Features Software
Water treatment company grows 300 per cent with Cloud ERP

Oct. 15, 2015 – The Company: Founded in 1969, Klenzoid is an industrial water treatment company providing chemical treatment, equipment and service solutions that reduce energy, water and chemical costs for steam boilers and cooling water systems. Based in Toronto, Ont., the privately-held and ISO-registered manufacturer serves about 1,500 customers in Canada and the U.S., including hospitals, manufacturers, food and beverage companies and others with large HVAC installations.

Klenzoid treatment programs are designed to inhibit scale formation, corrosion and micro-biological fouling, protecting valuable assets and minimizing wasted energy and water through its unique least-cost operating solution. About 80 per cent of Klenzoid’s workforce is mobile sales and field service professionals, who conduct monthly inspections at client sites.

The Challenge: Experiencing rapid growth in the mid-2000s, Klenzoid needed to replace its outdated legacy IT systems, including a DOS-based ERP application and Lotus Notes for customer relationship management (CRM). Unable to scale with the business, the unintegrated applications were slow, provided limited visibility into critical data and resulted in inordinate manual work. As part of its modernization strategy, Klenzoid also sought to replace a custom-built application called Klenztrak that logged data collected from client sites.

The Strategy: In a multi-phase approach that began in 2007, Klenzoid has implemented NetSuite OneWorld to run core business processes including financials, CRM, inventory and order management, manufacturing, purchasing and more in a single, unified Cloud system, and to manage its U.S. company, Eldon Water, based in Michigan. In 2013, Klenzoid extended NetSuite to replace its Klenztrak data logging system with a new platform called AquaAnalytics. In both phases, Klenzoid leveraged NetSuite flexibility to customize processes and introduce game-changing innovations that provided a foundation for rapid growth and high client satisfaction.

“One of the huge benefits of NetSuite is that we’ve been able to grow rapidly without any back-end failures whatsoever,” said Michael Cairns, Klenzoid director of business improvement. “NetSuite has opened up a plethora of opportunities for what we can do with information.”

The Results: With the NetSuite-powered AquaAnalytics, Klenzoid manages more than 1 million customer data points, ranging from pH levels to water, chemical and energy consumption. The solution has dramatically improved visibility into data inputted by Klenzoid technicians, as well as clients, to better monitor usage, detect anomalies, and enable precise and timely reordering of chemicals and equipment. Klenzoid is now working to incorporate real-time monitoring capabilities into AquaAnalytics.

“We generate, collect and analyze a lot of data to identify exceptions and do predictive modeling on when something is going to fail or a client falls out of the optimal least-cost operating model,” Cairns said. “The fact that AquaAnalytics ties into everything else in a single NetSuite system is phenomenal.”

Winner of NetSuite’s 2013 Your Suite Award for the most innovative customizations, AquaAnalytics highlights Klenzoid’s transformation with NetSuite Cloud ERP/CRM. Since 2007, Klenzoid has realized these improvements:

• Revenues have soared 300 per cent
• Client base has doubled to 1,500
• On-site client service efficiency up 35 per cent
• Operational efficiency up 40 per cent
• Data access and reporting efficiency up 45 per cent

Meanwhile, Klenzoid has streamlined equipment assembly with the NetSuite Work Orders and Assemblies module and improved inventory control at its 16,000 sq. ft. of warehousing space, helping fulfill objectives of 99 per cent on-time availability of chemicals and 95 per cent on-time availability of equipment. With the NetSuite Customer Center, Klenzoid enables clients to input and view information, helping drive high satisfaction. In a next phase, Klenzoid plans to roll out B2B commerce capabilities for clients to order products, view account history, print invoices and more.

“With AquaAnalytics, we’ve distilled our competitive advantage into a piece of software that offers so many advantages for Klenzoid and our customers,” Cairns said. “We love how the flexibility and scalability of NetSuite lets us rapidly introduce new programs and supports our objective to expand across Canada and the U.S.”

Michael Cairns is the director of business improvement at Klenzoid. He has been with Klenzoid for 12 years. He is a Canadian engineer experienced in water treatment, controls, cloud computing, ERP, and management.

This case study previously appeared in the September 2015 issue of Manufacturing AUTOMATION.