ScaleNorth helped a fast-growing cleaning products manufacturer tighten its NetSuite setup before Black Friday and continue improving the system over time.
Every time a big rig comes off the highway covered in road grime, salt, diesel soot, and weeks of hard miles, Chem-X sees more than a dirty truck. There’s a customer who needs to get back on the road, a fleet that can’t afford downtime, and a job that needs to get done right the first time. The Massachusetts company makes soaps, cleaning systems, and wash products for fleets, truckers, detailers, and drivers who want to get vehicles clean faster, without wasting time on products that don’t work.
The company was founded in 1979 as Chemex New England by Barry Hoyle, who started selling soaps and equipment directly to trucking and construction companies. His son, current CEO Bob Hoyle, grew up in the business, washing returned 55-gallon soap drums as a kid, riding along on deliveries as a teenager, and eventually taking over after his parents retired.
Chem-X still runs on that same hands-on approach, but its reach now extends far beyond New England via e-commerce, YouTube, TikTok, and the kind of before-and-after vehicle cleanup videos that stop people mid-scroll.
As Chem-X grew from a regional supplier of soaps and wash equipment into a multi-channel brand selling through Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop, distributors, and direct customer relationships, its back-office systems had to keep up. With about $6 million in annual revenue, the company needed better ways to manage net-30 customer accounts, sales tax requirements, inventory, and order flow across the growing organization.
“We’ve grown quite a bit over the last couple of years, and that’s presented a number of challenges,” says CEO Bob Hoyle. “There were many things that needed to be automated so that we could scale up.”[BM1.1]
Chem-X chose Oracle NetSuite for its automation capabilities and to strengthen the connections between its e-commerce channels, ERP, and shipping systems. The platform offered the right foundation, but Chem-X still needed help fine-tuning the initial ERP implementation.
Lot number tracking for Chem-X’s liquids caused some early problems. If the company needed to trace a specific batch of liquid product, for example, the ERP had to show which orders included those products and which customers received them. Instead, some early lot tracking problems caused orders to get stuck between Shopify, NetSuite, and ShipStation.
“One of our biggest challenges within NetSuite was lot number tracking for our liquids to make sure that if something came up with a lot, it would already be recorded in our system as the orders went out,” Hoyle explains. “There were problems with that at the outset, and it was causing a hang-up in all of our connectors.”
The lot tracking and connector problems added hours of work for the Chem-X team, and the timing made the situation even more pressing. The company was still learning how to use NetSuite ERP across a more complex operation, and it needed more hands-on training, faster answers, and a partner that could help fine-tune the ERP before order volume spiked.
Just one month out from the Black Friday order surge, Chem-X called on ScaleNorth for help. The company needed a strong NetSuite implementation partner that could resolve the connector issues, help the team get more comfortable in the system, and get the operation ready for its busiest selling period of the year.
“That was about how long we had to start ironing out a bunch of different issues while also getting ready for Black Friday,” says Hoyle. “We needed to make sure it didn’t go completely off the rails.”
Lucky for Chem-X, ScaleNorth had seen more than its fair share of growing companies come out of a new ERP implementation and move dangerously close to “off the rails” territory. It knew the signs, understood the manufacturer’s business model, and knew how to take on the new challenge.
ScaleNorth worked alongside the company, handled the immediate issues, and taught employees how to manage more of the process themselves. That combination gave Chem-X the support it needed during the Black Friday push and helped the company build more internal knowledge for the long term.
“ScaleNorth came in, and from the first meeting, we got a really good feeling from our interaction with the team,” says Hoyle. “That made us feel pretty comfortable, and everything just made sense, so we went with it.”
With ScaleNorth’s support, Chem-X resolved its most important connector and lot tracking issues in time for the Black Friday order surge. The company fine-tuned key parts of its NetSuite setup and gave the team a better handle on the system during one of its busiest selling periods of the year.
“We solved all of the important issues right in time for Black Friday,” says Hoyle. “Since then, ScaleNorth has been finding issues right away, bringing them to our attention, and fixing them.”
For example, ScaleNorth helped Chem-X identify sales tax questions, connector glitches, and process gaps around batch numbers. Fixing those issues helped the manufacturer get more from its ERP and build more confidence in the processes supporting its e-commerce, distributor, and direct sales channels.
Chem-X now has a NetSuite partner it can call on when questions come up, new processes need attention, or the team needs help getting more from the ERP. “ScaleNorth comes in like an army and fixes stuff,” says Hoyle. “It’s a huge relief to know we have the resources we need to make things work. I’d rate ScaleNorth a 10 out of 10.”
