Posted by Marissa Kinsley, Manufacturing and Distribution Industry Marketing Lead

From Internet of Things and machine learning to advanced business intelligence and new business models, the supply chain of today looks very different than it did even 10 years ago. At NetSuite we recognize these trends, embrace them as the future, and are adding more product functionality to help our customer capitalize on them.

At SuiteConnect during OpenWorld 2017, NetSuite experts explained the Supply Chain Operational Excellence (SCOPE) initiative, which maps the trajectory of our supply chain functionality through direct customer feedback. The group of customer representatives participating in this initiative – including Roku, Blue Microphones, and Akustica – shared their insights from the front lines on changes in the world of supply chain and opportunities for improvement in NetSuite’s offerings.

Akustica’s supply chain story is one of process automation, lean initiatives, and streamlined data management with NetSuite as the cornerstone.

“NetSuite has been instrumental in our supply chain transformation by giving us visibility, control and automation that wasn’t possible in our previous environment,” said Bryan Bishop, Director of Supply Chain and Export Control Officer at Akustica.

Using NetSuite as the centerpiece, Akustica links together its inventory across all of its facilities, as well as their vendors, to simulate a single company working together on building a product. In combination with Dell Boomi middleware, Akustica is able to link in data and transactions from suppliers with the NetSuite instance. The result of this? A fully automated supply chain, from raw material purchase through customer fulfillments from 3PLs.

Akustica has also brought data visualizations and business intelligence into the day-to-day using NetSuite dashboards. Using iCharts in conjunction with NetSuite’s vast amount of supply chain data, Akustica delivers key stakeholders visual representations of key metrics on their dashboards, including inventory vs. forecast and inventory vs. targets. Business intelligence along with NetSuite tasks enables Akustica to track problem areas in their supply and demand planning and alert specific users of required actions to close supply and demand gaps.

Although this only scratches the surface of Akustica’s advancements in supply chain, it shows that the company is thinking about the trends at hand and are taking action to keep up.

Learn more about Akustica’s supply chain story with NetSuite.