Unpacking NetSuite's Latest Tools and Updates: How Do They Impact Your Business?
SuiteWorld 2023 has left us in awe!
The event was nothing short of spectacular, fueling our excitement for the impressive lineup of revolutionary innovations and releases that await us - whether you're a long-time NetSuite user or new to the platform. The stage was set for exciting updates including generative AI, field service management, enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions, and a range of new capabilities in customer service and finance functions.
For 25+ years, NetSuite has remained dedicated to empowering growing businesses to achieve more with fewer resources. Now, a new era of AI-powered functionality is poised to usher in a "quantum leap" in NetSuite's commitment to delivering on this promise to its valued customers, as passionately articulated by founder Evan Goldberg in his rousing keynote speech. “The goal is to grow your business—the ‘accomplish more’ part of accomplish more and spend less,” he said.
With that in mind, let’s go through the new NetSuite tools and features introduced at SuiteWorld and explore how they can improve your operational efficiency.
Enterprise Performance Management
As per Evan Goldberg, “Finance teams with disconnected processes spend too much time looking at where the business has been and have less time to think about what's next, leading to missed growth opportunities.”
In addressing this challenge, Oracle NetSuite has developed an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system on the established Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management platform to help customers streamline and automate all their financial operations, starting from planning to close and reporting. These new and improved features — seamlessly integrated into NetSuite — including planning, budgeting, forecasting, account reconciliation, financial close, and reporting processes from across the entire organization.
Planning and Budgeting: EPM automates labor-intensive planning and budgeting processes, enabling finance teams to quickly and easily budget and forecast, scenario plan, and report — all under the convenience of a single, collaborative, scalable solution.
Account Reconciliation: With EPM, you have the power to streamline and simplify the reconciliation process for accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank and credit card transactions, prepaid accounts, accruals and fixed asset accounts, intercompany transactions, and other balance sheet accounts. If you’ve been having issues with maintaining accuracy and speed in the close process, NetSuite Account Reconciliation is your key to closing the books much faster.
Narrative Reporting: Finance teams can leverage this solution to easily collaborate in a central space to define, author, review, and publish management and regulatory reports.
Profitability and Cost Management: Do you want to gain a microscopic understanding of which customers, products, and other segments of a business are performing the most profitably? Now, finance leaders can make more informed decisions about optimizing their business and allocating resources more effectively with a deeper understanding of profitability.
Corporate Tax Reporting: This function within EPM automates tax reporting processes and enables enterprises with multinational operations to efficiently comply with new OECD country by country reporting (CbCR) obligations.
AI Capabilities
As we dive into the vast potential of generative AI, it's becoming clear that its influence, reach, and capabilities are reshaping industries.
NetSuite has also stepped up to integrate the formidable prowess of AI into its suite of products, propelling an enormous transformation in the way businesses operate and make decisions. This means business leaders can do more than just automate mundane tasks – they can harness AI at an unprecedented scale, boosting productivity across a spectrum of functions, from finance and sales to marketing, customer operations, and beyond.
These new AI tools include:
- NetSuite Text Enhance: Craft tailored and personalized content directly within NetSuite by simply inputting a few initial keywords that convey your intended message. It’s never been easier to produce relevant drafts that everyone can quickly and easily review, edit, and approve.
- NetSuite Planning and Budgeting: Using predictive algorithms that continually monitor and analyze plans, forecasts, and variances, you can dramatically improve data analysis and uncover trends, anomalies, and correlations.
- NetSuite Bill Capture: This function helps you intelligently capture and categorize expenses based on historical data — enabling you to reduce manual bill entry to help increase the productivity of accounting teams.
- NetSuite Analytics Warehouse: Have you been seeking a solution to consolidate and centralize data from a multitude of sources? This functionality delivers enhanced transparency and a more profound understanding of transaction-level operations, enabling you to access quicker insights that facilitate informed decision-making.
Field Service Management
Following NetSuite's acquisition of Next Technik, customers can now tap into an extensive array of field service management solutions engineered to streamline scheduling and dispatch operations.
Say farewell to tedious manual workflows that have been impeding both productivity and customer journeys. This tool goes beyond process automation to provide real-time insights that dramatically slash your operational expenses, elevate satisfaction and loyalty levels, and enhance both your top-line and bottom-line results.
Scheduling and Dispatch: Your schedulers can quickly assign and dispatch the nearest, most skilled technician with just a few clicks, streamlining the entire service process for tasks like warranty replacements, maintenance, repairs, and installations.
Field Productivity: Your field technicians can now access real-time job details and customer history through a mobile app – no need to call the office for more information. Billing becomes exceptionally hassle-free as each job-related expense is automatically tracked and recorded.
Asset Management: Using this solution, you can centralize all customer assets and gain detailed insights into asset hierarchy, history usage, and maintenance. If you've been in search of a way to oversee each asset from installation to commissioning to decommissioning — including manufacturing, bill of materials (BOM), and warranties — this has the potential to be a game-changing development for your organization.
Inventory Management: Imagine your organization effortlessly automating the entire inventory management journey, ensuring precise tracking of truck inventory and consistently well-stocked maintenance toolkits. Through this function, every part and piece of equipment is at your fingertips, ready to meet customer service demands as and when required. Plus, direct integration with NetSuite Inventory Management lets your technicians access and update inventory data in real-time through a mobile app, further improving inventory control across the board.
Operational Insights: You can standardize field service data within one system and leverage a dashboard of KPIs to evaluate business performance pertaining to every job, customer, service contract, and technician.
NetSuite Pay
NetSuite Pay, a new digital payments solution embedded in NetSuite, helps customers get paid faster and accelerate cash flow. Powered by Versapay, it serves as an extension of NetSuite's ERP, CRM, and SuiteCommerce capabilities, tailored to facilitate ERP payments and AR automation.
Using this product, you can:
- expedite and simplify the application and onboarding process for new merchant profiles
- integrate solutions from payment processing providers with pre-negotiated rates and fees
- accept payments for all your sales channels including ecommerce, POS, and AR with a single system. You’ll also be able to process credit and debit card payments, in addition to ACH, virtual card, and bank payments.
- eliminate hours spent reconciling payments with your NetSuite instance
New Licensing Model
NetSuite is rolling out an exciting new licensing system that's all about tailoring access to meet the unique needs of your employees. For example, now a warehouse worker who primarily deals with receiving, putaway, picking, and shipping can tap into NetSuite's powerful warehouse management features without the need for a full subscription.
- Employees with tailored access can carry out their tasks with greater precision and ease, knowing they have the right tools at their fingertips.
- By ensuring that the right people have the right tools, you can reduce redundancy and optimize daily operations
- Your workforce will be better equipped to tackle tasks efficiently and make the most out of NetSuite's capabilities – as more employees gain access to NetSuite's suite of tools and features
For a full overview of SuiteWorld 2023, download our presentation.
GSI SuiteCare stands at the forefront of NetSuite support solutions, featuring a dedicated team of specialists who engage in a comprehensive exploration of your business. Our team has already invested the time and effort required to fully grasp the latest tools and updates, and we are eager to demonstrate how these product updates can help optimize your processes.
Don't hesitate to reach out to us for complimentary demos.