Compass Datacenters has carved out a high-growth niche serving some of the world’s largest hyperscalers and cloud providers. Ranked among Inc. Magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing companies, the Dallas-based firm uses prefabrication and modern manufacturing principles to design and construct data centers. Compass’ innovative approach allows it to deliver customizable, sustainable and cost-effective facilities on accelerated timelines.
These aren’t small projects. Compass focuses on large-scale, long-lived campuses that customers lease and increasingly entrust the provider to operate. The company manages about $4.3 billion in assets, not including the customer-owned equipment housed within its own four walls. This helps Compass deliver economies of scale for clients and long-term economic gains for the surrounding communities.
“It’s a pretty explosive business,” says Deborah Shute, director of ERP Systems Integration. Facing rapid growth and the demands of managing both construction and operations, Compass decided to upgrade its core systems.
Compass’s business has surged by 700% over the last two years. As with any rapid growth spurt, this rapid increase came with both rewards and challenges. Up until that point the company had been using the out-of-the-box NetSuite platform for basic accounting and finance, but the expansion drove the need for a system that could do much more.
The growing company also needed a NetSuite partner that understood its business, the challenges it was facing and its future growth plans. Compass interviewed several vendors before choosing ScaleNorth for its expertise in inventory management and its strong team.
“They were looking for a vendor who had the intel to understand inventory management and how it worked,” says Shute, who joined the company after the partner selection process. “They liked the ScaleNorth team, so they made the decision to work with them.”
Today, Shute works closely with ScaleNorth, relying on its team for consulting, development and business testing. Working together, they align Compass’s business processes with the NetSuite platform to ensure the system can support operations and scale with the company’s continued growth.
Shute began mapping out Compass’s processes and started UAT, only to learn that the company kept changing how it wanted to operate. Those shifts created ripple effects, from reassigning responsibilities to updating user permissions midstream. “It was clear that this wasn’t just a system implementation,” says Shute. “It was us figuring out how we wanted to run the business.”
ScaleNorth was up to the challenge. To integrate Compass’ data center inventory into NetSuite, for example, the company built workflows for approvals; linked inventory to purchase orders; created a streamlined process for managing invoices and payments; and then revised those processes multiple times. Compass’ team shifted from purchase-order-linked inventory to the inventory module, moved between bulk and line-item purchase orders, and refined asset-tracking methods.
Today, ScaleNorth plays a central role in keeping Compass Datacenters’ ERP aligned with its evolving business needs. The ScaleNorth team supports everything from developing new workflows to refining inventory management and ensuring processes are tested before deployment. ScaleNorth also helps map business requirements to NetSuite, manage complex inventory tracking, and streamline how purchase orders, invoices and payments flow through the platform.
Shute relies on ScaleNorth for both development and business testing, ensuring that every change supports Compass’ own operational goals. “They help us take our business processes, overlay them onto the system, and execute,” she says. This partnership has helped Compass make continuous improvements without losing momentum, keeping the platform flexible enough to scale right along with the company’s rapid growth.
“Our relationship with ScaleNorth has only strengthened over time,” Shute explains. “We work closely with them to make sure they have clear requirements and complete workflows before anything starts. This approach has reduced the need for changes, improved collaboration and ultimately led to a better product that supports our business.”
Compass Datacenters’ fast-moving, complex business gives ScaleNorth plenty of opportunities to solve unique problems. With so many moving parts, the work often goes beyond standard NetSuite deployments. “We give them new challenges and they dive right in, thinking about things in different ways to find solutions,” says Shute.
The rapid pace of growth keeps the partnership dynamic. Compass is now approaching 80 to 90 subsidiaries, for example, and it’s also integrating NetSuite with platforms like Procore and BlackLine. These projects require creative problem-solving and a deep understanding of Compass’ operations and its technology stack.
ScaleNorth provides the sole support for Compass’s NetSuite environment, handling both day-to-day needs and complex development work. In fact, Shute says the team’s ability to “step outside the typical implementation box” has been critical to keeping Compass’s systems in sync with its rapid expansion.
“We clearly communicate what we want and how we want it,” says Shute, “and ScaleNorth provides the targeted guidance and recommends the best solutions.” Using this approach, ScaleNorth has been able to consistently steer Compass toward approaches that fit the company’s needs and growth plans, often introducing ideas the team had not considered.
In fact, Shute says ScaleNorth’s deep NetSuite expertise, combined with its proactive problem-solving, helps Compass launch new initiatives faster and bring complex projects online—all without disrupting the company’s ongoing operations.
For Compass Datacenters, ScaleNorth has become a trusted NetSuite consulting partner that’s fully invested in the company’s success. Shute values the team’s transparency, accountability and willingness to own and address issues quickly.
“I would absolutely recommend ScaleNorth,” she says. “They care, they’re transparent, they’re accountable and they always respond. That’s what I looked for in a partner, and ScaleNorth has all of those qualities.”
