About Valtir

Valtir is a U.S.-based leading manufacturer of heavily engineered highway safety products, such as guardrails, barricades, crash cushions – “anything that may absorb energy or deflect and help people if they get into a complicated situation,” said CFO Mark Dendle. They sell products in all 50 states and, in any given year, 50 countries.

Challenges to success

At the beginning of 2022, Valtir was carved out of a larger public company and joined a private equity (PE) portfolio of companies, and so needed to stand up independent corporate services and financials.  

They had been operating on a legacy, “home-built” set of technology systems, which was causing them operational pain points. This system, built over 20 years, managed operations, sales, purchasing, and plant manufacturing, and had passed Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) testing; but it had been built for a time when they were a small division within a large company, and no longer suited their next-stage needs.

• It could not offer the same advanced features as an industry-standard ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, nor the promise of longevity.
• A future sale or acquisition would be much better supported by a stronger platform that is easier to bring others onto, compared with a more limited homegrown system.
• Perhaps the most critical challenge was meeting the data and analytics expectations of their new private equity management, following their carveout. The investor’s playbook calls for data-driven decision-making: great data, and a great understanding of what the data is telling you about what has happened and what may happen. Valtir’s existing system was not optimized for offering that insight.

Valtir also needed a more integrated CRM (customer relationship management) system, and better tools for their sales team in terms of pricing, margin holds, and real-time inventory availability for their customers. They had an “almost infinite” number of SKUs to allow for variations in shipments based on component availability, which made it difficult to track how many complete units were sold.

Finally, Valtir faced a unique challenge in keeping up with industry quality standards. With lives on the line, their products are required to meet not only federal highway standards, but also 50 states’ unique highway standards. Products must be manufactured to a very tight specification, and then certification documents must be delivered with every product shipment – documents that must also be inventoried.  There is also the need for strict compliance with the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Buy America requirements.

For all of this, they wanted an all-encompassing system, not something that would require “bolt-on” applications to the overarching system for different tasks.

After evaluating a number of systems, Valtir chose NetSuite to be the next-level ERP platform for their carved-out entity. This would spark a two-phase project:

1. Implementing the NetSuite financial module, including General Ledger, AP/AR, and fixed assets.
2. Transferring the detailed requirements of their existing system into NetSuite, and training team members on the new platform.

Having previously worked with CohnReznick’s Strategy and Operations team on a technology transformation study, Valtir engaged CohnReznick again to implement NetSuite, with the goal of having a best-in-class platform for future sustained growth.

Action taken

CohnReznick worked with Valtir to implement an enterprise version of NetSuite specifically for premium manufacturers, involving advanced manufacturing and quality management. The team worked to configure the system to best represent Valtir’s unique requirements – a project initially thought to involve six customizations, but that turned out to be far more.

“It was six areas of customization, and it turns out that 2-3 of the six are some of the most complicated customizations you could ever imagine,” Dendle said. “So while you go, ‘We only have six’ – well, if one of the six is ‘Get to the bottom of the Mariana Trench,’ or ‘Climb Everest during a winter storm,’ it sounds like you only have six, but you really probably have several hundred or a thousand requirements embedded within the six.” 

For example, for the Sales function, said Michael Bennett, Director, Inside Sales, “We have a pretty comprehensive customization for Pricing, that involves actively managing costs and operational efficiency to enhance our financial performance.” 

Skip to read about each customization and its benefits: Pricing, Freight Calculations, Sales Tax Compliance, Heat Tracking, Material Cert Tracking (Quality), Load Planning.

In addition to their strategy and implementation work, the CohnReznick team also assisted with the change management involved in moving to NetSuite, working alongside the Valtir team to provide training and on-site support. 

“Our UAT (user acceptance testing) was rather long, a total of 6 weeks, but this helped our users to get more comfortable with using NetSuite and removed any resistance to transition,” project manager Priya Vasu said.

The teams worked together to smooth the transition by providing transparency on the timeline, allowing users the ability to explore and test the platform, and bringing staff together, to see how the system worked from end to end. 

“We did not work in silos, it was always end to end, all the way from quote or order entry to shipping,” Vasu said. “This is where things tied up together, and this helped the user community to understand the benefits and to embrace NetSuite.”

Seeing results

Among the Valtir stakeholders we spoke to, a clear “biggest benefit” emerged regarding their move to NetSuite: Better access to strong, real-time data.

Through their implementation of NetSuite Analytics Data Warehouse, “Immediately NetSuite allowed us to have a data warehouse integrated with our ERP, and it updates every night so we can have real-time analytics and cost-volume price analysis, which we were not able to achieve with our prior system,” Dendle said. “…Our shareholders are really pleased with the analytics we can produce from it. Our sales team now has more granularity, visibility to SKU-level information and trends, and parts that relate to systems sold. … We got into this in part for better data, better analytics ability, and we are achieving that.”

Benefits we heard included:

• NetSuite allows Valtir’s users to see production results, shipping results, inbound material, and other key details in real time, said Gary Schlumpf, Vice President, Supply Chain Operations. Previously, he had to ask for financial reports; “Now it’s at my fingertips where I can pull up real-time financial information,” he said.
• Individual users are able to use NetSuite to get their data on a self-serve basis. IT Manager Kirk Usey gave an example of a director who has become a “super user,” to great effect: “He knows his business, he knows the business transactions, and now he’s getting to know NetSuite, so that’s a powerful combination when he’s trying to make supply chain decisions and he can make it on his own pace.”
• Before, Valtir had experienced a burden of having financials in one system and plant operations and procurement in another; having them in the same system provides efficiencies in, for example, two- or three-way matches. They have been able to automate repetitive tasks and workflows, and to reduce downtime due to material shortages, which was previously a common concern. “Today we know our inventory every single day of the month,” Dendle said, as opposed to the prior system, where they knew those figures in the financials at month-end but estimated for the other 30 days.
• Plant managers and scheduling teams are able to release work orders faster, and do production reporting faster. If materials are late, they can use the system to see why – for example, if the product is on site but in quarantine – rather than have to call the supplier for information.

Critically, with NetSuite making data available for ongoing analytics, they have been able to provide more meaningful reporting to PE management – and with new consistency in data aggregation, they can use real data rather than estimates to provide better trend reports into the future.

The path forward

CohnReznick continues to work with Valtir on a managed services basis to maintain their implementation and help troubleshoot as needed.

Valtir hopes to now find efficiencies in third-party-involved processes like freight booking and rentals: Other providers might not have wanted to link their platform to the company’s 30-year-old legacy platform, Dendle explained, but on a standardized system, linking protocols can be better.

They are also starting to look into AI agents for certain processes and data areas, which they would not have had easy access to in their legacy system.

What’s more, the NetSuite implementation led the company to take a step back and overall reevaluate their processes and procedures, said CEO Nick Verska. 

“The processes and procedures at the manufacturing facilities are definitely more buttoned-up, from my perspective,” Verska said. “You understand much quicker when things go wrong or when things go great. And I think it’s because we’re much more precise about how we’re doing it, and each facility is doing it the same way.”

NetSuite support overview