As a business that has seen significant growth, MiniFAB have moved to underpin their future growth by implementing a cloud-based, integrated, advanced manufacturing solution, NetSuite.
Established in 2002, MiniFAB is a privately-held contract engineering firm providing custom development and manufacturing of disposable polymer microfluidic and micro-engineered products. With diverse geographical locations, MiniFAB’s growth into the US and Europe has paved the way for expansion into the global market, having worked on over 900 projects worldwide.
A cloud based business management platform was essential to their global footprint, minimising infrastructure costs and providing a nimble, accessible system anywhere in the world. Dean Maxwell, MiniFAB’s newly appointed CFO, says the business has operated successfully on many manual processes, future expansion requires an integrated system that provides timely information to assist decision-making.
“Rapid growth has really been the key driver in re-assessing our systems and processes to ensure we can keep aligned with our information and maintain the flexibility to innovate as a business,” he says. ”Reducing our current financial reporting timeline and gaining real-time visibility over the business financials were also key in our evaluation of systems.”
“We were looking for a solution that was cloud-based and was able to scale with our growing business.”
Dean Maxwell, CFO
Challenges faced before implementation
MiniFAB currently uses a construction-based solution with several siloed databases and fragmented processes. The business estimates the potential to increase productive capacity by up to 20% across the business with the introduction of NetSuite.
Business Outcomes
The Minifab solution provided by Klugo is unique to the Manufacturing industry as it is a complete, end-to-end advanced manufacturing solution that caters to PLM engineering, machine automation, advanced manufacturing, right through to the back-end core Financials, CRM and inventory management.
NetSuite’s Advanced Manufacturing Suite, together with NetSuite’s SuiteApp Arena, is helping manufacturers innovate, ensuring global compliance and reducing costs through a cloud-based platform that enables full visibility over their business, with real-time business intelligence. Arena PLM provides highly regulated medical device companies with a superior enterprise-wide approach to quality. This holistic quality solution offers visibility, cross-functional team collaboration, and long-term tracking of quality resolutions.
The system allows manufacturers to meet FDA and other regulations by managing information to show compliance as well as streamlining management of BOMs, design history files, device master records and change orders. It was Arena PLM’s decade-long industry experience that gave MiniFAB assurance that the solution was the right fit for their business.
Due to NetSuite’s status as a global market leader in ERP solutions and significant continued investment in the product’s development, the business was comfortable investing in the technology, knowing they could be rid of unwieldy upgrades in the future and benefit from over 30,000 global businesses using the platform.
MiniFAB have been a customer of Klugo’s sister company, Headland Technology; however, it wasn’t this connection that made MiniFAB choose to work with Klugo. Dean says it was the “honesty and openness from the Klugo sales team” that played a big part in the decision.
“Klugo supported MiniFAB’s approach, listened to what we wanted, and they are prepared to make it happen.”
Dean Maxwell, CFO
Dean was also impressed with the implementation methodology of the Klugo team. A senior leader within the Klugo group says helping local manufacturers transform their operations remains highly rewarding. With decades of experience in the manufacturing sector through Headland Machinery, they’ve seen first‑hand the limitations of systems that only get businesses by. It’s encouraging to see tailored, advanced manufacturing solutions supporting companies like MiniFAB as they scale and improve performance.
