At Cytrellis Biosystems, pulling a basic shipping report took ten days.
Not ten minutes. Ten days - a request into a queue, a SQL query against an on-premise database, a report builder that had to be coaxed, and a wait. This at a medical device manufacturer whose FDA-cleared ellacor Micro-Coring System was expanding into new indications and new countries, selling capital equipment into dermatology and plastic surgery practices with consumables, training, and service revenue behind it.
The system underneath was Infor SyteLine, deployed on-premise years earlier, during hypergrowth, when Cytrellis had more than 120 employees. By the time we met them, the company had made a deliberate decision to contract to roughly 30 people and rebuild around a focused commercial strategy. The ERP never got resized. What was left was an instance built for a company that no longer existed: rigid, dependent on the VAR for every change, and requiring full revalidation with each of its two annual upgrade cycles.
Salesforce sat beside it with no live connection, bridged by middleware that would itself need revalidating. Procure-to-pay ran on manual approval chains routed through DocuSign. There was no batch or lot tracking. No depot repair tracking. No loaner unit management - loaner devices were being carried as fixed assets, because there was nowhere else to put them.
Cytrellis is now live on a full-suite NetSuite deployment with FDA software validation complete at go-live. This is the story of how that happened, and of the objection that nearly stopped it.
Cytrellis evaluated NetSuite against Microsoft Dynamics.
The competing argument was not about price, or modules, or user experience. It was a single, direct claim: that a cloud ERP could not support an FDA-validated medical device environment. That regulated device manufacturers belong on-premise, where you control the release cycle, because validation and continuous vendor-driven updates are fundamentally incompatible.
It's a good objection. It is also the reason a lot of device manufacturers are still running systems they've outgrown.
The answer to it isn't a slide. It's a validation package.
BSP delivered FDA software validation as a defined, priced, scoped deliverable - 250 hours of it, built on a risk-based approach customized to Cytrellis:
That list is the whole argument. Validation in the cloud is not impossible; it is specific. It requires a partner who has done it before, who knows what an auditor will ask for, and who can produce a traceability matrix rather than a reassurance.
And the payoff runs the other direction from the objection. Cytrellis didn't just move to a validated cloud ERP - they retired the revalidation burden that came with every on-premise Infor rollout, twice a year, indefinitely.
That is the part worth sitting with. The on-premise argument for control quietly assumes the cost of that control is free. It isn't. Cytrellis was paying it in staff time, twice annually, with one in-house finance resource.
This was not a Financials First deployment with modules trailing behind it. Cytrellis went live in a single cutover on NetSuite Premium Manufacturing:
Financials - segmented chart of accounts, period close, budgeting, bank integration and reconciliation, ACH and wire payments, expense reports.
Manufacturing - work orders and multi-level assemblies including kits and phantoms, work order completions with backflush against lot-numbered components, and co-manufacturing for toll manufacturing at third-party locations.
Inventory and traceability - lot and serialized items, multiple units of measure, cycle counting, inventory status by lot, with the Lot Assignments and Lot Traceability SuiteApps delivering FIFO lot assignment, shelf-life enforcement at both item and customer-item level, and full forward and backward traceability. One physical warehouse, five virtual locations, one co-manufacturer site.
Procure-to-pay - requisitions through vendor payments, blanket POs, vendor returns and credits, and a 2/3-way match approval workflow that replaced the DocuSign chain entirely.
Quote-to-cash - parent/child customer hierarchy, quotes, sales orders, special-order work order generation, shipment, invoicing, deposits, automated billing, bills of lading.
Fixed assets, amortization schedules, support cases, FedEx and UPS parcel shipping, and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse for dashboards and pipelines - replacing the ten-day report request with role-based dashboards for 20 configured users.
Salesforce was integrated to the ERP for the first time, on the NetSuite Integration Platform, retiring the middleware that would have needed revalidation. Three years of historical trial balance came across, along with open purchase orders, vendor bills, sales orders, invoices and credit memos, inventory balances by item, lot and serial number, and roughly 500 customer and 250 vendor master records.
Cytrellis went live in May of 2026 - within two weeks of the target date the company had fixed before it ever chose an implementation partner - with validation complete, not deferred.
Halfway through the implementation, in November 2025, Cytrellis expanded the scope.
They added BSP's Viking Solutions Service & Repair - depot repair, field service, and loaner unit tracking - as a change order. It was delivered and closed by go-live, alongside everything above.
Customers do not buy more from you mid-implementation unless the implementation is going well. That change order is the most honest endorsement in this entire story, and it closed a gap named explicitly during evaluation.
Cytrellis has since committed to a Phase 2 quality scope: approved suppliers, quality inspection on receipt, and electronic signature. Beyond it sits a longer roadmap - eQMS covering NCR, CAPA and DCO, device history records, item revision management, FEFO lot assignment, demand planning and MRP.
BSP runs a dedicated life sciences and medical device practice. Behind it is a purpose-built solution suite - Viking Solutions - covering eQMS, device history records, electronic signature, approved suppliers, and lot generation. It exists because device manufacturers need things that generic ERP implementations don't deliver, and because a 30-person company with one finance resource cannot absorb a full-suite ERP replacement and an FDA validation at the same time without a partner who brings leading-practice process flows and documentation already built.
Cytrellis is in Woburn, Massachusetts. BSP is headquartered in Boston, in the same metro area, and a member community that includes MassMEDIC. Some of this work still benefits from being able to drive to it.
The NetSuite Alliance Partner Spotlight Award in Life Sciences recognizes this engagement. It follows our 2025 Alliance Partner Spotlight in Medical Devices and Equipment - back-to-back recognition in medtech - and joins Consumer Services, Rapid Scaling, and Chemical Manufacturing on BSP's 2026 Spotlight list.
Congratulations to the Cytrellis team, and to the BSP people who delivered this one.
Are you running a validated on-premise ERP you've outgrown? The revalidation cycle is not the cost of doing business in a regulated industry. It's the cost of a deployment model. Learn More...