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Case Study
Koko Black tempers its operations with a NetSuite rebuild by DWR
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At a Glance
- Chocolate production
- Retail stores
- Online sales
Koko Black is a premium Australian chocolatier. It makes its chocolate in Melbourne and sells it online and through its own stores around the country, from its original home in Melbourne's Royal Arcade to Crown Melbourne and Brisbane's Queen Street Mall.
Premium chocolate manufacturing and retail
Melbourne, Australia
Chocolate production, national retail stores and online sales
NetSuite Project Rescue by DWR
Key Results
A clean rebuild
on NetSuite leading practice
Was: years of patches and workarounds
Recipes in NetSuite
before production starts
Was: built in Excel, added later
Role-based access
for every team
Was: most staff set up as administrators
The Challenge
A system that had stopped keeping up
- Ambitious growth targets
- 2 separate entities
- Spreadsheet planning
- Manual approvals
Koko Black had set itself an ambitious goal: to grow into a $100m business within 3 years. It had run on NetSuite since around 2013, but the system had been extended and patched over time in ways that no longer matched how the business worked. It wasn't delivering the return the team expected.
The business was split across 2 entities, which clouded the view of stock and production and left finance reconciling between them every month end. Recipes were built in Excel and sometimes reached NetSuite only after the chocolate had been made. Demand and supply planning ran on an intricate spreadsheet that only a handful of people understood, and supplier bills still went through manual approvals. With most staff set up as administrators, it was also hard to control who could change what.
Koko Black needed a system that would support its growth rather than hold it back, so it asked DWR to take a hard look at what it had.
What DWR's review found
Rebuilding beat repairing
Untangling the existing setup while the business kept trading would have taken longer, carried more risk and cost more than starting again on a clean NetSuite foundation.
The Solution
Back to how NetSuite was designed to work
DWR treated the work as a NetSuite project rescue and began with a Leading Practices Review, running workshops with the people who used the system every day across production, the warehouse, sales and finance. It measured each area against how NetSuite is designed to work, and the findings became the roadmap for a full reimplementation in a new instance.
NetSuite Project Rescue: SuiteSuccess Manufacturing rebuild
Design workshops took place on site at Koko Black's Coburg production facility, with a clear rule: stay close to standard NetSuite and customise only where the business needed it. Recipes, bills of materials and work orders moved into NetSuite. Planning followed, with the demand plan driving suggested purchase orders and work orders. Purchasing was built around food production, down to temperature checks when raw materials arrived. A role-based setup gave each team the dashboards and access its job required. Before go-live, every process was tested against real Koko Black scenarios.
The Impact
Ready for the next stage of growth
The most immediate change was in production. With recipes, work orders and planning in one system, the team could plan and cost production in NetSuite instead of rebuilding the picture from spreadsheets. Knowledge that had lived with a few individuals now sat where everyone could use it.
The bigger shift was control. Each team worked from a dashboard built for its role, access matched the job, and supplier bills moved through approval inside NetSuite. Koko Black went live in 2019 on a clean system, ready to grow with the business.
In Their Words
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What could NetSuite do for your business?
What could NetSuite do for your business? Sydney and Melbourne teams who understand Australian compliance and mid-market operations. This consultation covers the NetSuite OneWorld implementation, the same day result above. TaskDrive, the AI layer, is a separate product evaluated at taskdrive.ai.
No obligation. Straight answers.
Results described are specific to this customer and depend on their starting systems, data quality, implementation scope, and ongoing use of the platform. Individual results vary by organisation. TaskDrive is an independent product and company, separate from DWR.
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