address with the
accounting challenges of multi-nationals combined with easy anytime,
anywhere access for all users is exactly what companies need to run a
successful global businesses. NetSuite’s power to run their business is
matched by BMW ORACLE Racing’s prowess on the water.”

Although the business of BMW ORACLE Racing is different from many other
companies, behind the scenes the outfit shares much in common with any
other enterprise — vendors to pay, employees to manage and regular
reports to its shareholders. But because of the global nature of the
company it is a much more complex business to manage than many
operations of a similar size. This requires sophisticated financial
software to meet the needs of budget management, local tax
requirements, statutory reporting and multi-currency management. The
team’s business operates in three currencies, the New Zealand dollar,
the US dollar and the Euro. Using NetSuite, BMW ORACLE Racing has been
able to standardize business processes across its various operations,
minimizing costs and improving efficiency while ensuring accurate
financial reports are available in a timely fashion — something that
is absolutely vital in a business that operates under tight budgetary
constraints.

Additionally, the need for real-time financial reporting presented
challenges for the team that were easily met with NetSuite’s advanced
dashboards. The NetSuite dashboard provides senior managers a bird’s
eye view of their entire business in real-time while the operations
team can get specific and detailed accurate financial reporting at
their fingertips at any time.

Finally, with globe-spanning operations, BMW ORACLE Racing required a
solution that would work across geographic, currency and time zone
barriers, and NetSuite’s software as a service (SaaS) delivery model
enabled painless “anytime, anywhere access.” In addition, BMW ORACLE
Racing adopted NetSuite to provide flexibility and global reach without
the need for expensive servers or dedicated in-house support staff. For
BMW ORACLE Racing, reliability and availability have been running
straight and true with NetSuite.

“The racing business is a complex multi-national and multi-functional
operation, and the team recognises the need to have an effective and
efficient enterprise system to support the sailing, design and shore
teams — they must have accurate and timely information to aid their
decision making,” said Diana Puketapu, CFO for BMW ORACLE Racing.
“NetSuite is our total financial operations package — we use it to
prepare all of our monthly management reports at the line manager
level, and our senior managers use it for overviews of the entire
operation. I have done a lot of traveling between New Zealand and
Spain, with trips to the US en route, and I can always stop somewhere,
log in, and see what’s happening. And we’re happy to be coming into
this year’s Louis Vuitton Cup with NetSuite doing exactly what we want
it to.”