Modular Devices

Five years on NetSuite, and the project side still lived in a spreadsheet

Modular Devices pioneered mobile medical imaging more than 35 years ago. Today the Indianapolis-based company designs, manufactures and leases mobile and modular cath labs, MRI and CT trailers, and cleanrooms for hospitals and life-science manufacturers nationwide. Under private-equity ownership it has grown to nine subsidiaries — three of them acquired in the last year alone.

The parent company had run NetSuite for about five years, including native NetSuite Projects. But the business is milestone-driven, and finance wanted to recognize revenue against cost. Native Projects couldn't connect the two. Each month, Kelsey Harden — then Director of Operations — spent the better part of a week closing out revenue recognition by hand.

“It would take probably a full week to close out the month of revenue recognition. I needed something where we could easily see our costs and revenue in the same spot.”Kelsey Harden, Director of Business Systems & Integration, Modular Devices

The acquisition of TDC Trailer, the group's trailer manufacturer, sharpened the problem. TDC needed real-time visibility into job costs, and with no reliable view of work in progress the company had fallen well behind on invoicing. When Kelsey moved into her current systems role, handing the manual process to someone else wasn't realistic — the process itself had to change.

Why stay on-platform

Kelsey went to SuiteWorld with one goal: find a project-accounting tool that could serve both the manufacturing and the project-management sides of the portfolio. She had already lived with the limits of native Projects and knew an off-platform tool would mean integrating cost data back into NetSuite. BlueCollar Projects, a native SuiteApp, kept everything on the general ledger and gave TDC Trailer's work orders, assemblies and WIP a direct line to project cost.

An implementation run peer to peer

Kelsey came into the engagement unusually well prepared — she knew the operations, she knew NetSuite, and she knew exactly what she wanted the system to do. The BlueCollar team met her at that level. Weekly working sessions with Riley and Michael became a standing forum for feasibility questions: is this possible, does it make sense, and is it worth building.

“I work with many vendors across our tech stack, and BlueCollar has been my favorite vendor. Riley is very knowledgeable — I'd ask a feasibility question and he'd come back with a very detailed answer. It was almost peer to peer.”Kelsey Harden, Modular Devices

Together they built targeted customizations rather than sweeping ones: cost codes apply automatically based on the project on a sales order, and serialized components for MRI and CT trailer builds are tagged to their BlueCollar project so cost lands in WIP, then cost of goods sold, without manual intervention.

What's next

Growth is the mandate. With more acquisitions on the horizon, Kelsey's job is to make each new entity as easy to integrate as possible, and BlueCollar Projects is the project-accounting layer she standardizes on. Two more companies in the group are slated to move onto the manufacturing side of BlueCollar Projects, and the estimating work that still lives in Excel is the next candidate for the platform.

“Now that the implementation's officially over, I'm kind of sad. I enjoyed our weekly meetings.”Kelsey Harden, Modular Devices