Astrak CIO talks NetSuite, AI and the future of IT

At SuiteConnect London, I sat down with Stephen Cope, the CIO of Astrak, to discuss NetSuite and how the firm is leveraging it. Astrak sells parts for heavy earth-moving machines. Those are machines that typically operate in the construction or agricultural sector. The firm also operates in distress purchase markets. When a machine is down, and operators need a rapid repair to complete their job, Astrak provides parts quickly.

Founded in Denmark in 2003 as a family firm, the firm moved its operations to the UK in 2007 and rebranded as Astrak Group in 2010. Its first ERP was Enterprise. However, around a decade ago it switched to NetSuite. Because of its strong capabilities, ease of customisation and support for global expansion.

Over the last few years, the firm has grown rapidly. That accelerated following investment firm Inflexion’s acquisition in 2022. By 2025, the firm had over 200 employees with projected revenues of £100 million. It has now expanded into Australasia with the acquisition of West-Trak in New Zealand and, recently, TKV, one of Australia’s leading specialist suppliers of pads, tracks, and undercarriage solutions for construction and agricultural equipment.

NetSuite has supported that growth and international expansion, and Astrak is leveraging its multi-subsidiary, multi-currency OneWorld function for entities across Europe, Australasia and North America.

I asked Cope why NetSuite was chosen. It was before he joined the company, but he said, “I believe the biggest driver was that it was cloud-based, having that one source of truth, and being able to customise the ERP to the business processes, and NetSuite was one of the best ones to do that at the time.”

NetSuite makes onboarding acquisitions easier

With Astrak making several acquisitions over the seven years since Cope joined the company, I asked him what challenges he had faced when merging new companies and how Astrak had overcome them.

He replied, “Data, Data, quality or lack of it? So you can imagine some of the acquisitions we were doing in our space, owner-managed businesses. They didn’t really make enough margin to invest in their systems and processes, and they didn’t have to.

“Ultimately, the acquisitions we’ve done have ranged from 10 people to 40 FTE in a business. It’s very much supply chain-oriented; buying products, stocking them, selling them, and getting them to the customer the next day.

“The biggest headache of mine over the last couple of years has been data quality. We try to do the integration of our acquisitions within 90 days. The quickest we’ve actually done is 50 days. We do a process alignment piece. We migrate all the data across, and during that migration process, we do the tidy up as well.

“To do data transfers, we built our own tools. Some data is transferred via Excel, and we built API tools into Google Maps to clean up the address data.”

Cope also explained that Astrak is self-sufficient with NetSuite. Many firms use a partner to help them. Cope, however, has an internal NetSuite team that the business transformation manager leads.

They manage all NetSuite developers and an administrator who works alongside the data team. He added, “We’ve done all the acquisitions ourselves internally. We do lean on ACS if we have any questions or problems. Typically, we’ve done it without any partner help in the past.”

Learning NetSuite

Another NetSuite service Astrak uses is NetSuite Learning Cloud Support. Astrak uses a Company pass to all their NetSuite users to easily and cost-effectively engage in continuous education. It includes on-demand learning, live events, and other benefits.

I asked Cope what that means for Astrak.

“At Astrak, we pride ourselves on learning development. It’s something that we use to attract talent into my department. Because we have the NetSuite Learning Cloud Pass, people can learn NetSuite as they work within NetSuite and also get certified.

“We’ve had many successful people come through the business now and come through my team, get certified, they go on to bigger and better things, but at least during three or four years, we get quite a bit of output from them.”

It is a strategy of employee growth that reflects well on Cope and his ethos as a CIO, and something he justifiably prides himself on.

It is not the only department that uses NetSuite, and Cope then explained who is responsible for the different functions; it is not just an IT system.

“Obviously, the cash-to-quote system will be a sales process. Then we’ve got inventory management for operations, so receipt and fulfilment, then all the financial functions and financial statement reporting. They’re all owned by the functional departments, but ultimately, my team sits on top of that to help and support what we can and to customise effectively.”

What Astrak likes about NetSuite

What do you like about that NetSuite?

“Probably the customisation and how easy it is to connect to the system. We have a lot of 3PLs and carriers around the world because our products are big, dirty, and heavy. We work directly with these companies using APIs and EDI (Connectors) into their systems, and that reduces a lot of strain on ourselves of filling in forms or carrier systems to book consignments.”

I asked Cope what he thought about the NetSuite announcement relating to its AI-powered Connector

“There are loads of things there that really excite me. We’re quite far along the AI journey. I know we’re quite a traditional business, but we’ve always invested in new technology. In the last 18 months, we went through an AI enablement programme where we actually taught staff what an LLM is and what automation is. What is machine learning?

“We invited departments into a working group to come up with ideas on how they can actually use AI effectively in their role. We’re seeing some really strong ROI cases. One of the tools we’ve built recently is a sales AI intelligence piece that will consume our customer data and suggest price-sensitive levers and churn data.

“We’re already using quite a lot of AI and analytics, but we’re really interested to see how we can use the Agentic agents inside NetSuite to do some of the automation.”

Where are you on your journey? Are these solutions deployed?

“I would say we’re walking at the moment, rather than running. We’ve got a roadmap of a lot of AI projects on the table. One that we’re using at the moment is to identify gaps in our knowledge. Our parts can fit multiple machine models. We’re using AI to reference external sources, like OEM part numbers and alternative part numbers to identify gaps in our knowledge base and backfill.”

Is there something that NetSuite could improve on?

“I think they’re making some strides on the UI. The UI was always a big discussion point. Redwood looks better. It could look even better, in my opinion. Performance and speed, so I’d be really interested to see what the new Oracle AI function will have an impact on the speed and performance of the record loads.”

On Integrations

Besides the 3PL and carrier integrations, what other integrations does your NetSuite instance support?

“We’ve done a headless e-commerce website in the past using APIs for pricing, availability and order placements. We’ve also used some middleware like Celigo to integrate into Shopify and a couple of eCommerce websites.”

Cope revealed that they have also integrated into BI products, but are now looking to build their own reporting structure.

On AI and the future

Rather than using AI for automation, they have focused on intelligence. His approach is to roll out AI within small pockets, check adoption rates and then scale. For agentic AI, he intends to examine the current business processes and identify where Agents can have an impact.

Importantly, Cope is not just looking to automate existing processes; he will also consider re-engineering them. He added, “How can we do this different now, with the tools we’ve got available?”

With AI becoming so integrated in the business, what is the future role of the CIO?

“I think it will merge with the COO and also the CHRO role, if I’m honest, because you’ll be managing not only people, but also AI agents. I think the biggest improvements from AI will be in HR, because in traditional businesses people are typically kept on their own islands, and AI will bridge that gap.”

Who will be responsible for the compliance of digital workers?

“It can’t sit with the developers; it has to be owned by the C-Suite. It has to be owned by the technology and HR strategy. So whoever owns that.”

The book question

I asked Cope about the latest book he read and whether he listens to podcasts instead of or in addition to books. He replied, “I think books are very good for the fundamentals and for the theory side. Podcasts are really good as well, for understanding what new technologies are around the corner.”

Cope both reads books and listens to podcasts. The latest book he read was Co-Intelligence: The Definitive, Bestselling Guide to Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick (Amazon Aus, UK, US)

For podcasts, he likes Danny in the Valley, the Times Tech podcast. It is hosted by Danny Fortson, who is based in Silicon Valley. He also recommended the sports podcast, Stick to Football, hosted by Gary Neville, Roy Keane and Ian Wright, which he listens to weekly. Cope also likes to take time to use new technologies, as he believes you learn so much more by using them.

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