Chicago Music Exchange, a premier authority on vintage, new, and used music equipment, is working with Oracle NetSuite to serve musicians, collectors, and friends who want straight answers expertise and first-hand knowledge. With NetSuite, Chicago Music Exchange has been able to take advantage of an integrated business system to enable increased productivity and profitability as it grows its in-store and digital presence.

Since 1990, Chicago Music Exchange has served as a premier destination for musicians globally and now ships more than 120,000 instruments annually from its store in downtown Chicago and through its three ecommerce channels. To help ensure it could continue to help customers quickly and easily find the perfect gear as demand soared, Chicago Music Exchange needed to streamline its operations which included disparate IT systems, a 20,000-square-foot warehouse, and more than 15,000 SKUs. After careful evaluation, Chicago Music Exchange replaced QuickBooks and Lightspeed with NetSuite to help automate its inventory management and ecommerce operations, improve visibility across its organization, and enhance decision making.

“As we reviewed new business opportunities, we realized we were constrained by inefficient processes and needed to rethink our systems,” said Andrew Yonke, CEO, Chicago Music Exchange. “With NetSuite, we now have a single business system that has given us new insights into our business by enabling us to look at ecommerce, inventory, and sales metrics in real time. We have also been able to automate many different processes with NetSuite and that has significantly increased efficiencies and helped us maintain our 24-hour shipping guarantee even as demand has soared. The combination of improved insights and efficiency is having a significant impact on our current business and as we continue to expand, NetSuite scales with us.”

With NetSuite, Chicago Music Exchange has been able to move from several disconnected business applications to a single integrated system. NetSuite ERP has enabled Chicago Music Exchange to streamline inventory management by tracking inventory quantity and location, providing greater insight to make more informed financial and operational decisions. When it’s time to pick an order, NetSuite can save time and increase efficiency by telling employees each item’s exact bin location. In addition, NetSuite can help Chicago Music Exchange avoid overselling items by providing a real-time snapshot of stock on order from vendors and items ordered by its’ site’s customers, so it can calculate how much stock to allocate to Amazon and Reverb. Leveraging the NetSuite Connector, inventory availability is also updated on those sites seamlessly.

NetSuite enables Chicago Music Exchange to track demand in real time to help ensure it stocks the right products. For example, Chicago Music Exchange can now track music equipment attributes – brand, body style, and color – that sell quickly to guide purchase decisions. The enhanced reporting delivered by NetSuite has enabled Chicago Music Exchange to move from manually calculating inventory costs to automatically running inventory reports.

“Retailers are looking to unify and automate business operations across channels in an efficient and profitable way,” said David Rodman, SVP of Customer Success, Oracle NetSuite. “With NetSuite’s centralized and scalable system, Chicago Music Exchange uses one system to manage all transactions, and this increases visibility and control over its business. As a result, Chicago Music Exchange can deliver the shopping experience that customers seek, while tracking product popularity, understanding real-time demand, and driving operational excellence.”

As Chicago Music Exchange enters its seventh year with NetSuite, the organization is looking to realize the full value NetSuite can bring to its business including exploring the product training available in NetSuite Learning Cloud Support. By saving teams’ time on manual work, the organization saves money and can focus valuable resources on what matters most: delighting more guitar enthusiasts nationwide.