Lifecykel taps Annexa for NetSuite transformation

The biotech company needed more than just a Xero replacement.

Biotech company Lifecykel has partnered with Annexa to overhaul its finance operations from multiple Xero instances and spreadsheets to Oracle NetSuite ERP.

The business, founded in 2015, specialises in premium functional mushroom extracts and distributes to more than 120 countries, including Australia, the US and UK.

As Lifecykel grew from startup to global business, its finance and operational systems were unable to keep pace and constraining future growth. At one point, it ran seven or eight Xero instances, with everything the system couldn’t hold tracked in separate spreadsheets.

The problem was that purchase orders could be raised through spreadsheets without numbering, reporting had to be produced entity by entity and reconciliation and consolidation were handled separately.

Traceability is a business-critical issue

As Lifecykel's product line and manufacturing operations scaled across countries, the company needed visibility over raw materials, work in progress and finished products, as well as the ability to track batch and serial numbers.

Traceability, including food safety certification and organic and non-GMO certification, had become a requirement for further expansion. The business needed a platform capable of managing supply chain, manufacturing, inventory, quality control and multi-entity financial consolidation within a more unified environment.

Lifecykel initially investigated adding an inventory platform to Xero. However, the complexity of its manufacturing operations meant this would not solve the broader problem.

“We were managing the entire end-to-end process, and we needed to track everything, including batch numbers, serial numbers,” said Lifecykel’s CFO, Jonathon Meredith-Smith.

Transforming to one global-ready platform

Lifecykel chose Annexa as its NetSuite implementation partner, which involved more than just moving financial data from one accounting platform to another. The manufacturing component had to be created from scratch because it hadn’t existed within Xero.

For finance, trial balances from Xero were mapped account by account to the new chart of accounts, with the team completing several practice uploads before go live. Inventory also had to be rebuilt to a greater level of detail, incorporating each product, quantity, batch number and best-before date.

One of the challenges was moving systems while Lifecykel's ecommerce and logistics operations continued. The team ran approximately five days of overlap during go live. An accurate chart of accounts and inventory position were critical, particularly because Shopify orders and third-party logistics operations could not simply be paused.

The transformation has delivered greater clarity across budgeting, forecasting and reporting. Financial information across countries and currencies can now be consolidated automatically, providing real-time visibility of the company's global financial position.

Where reconciling accounts could previously take up to a month, the finance team can now close the books in a matter of days. Reporting has also shifted into the central system rather than requiring the team to reconcile entities through a separate tool or rebuild a consolidated balance sheet externally.

Annexa's work also helped Lifecykel connect NetSuite with key systems including Shopify, Amazon marketplace and ShipBob through Celigo iPaaS. This has removed data silos and established NetSuite as the central source of truth, while allowing information to flow between systems.

Lifecykel's manufacturing processes has given the business visibility from raw materials through work in progress to finished products across multiple regions. Real-time visibility across warehouses now enables Lifecykel to identify potential shortages and surpluses more quickly.

Weekly inventory reporting has gone from six to eight hours to just 10 minutes. In addition, the control and traceability provided by the new platform have supported Lifecykel to expand into new retailers.

Establishing the foundation for AI

Lifecykel is now using NetSuite as its data foundation for adopting AI and is trialling Erstan, Annexa's agentic AI platform built for NetSuite. It will trial three agents once their program begins, while the company is also watching NetSuite's own AI releases.

Annexa’s solution architect Will Goodbourn said it’s vital to get the underlying data environment right before introducing AI agents.

“An AI tool’s only really as good as the data underneath it. If your numbers are in five different places and they don’t agree, then you can’t really run an agent on that,” he said.