Firstbeat

Firstbeat develops wellbeing with NetSuite

Established in 2002, Firstbeat Technologies Oy is an international company providing physiological analytics and services for well-being and professional sports. Its heart rate analysis, based on multidisciplinary research, and digital services produce personalized information about stress levels, recovery, sleep and the impact of exercise. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have gained new insights into stress and recovery thanks to Firstbeat’s wellbeing services. Launched a few years ago, the Firstbeat Life service already has hundreds of service providers as partners worldwide. Firstbeat Sports supports tens of thousands of professional athletes in the Premier League, NHL and NBA, as well as in numerous national teams. The company’s former consumer business offered analytics to manufacturers of smart and sports watches, inspiring millions of consumers to improve their performance and wellbeing with the help of Firstbeat. Today, Firstbeat’s wellbeing and sports businesses have customers in more than 70 countries.

Firstbeat offers people continuously new ways to learn more about themselves and helps them achieve their health and performance goals with science-backed confidence. Firstbeat has received a great deal of recognition both in Finland and internationally. Among other things, it received the INNOSUOMI award granted by the President of Finland for its development of heart rate analytics technology and was one of the winners of the Grow to USA award in the Kasvu Open 2017 competition.

In search of a comprehensive business platform to support the growth strategy

In 2019, Firstbeat set its eyes on business growth both in Finland and abroad. The prerequisites for growth had been thoroughly inspected, and the processes and systems used back then were found to be inadequate. The reporting process, for example, was based on various local accounting systems and service providers in different countries. The resulting inconsistency in reporting and manual consolidation of figures were found to involve too many risks.

To support its growth strategy, Firstbeat set out to find a partner and business platform that together would enable more harmonised, efficient and scalable processes for all countries. To ensure better control during growth, the company sought real-time visibility of the operational situation and financial figures.

“We concluded that our distributed country-specific systems and Excel-based inventory management did not support our global growth and operational scaling efforts. We felt that growth required a comprehensive ERP system,” says Tuulia Kärki, CFO of Firstbeat.

Another goal in choosing a new, comprehensive business platform and partner was to reduce the manual stages involved in reporting and operational work to ensure a smarter allocation of limited resources during the stage of rapid growth. Firstbeat’s choice of a new platform fell on NetSuite.

“The new ERP system allowed us to significantly free up resources from routine manual work and allocate them to customer service and business development tasks. It also enabled us to use external partners for logistics operations, for example,” says Kärki.

NetSuite and Staria to support business growth

Following a competitive bidding involving several NetSuite providers, Firstbeat chose Staria as its partner. Staria also contributed to an extensive renewal of financial processes with its International Accounting service centre. As a result, Firstbeat was able to reduce its own administration and focus on supporting its business instead of handling monthly routines.

“We chose Staria as our partner because in view of synergies, we wanted to get the ERP delivery project and financial administration services from the same place. Staria’s strength is its ability to provide financial administration services to the entire group, including our foreign subsidiaries. The deployment of the ERP system was surprisingly fast and smooth. We have been satisfied with their knowledgeable consultants, who help us further develop the system and its functionalities in accordance with Firstbeat’s changing needs,” says Kärki.

In addition to NetSuite, Firstbeat was also interested in Staria’s SuiteApp solutions and other complementary systems that supported the comprehensive system update. Of the SuiteApp solutions, the company chose INFlow, a purchase invoice solution built into NetSuite. Firstbeat is also using Staria Banking to automate payment transactions.

“Thanks to INFlow, our purchase invoice approval process automatically matches our approval matrix, and the related audit trail is stored in the system. We have been satisfied with the solution,” says Kärki.

Firstbeat logo

Founded
2002

Business
Wellbeing and sports

Service solutions
NetSuite ERP, International Accounting, INFlow SuiteApp and Staria Banking

Webpage
https://www.firstbeat.com/en/

Read more about our NetSuite customers

We’d love to hear from you!

Whether you have questions about financial administration services, our products or you’d like a free demo, we’ll answer all your questions.

Reach out to our local sales teams or use the form to leave a contact request, and we’ll be in touch with you soon.