When Its Mission and Project Complexity Grew, Oakhurst Signs Turned to NetSuite SuiteProjects

Oakhurst Signs has been putting buildings on the map for more than a decade. The St. Petersburg, Fla.-based firm got its start providing signage for multifamily housing. Then, when manufacturing-focused private equity firm Illinois Avenue Partners acquired it, Oakhurst Signs became the core of a business strategy to deliver end-to-end signage services—including design, in-house manufacturing, site surveys, permitting and installation—for both commercial buildings and multifamily dwellings.


Oakhurst Signs logo

Company

Oakhurst Signs

Location

St. Petersburg, Fla.

Industry

Manufacturing

EMPLOYEES

100-250

REVENUE

30M

NUMBER OF SUBSIDIARIES

4

SYSTEMS REPLACED

QuickBooks
Homegrown manufacturing system

OTHER SOLUTION CONSIDERED

Procore

NETSUITE PRODUCT IMPLEMENTED

NetSuite ERP
SuiteProjects
Advanced Customer Support

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“NetSuite gave us the ability to have not only the SuiteProjects module but also a manufacturing module, all live in one ERP.” Ryan Winton, Business Analyst, Oakhurst Signs


PE Acquisition Brings Sweeping Change

Multiple avenues create roadblocks
Illinois Avenue bought three more signage companies after Oakhurst Signs. Consolidating financials across four separate QuickBooks instances was an Excel-intensive chore. Project management processes relied on email and paper, and they weren’t standardised nor centralised. The team needed capabilities to take on larger, more complex projects.
A well-constructed system
Oakhurst Signs chose NetSuite over Procore’s construction management software because it provided manufacturing, finance and project management functionality in one system, along with rich analytics. For instance, Oakhurst Signs worked with NetSuite’s Advanced Customer Support (ACS) team to build a custom report allowing company leadership to see project-level P&L data in real time.
Standardising to stand out
The Illinois Avenue family of companies can now take on larger commercial building projects with NetSuite SuiteProjects because it’s more capable of managing active projects that often span years. Teams can also drill into job costing data to better understand what didn’t go according to plan with a given project. This improves, for instance, the accuracy of project estimates for future customers.
Framework to grow
Oakhurst Signs and its subsidiaries plan to expand nationwide with their combined abilities to handle more complex jobs and easily fold in acquisitions that will build out capabilities as its strategy demands. It plans to work with the ACS team to implement barcoding functionality so teams can track signs through production and more fully automate the configure, price and quote (CPQ) process, generating more accurate quotes faster.

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