How a Hardware Distributor Replaced NetSuite With Stellar One and Saved $250,000

Six years on NetSuite at a growing hardware distributor looks something like this. The system was implemented by someone who's no longer with the company. Nobody on the team really knows how it works. Demand planning happens in a spreadsheet because the native tools don't fit the workflow. And the renewal price keeps climbing about 19 percent a year, every year, with no realistic ceiling.

That's the spot Copper Creek, a hardware distributor, was in two years ago. Here's what happened after they switched to Stellar One, and what other distributors stuck in the same loop can take from it.

The True Cost of Staying on NetSuite as a Distributor

Copper Creek started on NetSuite at $39,000 a year. By the time they were evaluating alternatives, the trajectory was clear. At the same rate of escalation, year seven was projected at $113,000 a year. Over six years, the difference between staying and switching came to roughly $250,000.

That's not a hypothetical. Tay Lee, owner at Copper Creek, signed off on those numbers from the project closeout. Year one alone delivered about $40,000 back to the business.

This is the part most distributors don't see coming. NetSuite's pricing escalates with user counts, module add-ons, and renewal rate increases. By year five or six, the number you signed up for at $39K bears no resemblance to what you're actually paying. Most companies don't notice until they're already locked into the next contract.

Demand Planning That Actually Fits a Distributor's Workflow

Before the switch, Tay was running purchasing and inventory planning off a spreadsheet. Every month meant cutting and pasting different reports, recalculating monthly averages by hand, and hoping nothing got missed in transit.

That's not a Tay problem. It's a distribution problem. Around 68 percent of small and midsized distributors keep using Excel alongside their ERP system because native tools don't match how operations actually work at the SKU level.

Stellar One took a different approach. Instead of forcing Tay to abandon a planning workflow he'd built over years, the team connected his existing Excel spreadsheet to Acumatica through an OData feed. Live in-transit numbers, open POs, and backorders started flowing in automatically. Over time, that evolved into a fully custom demand planning tool, now on its sixth iteration, that Tay still uses today. As he put it during a working session after testing a new build: "As soon as I created these additional receipts, those numbers went right into that in-transit when I refreshed this spreadsheet. So that was working perfectly."

Custom Reporting and Commission Logic Included in the Subscription

Distribution finance teams know the headache. Commission reporting across direct B2B, Amazon, and retail EDI is a tangle of different payment timing, deduction logic, and fee structures. Most ERP partners price this kind of work as a separate project at $10,000 to $25,000 minimum.

For Copper Creek, Stellar One built a fully custom commission results report, including Amazon payment reconciliation, with multiple rounds of iteration based on what Fran Uribe and the finance team actually needed. Total separate cost: zero. It came through Mission Support, which is bundled into the Stellar One subscription with no per-question fee.

The same model covered the demand planning tool, the SPS Commerce EDI transition mid-implementation, packing slip and picking ticket redesigns, and a long list of post go-live enhancements that other partners would have scoped out as paid change orders.

The EDI Switch Most Partners Would Have Pushed Back On

Mid-implementation EDI changes are one of the highest-risk events in a distribution ERP project. Copper Creek had been using True Commerce. During the project, the decision was made to switch to SPS Commerce. That meant remapping trading partner connections (including Home Depot), re-testing retailer compliance, and compressing testing windows, all while the primary cutover was already in motion.

Stellar One absorbed the change inside the existing project scope. The May 1, 2024 go-live held. Today, SPS Commerce connects Copper Creek's retail trading partners through the same Mission Support relationship that covers everything else.

What Distributors Can Take From This

If you're running a distribution business on NetSuite and your renewal numbers are getting harder to defend, the issue isn't your team. It's the structure of the cost. NetSuite's pricing model rewards staying for the first few years and punishes you compounding from there. By the time the price feels wrong, the switching cost feels worse.

Copper Creek's story isn't unique. It's just one that got documented. A hardware distributor with no internal IT, no technical resources, and six years of accumulated NetSuite habits made the switch and came out of it with custom tools, real savings, and a partner that still picks up the phone two years later. The difference wasn't the software. It was a pricing model that didn't punish growth and a support model that didn't charge by the question.

If those two things sound like what you've been missing, the next step is figuring out what your own switching math actually looks like.