Customer Case Study – Core Education
Visibility meets Sustainability
For nearly 20 years, CORE Education has strived to address inequities facing learners in Aotearoa New Zealand.
From a small team of 10 in 2003, to a company with over 140 staff in 2022, CORE has grown into a force for change in the educational landscape. Today, CORE draws strength from their whakapapa as they continue to push boundaries in education and drive Aotearoa New Zealand towards a more equitable and learner-centred future.
Keryn, who has been with CORE for 12 years, has worked in many parts of the company. She is now a member of CORE’s Senior Leadership Team, and leads Te Aho Waihanga, the company’s Design Solutions group.
Key Customer Wins
Scalability allows operations to grow alongside the company
Ability to see sales pipeline and where value lies
Real-time visibility across all company operations
Cloud-based system fits the needs of CORE’s diverse team – including office-only, hybrid, and remote staff across the country
In-depth data collection enables advanced decision-making

Driving organisation-wide change
“NetSuite is supporting us and driving the change we want to make.”

Why Core Education chose NetSuite ERP
In the face of continuous growth, the benefits of jumping to a scalable cloud-based system were increasingly obvious to the team. According to Keryn, CORE required “an enterprise resource planning tool like NetSuite – we were very much running on spreadsheets and disparate disconnected systems, and we were outgrowing those systems.”
“We really needed to find something that would take us into a space where we could scale, be sustainable, and understand our business a lot better,” Keryn says.
The CORE team were searching “not only for a really compatible technology solution”, but also a flexible tool that would suit the needs of their diverse team. “Our team is spread across the country. So, we have people who are office-based, hybrid and virtual across the entire company. We were looking for something that would be fit for all of them,” Keryn says.
By 2017, CORE had transformed from running around 20 large projects to managing over 650 projects, both large and small, at any given time. This highlighted a need for increased financial visibility and standardisation of processes. “We too had far too many moving parts, and far too much complexity in the business to keep running in that way,” Keryn says.
Key Benefits of NetSuite
NetSuite solved a massive pain point that was hindering CORE’s ability to move forward – a lack of visibility across their ever-expanding operations. The move to NetSuite affirmed for CORE that they “can make better decisions because of what we can see,” Keryn says.
The move to NetSuite “wasn’t just about our business well-being, it was about our people’s well-being,” Keryn says. Now the CORE team can better manage their time and maximise the value of their work – resulting in mutually beneficial outcomes for staff, CORE, and the communities they serve.
Impactful mahi
CORE Education is focused on achieving a positive impact for learners, specifically those disadvantaged by inequity.
The trusted national provider of high-quality, learning-related products and services utilises a diverse array of skills and expertise in their mahi (work) to address learner inequity. This ranges from research and thought leadership, content design and development, to professional and personal learning services. Regardless of the medium, CORE is seeks to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the design and delivery of their services.

Supporting sustainable action
While CORE is already largely paper-free, NetSuite has contributed by further digitising operations and utilising NetSuite’s powerful cloud-based system.

Cloud access across Aotearoa
Increased flexibility and efficiency as a cloud-based system allows staff across the country to access up-to-date data.

Actionable data
NetSuite lets CORE make data-driven decisions on how to move their vision forward.
Partnering with Liberate I.T.
After a rigorous RFP process, CORE’s journey with Liberate I.T. took off. They “won us over in terms of the alignment to our values,” and “there was a real compatibility” between us, says Keryn.
CORE’s implementation process was not without hard work, but Keryn says that “flipping the switch was really smooth” and go-live in June of 2021 was “remarkably easy.”
The project stayed on budget, but Keryn admits the “quite ambitious” timeline needed to be pushed back. Upgrading to NetSuite was “like going from a Cessna to a 747 – we needed to learn how to fly this thing!”
Although it took time for people across the CORE team to adjust, within weeks positive feedback began to emerge about the impact of NetSuite’s powerful visibility capabilities.
If your company is all about people and values-driven, then Liberate I.T. is “definitely worth picking up the phone for.”

The possibilities for improvement are endless.
We know that we can get more systems talking to NetSuite and make the work a bit easier. The possibilities for improvement are endless.
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