Case studies

Five engagements, by industry. Numbers are the ones I can share.

1. Biotech manufacturing

   A production platform and NetSuite that agree with each other

   The situation

   An antibody manufacturer ran production on its own platform and the business on NetSuite. Orders, lots and inventory had to move both ways, in real time, without anyone keying them twice, and the allocation of lot-tracked inventory to orders followed rules the standard commitment logic couldn’t express.

   What I built

   A bidirectional integration: four RESTlets for the real-time traffic, with a Map/Reduce backup-and-retry layer that uses file-based persistence and integration-log audit records, all engineered around NetSuite’s governance limits. Beside it, a lot-level inventory allocation engine, about 4,500 lines of User Event script running a five-step allocation cascade with inventory-detail subrecord commitment. An in-memory mapping cache replaced a hundred-plus per-transaction lookups with a single query. I was the primary technical contact, leading weekly work-track sessions, UAT cycles and the integration sequencing on an engagement of roughly 90 hours a month.

   The hard part

   Governance. A real-time RESTlet gets a fixed budget of work per call, and an allocation cascade over lots and subrecords eats it fast. The design splits the work so the RESTlet does what must be synchronous and hands the rest to Map/Reduce, with the integration log as the ledger that lets a failed step be retried without being repeated.

   Outcome

   Live in production. The same architecture was then extended to stand up a new German subsidiary.

2. Legal services

   E-billing that the carriers’ platform would accept

   The situation

   A national legal record-retrieval provider invoiced major insurance carriers, which take electronic bills in LEDES format through the T360 platform. Its billing ran on a legacy system that had to be retired, and the published LEDES specifications did not match the files the platform actually accepted.

   What I built

   LEDES 1998B and LEDES XML 2.0 export in NetSuite: a Suitelet for selecting and reviewing the invoices to bill, and a Map/Reduce script that builds and validates the files at volume.

   The hard part

   The documentation was incomplete and, in places, wrong. I reverse-engineered the differences between the vendor specifications and production files the platform had already accepted, and built the exporter to the files rather than to the spec.

   Outcome

   T360 acceptance, electronic invoicing to the carriers from NetSuite, and the legacy billing system switched off.

3. Consulting, internal

   Meeting notes that file themselves

   The situation

   A consultancy recorded its client meetings with a transcription service and paid for licences whose main job was turning transcripts into notes and action items that someone then copied into SharePoint by hand.

   What I built

   A meeting-intelligence pipeline: the transcription service’s webhooks into Celigo, a multi-pass LLM extraction that pulls decisions, action items and owners out of each transcript, and the Microsoft Graph API to file the result in the right SharePoint site. Designed and proved out end to end.

   The hard part

   Getting structured, trustworthy output from unstructured transcripts. One pass over a long meeting misses things, so the extraction runs in stages, each with a narrow job and a fixed output shape, and the pipeline keeps the original transcript beside the summary so anything can be checked.

   Outcome

   Projected to save about $12K a year in licensing.

4. Project-based business

   From a won deal to a project, without a form

   The situation

   Sales lived in HubSpot and delivery lived in NetSuite. Every closed deal meant someone creating the matching projects by hand, one for each line of the deal, and label and check printing needed layouts NetSuite doesn’t ship with.

   What I built

   A Map/Reduce script that watches deal-stage probability in HubSpot and creates NetSuite projects automatically, one project per deal line item. Alongside it, label and check printing rebuilt on Advanced PDF/HTML templates.

   The hard part

   Deals keep changing after they cross the line. The script has to recognise a line it has already turned into a project, pick up lines added later, and leave alone anything a project manager has edited since.

   Outcome

   Projects appear in NetSuite the moment a deal crosses the line; labels and checks print from the live record.

5. Apparel manufacturing

   Purchase orders that reach the factory

   The situation

   An apparel manufacturer produced overseas. Purchase orders left NetSuite as documents, and what the factory did with them came back by email, so the order book and the factory’s view of it drifted apart.

   What I built

   An integration between NetSuite and the overseas factory’s system: purchase orders flow out as they are approved, and the factory’s side flows back into the same records.

   The hard part

   Two systems that each think they own the purchase order. The integration decides which side wins on every field, and says so in its logs when they disagree.

   Outcome

   Live, with purchase orders flowing.