Tag Archives: NetSuite
Continuous Employee Engagement: What’s New with SuitePeople in the NetSuite 2020 Release 1
By Marc Holliday, Senior Product Marketing Manager
According to a recent report from Gallup, 85% of the global workforce is “not engaged or actively disengaged at work.” That is an extremely high percentage of workers and should concern business leaders. Employees who are engaged tend to produce more quality work, refer top talent to the company, achieve their goals and help others grow and develop. HR technology can play a role in helping employees engage more with self-service experiences to get answers to questions faster, being rewarded and recognized for a promotion, and automating tedious processes that sometimes get in the way of the enjoyable parts of work.
The NetSuite 2020 Release 1 introduces some great new enhancements to SuitePeople to help fast growing companies make work easier and more engaging for employees. Managers are now empowered to initiate change requests like promoting direct reports themselves. Bonuses and other variable pay types are now visible to employees and can be paid through SuitePeople U.S. Payroll, adding additional motivation. With new workforce planning capabilities, headcount needs can be modeled to support growth goals. All of these new capabilities engage employees in new ways to help them perform better and deepen their connection to the company.
Motivate and Retain Your Employees
Bonuses can serve as a great motivator for employees but can be a challenge for HR managers to include in regular payroll processing. With the flexibility to support and process various bonus types such as spot, referral, merit or even create custom types, payroll managers can now calculate and payout bonuses through SuitePeople U.S. Payroll without using a spreadsheet. Employees can now also see bonus targets and historical payouts for additional motivation. With this added visibility, HR managers have a new way to support retention strategies.
Empower Your Managers
With new enhancements to Manager Self Service, managers are empowered to initiate changes for their direct reports without having to rely on HR staff. These changes could include promotions, transfers and salary increases. Managers are equipped with real data to help justify the changes. Armed with salary increase percentages and experience for the job a direct report is being considered for promotion, managers can initiate the request from their desktop or mobile device, and have more confidence their request will be approved. Approvals for the requests can be defined using SuiteFlow and can be monitored by managers until they’re completed.
Planning for Growth
One of the biggest challenges in managing growth is planning for future headcount. Often times this is done in a spreadsheet with incomplete or missing information outside of the HR solution. Information comes in from multiple sources, standardized, but version control of the spreadsheet becomes unmanageable and decisions are more difficult to make and take longer. Now, CFOs or other executives can benefit from an up-to-date unified source of employee, financial and budget data to plan workforce needs faster. With a more centralized approach to workforce planning, data entry is reduced, revisions are easier, and a more accurate forecast can be used to support deciding on future needs.
Implement Changes Faster
Importing large files of employee information can take a long time, resulting in a lot of troubleshooting and re-keying of data especially when effective dates are required. An enhancement to the CSV Import Tool now includes effective dates for past, present or future changes. Bulk changes such as reassigning a group of people to a new department or awarding an annual salary increase across the entire company can now be done much sooner and faster while reducing the need to key in effective dates.
Additional Access Controls
Managing who has access to different types of employee information is a challenge, especially for companies with multiple office locations. HR managers are not always responsible for employees only at their location. NetSuite administrators can now define a restriction by subsidiary and location and assign it to a NetSuite role. For example, an HR manager located in a Florida office is responsible for only employees in the company’s Toronto location, and should not see sensitive employee data for individuals in their own Florida office. SuitePeople will allow organizations to control whose employee data can be seen according to company-defined policies.
Complete Employee Lifecycle Management
Offboarding employees can slow an HR department down. Tasks can be missed. Former employees can leave with company property. Valuable information can be lost if exit interviews are not conducted. These are just some examples of what can occur if a formal offboarding process is not in place. To complement SuitePeople HR’s onboarding process, a new offboarding process is now available to help reduce the burden on HR staff and better ensure all tasks are completed before the employee’s last day. Once a separation is known, the HR representative can create an offboarding plan, notify and assign tasks to other departments such as IT and Payroll to be completed based on the termination date.
Learn More
For more specifics on these features for North American companies, be sure to read the Release Notes.
If you already using SuitePeople and want to take a look at these features before your account is updated, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you’ll be able to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 1.
by NetSuite filed under
Developers and Administrators: NetSuite 2020 Release 1 Brings New Ways to Harness the Power of the SuiteCloud Platform
Posted by Erik Klein, Principal Outbound Product Manager, SuiteCloud Platform
Running an organization is a complex undertaking, mandating companies to derive as much value from their business applications as possible. Perhaps no capability does more to ensure that customers are able to realize distinct business advantage from NetSuite than the SuiteCloud Platform.
Software developers and administrators around the globe leverage the SuiteCloud Platform to customize and extend their organizations’ NetSuite environments, not only to solve the unique challenges they face, but also to maximize the return on their ERP, ecommerce and HR investments. They count on the NetSuite Platform’s comprehensive and evolving array of customization and integration solutions to address these challenges.
NetSuite 2020 Release 1 continues to deliver on this promise by delivering a number of significant enhancements to the SuiteCloud Platform. From updated software development lifecycle tools in the SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) capabilities to the new in-product SuiteApp Marketplace, NetSuite 2020 Release 1 raises the stakes, giving developers more options than ever to become more agile and productive.
What’s more, these newly enhanced SuiteCloud Platform tools can accelerate DevOps efforts, as well as streamline and automate develop, test and deploy efforts. To top it off, SuiteScript 2.1 supports the latest version of ECMAScript, includes a variety of new REST web service features, and a broad array of SuiteScript APIs that make it possible to customize, integrate and extend NetSuite as never before.
SuiteCloud Platform Highlights
Here’s a sampling of new NetSuite 2020 Release 1 SuiteCloud Platform capabilities available within your NetSuite environment:
- Generally available REST web services enable external applications to securely integrate with NetSuite, and includes support for custom records, expanded CRUD (Create, Read, Update Delete) operations, record collection filtering, and executable Record Actions.
- A new REST API browser provides developers with a visual overview of API structure and function.
- The updated SuiteScript 2.1 programming language supports the latest ECMAScript 2018 JavaScript syntax and is powered by Graal virtual machine technology, enabling developers to write powerful apps with less code. It also supports relative file path preferences.
- The SuiteQL API enables the creation of fast and scalable applications, and significantly improves query performance and efficiency.
- The updated SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) improves developer productivity and broadens support for application features. SDF-enabled SuiteScript customizations make it easy to create and modify forms natively in SuiteScript, and the new open-sourced Node.JS Command Line Interface (CLI) aids in attaining DevOps objectives such as Continuous Development and Integration (CI/CD).
- Enhanced auditing and change management features add robustness to core auditing functions in the new System Notes v2 implementation.
- SuiteFlow now features expanded support for expense automation, and workflow actions such as data validations no longer require custom scripting skills.
- The new SuiteApp Marketplace introduces a new consumer-like experience natively within the NetSuite UI for discovering, distributing and consuming SuiteApps.
In summary, the SuiteCloud enhancements in NetSuite 2020 Release 1 will help customers and partners meet the unique requirements of their organizations by enabling them to customize NetSuite by leveraging technologies such as SuiteTalk for extensible cloud integration, SuiteFlow for workflow process automation, and SuiteAnalytics for business intelligence.
Learn More About the NetSuite 2020 Release 1
These are just the highlights! There are simply too many enhancements to the SuiteCloud Platform in this release to cover in a single blog post. To learn more about the complete list of new Platform features, be sure to read the Release Notes.
New to the release process? Learn more about it here.
Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you can test to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 1.
by NetSuite filed under
Professional Services Companies: NetSuite 2020 Release 1 Helps Firms Thrive in a Time of Change
Posted by Adam Mayo, Master Industry Principal, Services
From globalization and automation to the way services are billed, professional services firms are forced to adapt to a fast-evolving marketplace. And with an expected compound annual growth rate of more than 10% over the next decade, it’s in their best interest to go along for the ride.
“We’re experiencing unprecedented disruption in how (services) businesses operate, driven largely by changes in customer expectations and behavior,” Frank Della Rosa, a research director at IDC, said last year.
Among those expectations: More pricing transparency and value-based services. Meanwhile, professional services firms face increased competition from globalization and pressure to keep up with emerging technologies such as AI. In such a volatile environment, it’s critical that firms closely monitor the health and finances of projects, and position themselves to capitalize on additional potential revenue streams.
With NetSuite 2020 Release 1, professional services firms can make themselves smarter, faster and more adaptable with an expanded array of capabilities that deliver visibility, automation and global financial integration:
An improved set of tools and smarter analytics simplifies management of project budgets. Organizations can now easily see how costs are impacted when adding and editing those project budgets. Automated cost calculations help to increase accuracy, and miscoded time or expenses can now be quickly identified. What’s more, NetSuite now offers system suggestions for updating time estimates when unexpected costs arise.
- New time modification enhancements provide better control of billable time. Time entries can now be easily modified, and an audit trail makes it possible to correct entries entered against the wrong project. Plus, NetSuite Analytics now supports time modification requests and entries, improving visibility into changes.
- Enhancements bring automation and flexibility to measuring the health of projects. Automated calculation of key financial data raises the accuracy of project, budget and work breakdown structure records.
In NetSuite project profitability reports, tracked and actual time are better categorized as either committed or actual costs, and forecast and actual charges are now easily included for better insight into project billing.
- On the global financial front, the combination of seamless banking integration via the Bank Feeds SuiteApp and a new banking plug-in featuring open banking APIs enables automated import of banking data into NetSuite from financial institutions around the world and delivers increased financial insight. An intelligent rules engine powers automated bank data reconciliation, resulting in improved matching and reduced clutter.
- Tracking and payout of bonuses now benefit from a single source for employee and financial data. HR now has the flexibility to support numerous bonus types, such as spot, referral, merit or custom, enabling it to better track incentive pay, while employees have visibility into current bonus potential, providing motivation. And all of this bonus data flows seamlessly into SuitePeople Payroll.
- NetSuite now enables managers to make employee change requests, while employees can approve vendor bills, all of which speeds processes, improves accuracy and frees up HR resources.
- Vendor bills can now be approved by employees, who are looped into the process, resulting in improved accuracy and efficiency. Vendor prepayments also can be streamlined and auto-applied to bills.
Learn More About NetSuite 2020 Release 1
These are just the highlights; there’s much more for services companies in NetSuite 2020 Release 1 than can’t be covered in a single blog post. For more specifics on the complete list and details of all the new features in the release, be sure to read the Release Notes.
New to the release process? Learn more about it here.
Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you can test to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 1.
by NetSuite filed under
Software Companies: Capitalize on Evolving Business Models with NetSuite 2020 Release 1 Enhancements
Software Companies: Capitalize on Evolving Business Models with NetSuite 2020 Release 1 Enhancements
Posted by Carrie Augustine, Industry Principal, Software
The demands of the Office of the CFO are exponentially increasing. Since the turn of the century, it hasn’t been enough to close the book and produce financials. The Office of the CFO is expected to partner with the leaders in the organization – e.g. Sales, Marketing, Product – to enable them to make timelier and well-informed business decisions. The needs of Sales can be quite distinct when compared the needs of an IT department; thus, company-wide partnership can require extensive effort and attention.
Automation is imperative in order to provide the expected level of service / partnership from Accounting. High performing teams are constantly assessing activities that should be automated or eliminated, in order to spend time on more value-added activities.
In this release, we are enabling Accounting teams to be more efficient through automation. With a long list of new and enhanced features, NetSuite provides software companies with expanded capabilities for supporting subscription revenue recognition, monitoring project health and streamlining processes, such as bank reconciliations:
- On the global financial front, the combination of seamless banking integration via the Bank Feeds SuiteApp and a new banking plug-in featuring open banking APIs enables automated import of banking data into NetSuite from financial institutions around the world and delivers increased financial insight.
- An intelligent rules engine powers automated bank data reconciliation, resulting in improved matching and reduced clutter; automated balancing journals make it possible to generate reports balanced by segments; and custom transactions extend the NetSuite transactional model, enabling easy builds of purchase and sale transactions.
- Enhancements to NetSuite bring greater visibility into contract revenue, improving insight into revenue allocation and increasing understanding of whether offerings have been fully billed or not.
- Firms with global billing operations and multi-subsidiary customers will enjoy streamlined billing with a single customer record and a clearer view of customer relationships.
- Better revenue trace-through and an enhanced audit trail means improved visibility into how changes to subscriptions impact revenue streams, as well as more precise revenue recognition.
- Changes to subscriptions can now be managed in bulk, saving time and improving invoice accuracy. Usage activities that shouldn’t be invoiced can now be removed easily, and the ability to update subscriptions results in more accurate and complete invoices.
- An improved set of tools and smarter analytics simplifies management of project budgets. Organizations can now easily see how costs are impacted when adding and editing activities. Automated cost calculations help to increase accuracy, and miscoded time or expenses can now be quickly identified. What’s more, NetSuite now offers system suggestions for updating time estimates when unexpected costs arise.
- New time modification enhancements provide better control of billable time. Time entries can now be easily modified, and an audit trail makes it possible to correct entries entered against the wrong project. Plus, NetSuite Analytics now supports time modification requests and entries, improving visibility into changes.
- Enhancements bring automation and flexibility to measuring the health of projects. Automated calculation of key financial data raises the accuracy of project, budget and work breakdown structure records. In NetSuite project profitability reports, tracked and actual time are better categorized as either actual or committed costs, and forecast and actual charges are now easily included.
Learn More About NetSuite 2020 Release 1
These are just the highlights; there’s much more for software companies in NetSuite 2020 Release 1 than can be covered in a single blog post. For more specifics on the complete list of new features, be sure to read the Release Notes.
New to the release process? Learn more about it here.
Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you can test to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 1.
by NetSuite filed under
Organizations across the Middle East unlock growth with cloud company Oracle NetSuite
Organizations across the Middle East are increasingly selecting Oracle NetSuite to unlock growth and take their businesses to the next level. With NetSuite, organizations operating in the region, such as Property Finder Group, Al Jabr Holding and the International Cricket Council Limited, can take advantage of an integrated business platform in the cloud to gain the visibility and control needed to navigate change, meet regulatory requirements, and accelerate growth.
“There’s a significant culture of entrepreneurialism and innovation across the Middle East region, and this presents a huge opportunity for business growth,” said Nicky Tozer, VP of EMEA, Oracle NetSuite. “In the last year alone, we have seen more and more organizations that are operating in this region rethink their traditional business systems as they seek to increase operational efficiency and unlock new growth opportunities. At NetSuite, we are committed to helping organizations across the Middle East take advantage of the cloud to elevate their business to the next level.”
Property Finder Group selects NetSuite to support growth targets
Property Finder Group is the leading real estate digital platform, providing a convenient rental and sale marketplace for residential and commercial properties in the Middle East and North Africa. With over six million monthly visits across its platforms, and a growing ecosystem of users throughout the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Morocco, Property Finder needed a cloud-based platform to efficiently manage its multinational and multi-subsidiary operations.
“Our mission is to provide the most convenient house hunting and real estate journey for millions of users across multiple countries,” said Anas Qudah, Group Enterprise Systems Controller, Property Finder. “As we grew, we needed to improve our revenue recognition and ability to operate across borders. NetSuite gives us the flexibility to act local but be global, gives a real-time view into our business, and ultimately improves the experience for our customers.”
Al Jabr brings in NetSuite to unlock portfolio growth
Founded in 1952, Al Jabr Holding Co. is a Saudi-based conglomerate with a broad investment portfolio across sectors including automotive, car rental, laundry, investment and real estate, financing and construction, contracting and manufacturing, and is the national dealer for KIA MOTORS in Saudi Arabia. To supports its mission to deliver products and services of unmatched quality across its portfolio, Al Jabr needed greater visibility into financial and operational performance across its business.
“Al Jabr stands for quality, and maintaining such high standards across a diverse portfolio requires clarity and vision as we pursue ambitious economic, social, and environmental objectives,” said Ihab Hawari, CIO, Al Jabr Group. “NetSuite has given us a deep understanding of our performance across our range of business interests. This is helping us forward-plan, explore new growth opportunities and contributing to our digital transformation efforts which will help us better engage with our customers.”
NetSuite helps the ICC lay the foundation for cricket growth
The International Cricket Council Limited (ICC) is the international body that governs the sport of cricket. Representing 105 member organizations across the globe, the ICC plays an integral role in the global growth of cricket. To help support its plans for the expansion of the game and successfully manage ICC Events, the ICC needs an integrated business platform to capture insights into commercial performance and enhance decision-making. With NetSuite, the ICC will benefit from greater visibility into its financial operations in its drive towards delivering more competitive, entertaining, and meaningful cricket for players and fans.
UFC GYM strengthens its operations
UFC GYM is the first major brand extension of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC®). With an aggressive franchise growth strategy across the Middle East and North Africa and existing clubs in the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Egypt and with new fitness facilities opening in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, UFC GYM needed to consolidate its operations and streamline its financial and statutory reporting.
“Our success is driven by providing world-class mixed martial arts and functional training to our members which we have mastered. Providing real-time reporting to our management team is just as essential to run an exceptional operation and to achieve our growth strategy,” said Ibrahim Mohamed, CFO, UFC GYM ME. “NetSuite allows us to manage multiple subsidiaries and business units on one platform, comply with local and international standards and ensure that our required reporting obligations are being met”.
MELiUS grows with NetSuite
Dubai-based MELiUS provides an e-learning resource to help business owners take advantage of new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, as well as delivering commercial insights and research to help clients make more informed decisions. To support increasing demand for the MELiUS interactive learning space, MELiUS needed to replace its previous finance system, which was unintuitive and unable to deliver detailed performance reports.
“Our mission is to deliver targeted information that helps business owners reach their objectives,” said Moyn Islam, co-founder and CEO, MELiUS. “NetSuite is a perfect choice for a growing company like ours. It has allowed us to track our growth and better understand how, when, and where to expand. Our efficiency has increased exponentially since using NetSuite, and we have far greater visibility into our performance, which is important as we embark on new projects to help even more business owners.”
About Oracle NetSuite
For more than 20 years, Oracle NetSuite has helped organizations grow, scale and adapt to change. NetSuite provides a suite of cloud-based applications, which includes financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR, professional services automation and omnichannel commerce, used by more than 19,000 customers in 203 countries and dependent territories.
For more information, please visit https://www.netsuite.com.
Follow NetSuite’s Cloud blog, Facebook page and @NetSuite Twitter handle for real-time updates.
About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.
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How NetSuite Helps MANA Nutrition Feed More Starving Children
.jpg "How NetSuite Helps MANA Nutrition Feed More Starving Children")
How NetSuite Helps MANA Nutrition Feed More Starving Children
Posted by Kendall Fisher, Executive Producer and Host of The NetSuite Podcast
As we head into the first full week of 2020, many of us are diving right into our New Year’s resolutions. While health, self-care and rejuvenation are likely at the top of many lists, this time of year always tends to re-open our drive to give back, too.
NetSuite’s year-round goal is to do good, better, and working with a myriad of incredible social impact organizations only opens our eyes to the countless opportunities in which that’s possible.
For example, MANA Nutrition is one of the nonprofits we’ve had the honor of partnering with since 2011. The organization produces ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) for children suffering from severe acute malnutrition all over the globe. To put that in perspective, nearly three million children are impacted by this disease every year.
MANA Nutrition is changing that.
On this episode of “The NetSuite Podcast,” we sat down with the MANA’s CFO, Chris Whitfield, to find out how NetSuite helps the organization fuel that important mission with the help of better, more efficient processes, seamless financial and operational communication, and visibility and control over quality and traceability.
To hear MANA Nutrition’s full success story, listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube.
by NetSuite filed under
Did You Know? NetSuite Timesheets 2.0
Posted by Ben Feinauer, Principal Product Strategist – Operational ERP
With as many features as a complete ERP suite like NetSuite can provide, some are bound to fly under the radar. With the Did You Know? series, NetSuite’s product team is highlighting some of these features and how customers can benefit.
Whether you use time tracking features within NetSuite or you use some other system for employee time entry and approval, now is the time to take another look at NetSuite’s employee time tracking capabilities.
NetSuite provides the ability to enter and track employee time via the Weekly Timesheet interface, and this interface has recently undergone several improvements that aid in more efficient time entry, ensuring better control and understanding of how an employee’s time is being applied to the bottom-line.
Employees often treat time entry as an afterthought at the end of a busy week. They are looking to get out the door to head to some much-needed down time. When time tracking activities are tedious and cumbersome, employee frustrations become obvious. NetSuite improves time entry visibility, including daily and weekly hour totals, floating headers and improved navigation between weeks.
These views give employees simple yet powerful ways to effectively enter time quickly and accurately. Most frequently, users are simply copying hours from previous weeks based on tasks they are working on within a given project. Now with a simple click of a button these users can have any week copied to their current sheet, reducing copying errors and repetitive tasks.
While the interface has been a major development focus, NetSuite has also provided a few enhancements to preferences for supervisors and approvers. Approvers and admins can now take advantage of new fields to report on missing timesheets. NetSuite has added functionality to allow for notification to employees and their immediate supervisor of their missing time.
Approvers now have the option to bulk approve or reject time from the page, with the option to include a rejection note as well as the option to set the status of time entries to open, pending approval, approved or rejected. NetSuite has added a time approval preference to the Project Record allowing project managers to assign who can approve time against their projects with the option to have time approved automatically.
Vendor time approvals is also included, along with the ability to allow approvers to manually accept vendor time instead of those hours being approved automatically.
With these improvements to time approval processes, project managers and accountants can more quickly and accurately identify project profitability and improve billing procedures.
Additional configurations within accounting preferences include the following:
- Advanced Approvals on Time Records
- Allows supervisors, administrators and time approvers.
- Lock Timesheet Period
- Admins have the ability to globally disable the ability to edit/submit records in a closed fiscal period, previous weeks or months.
- Time thresholds
- Define minimum and maximum hours required before users should submit time. Warning is displayed instead of blocking submissions.
- Approvals can be alerted if approving a period that does not meet the defined min/max requirements.
- Copy from Week Inclusion
- Decide what is copied when copying timesheets from a previous week. Options include copying both hours and memos, never copying hours and memos or allowing the user to decide.
- Copy Service Item Description To Time Memo
- Maintain text in the memo field even if changes are made to the item on the time record.
In order to take advantage of “Timesheets 2.0” you will need to enable the following features.
Go to Setup > Company > Enable Features > Employees > Time & Expenses and check these boxes:
by NetSuite filed under
How NetSuite Helps Mexican Ecommerce Company Ibushak ‘Focus On What Matters’ During Massive Growth
-page-001%20(1).jpg "How NetSuite Helps Mexican Ecommerce Company Ibushak ‘Focus On What Matters’ During Massive Growth")
How NetSuite Helps Mexican Ecommerce Company Ibushak ‘Focus On What Matters’ During Massive Growth
Posted by Kendall Fisher, Executive Producer and Host of The NetSuite Podcast
In 2004, Ibushak—a Mexican ecommerce provider helping companies of all sizes sell and distribute products across Latin America—was fulfilling 40 orders a day. Fast forward to 2019, and the company is now seeing 2,500 orders a day.
That’s a tremendous amount of growth in a short period of time, and something that co-founder and CEO Mauricio Bouzali believes couldn’t be done had he not decided to implement Oracle NetSuite in 2015.
On this episode of “The NetSuite Podcast,” Bouzali takes us through Ibushak’s growth journey—from the moment he and his brother decided the Mexican marketplace needed a company like Ibushak, to developing partnerships with small, medium and Fortune 100 companies, to its 140% year-over-year growth.
Bouzali dives into NetSuite’s support in this growth, becoming “the heart” (as he puts it) of Ibushak and touching every part of the company. He says NetSuite’s biggest impact has been allowing him and other members of the leadership team to step away from operations, and rather, focus on what matters: Continuing to grow the company, always meeting customer expectations and discovering new technologies—like AI and BI—to further advance Ibushak’s competitive stance in the industry.
In fact, Bouzali concludes with one piece of advice for companies that are currently considering NetSuite: “The best day to implement NetSuite is yesterday.”
To hear Ibushak’s full success story, listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube.
by NetSuite filed under
Ad Agency Finance VP Reflects on Fourth Different NetSuite Implementation
Posted by Barney Beal, Content Director
When it comes to implementing NetSuite, Stewart Ellner knows of what he speaks.
That’s because Ellner, currently the vice president of finance for advertising agency Oxford Road, has put the system in at five different companies.
Four years ago, while working at Veritone, another advertising technology company, Ellner got his first taste of NetSuite when he met a NetSuite employee who introduced him to the cloud-based ERP system.
“I was floored at how well thought out it was,” Ellner said. “I liked that it was more of a database and you could extract information through saved searches.”
After getting NetSuite successfully up and running at Veritone, Ellner moved on after two years, joining Prolecto, a consulting company. While there he helped accomplish two implementations of NetSuite, one at RingDNA, a maker of inside sales management software, where he ultimately became vice president of finance in 2017.
It was there that Ellner was introduced to the revenue recognition features of NetSuite. A software as a service (SaaS) company, RingDNA needed the advanced revenue management to manage financials in a subscription-based business, particularly as ASC 606, new rules for recognizing revenue were fast approaching.
“I was sold on NetSuite almost immediately,” Ellner said. “I have a technical background even though I’m in finance so when I did my first project at Veritone, I saw the power of it. For a midsized market and with its pricing I realized NetSuite was a better program.”
That’s not to say that implementing NetSuite was a slam dunk at every one of his stops. At no place was Ellner the sole decision maker and, given that they were different industries, he still needed to perform his due diligence. NetSuite just kept coming out on top.
What’s more, Ellner has seen the evolution of the product in just the past five years.
“I’ve seen vast improvement in the ability to grow, get insights, the dashboards that it offers, the mobile app,” he said. “One of the things I’ve learned quite a bit about NetSuite is we constantly are learning more and more. It’s made us feel more and more valuable.”
Indeed, since he first implemented NetSuite at Veritone, the company has made significant additions to its platform, including SuitePeople for human resources, SuiteBilling for complex billing scenarios, SuiteCommerce InStore to unify the in-store and online shopping experience, acquired and extended Bronto commerce marketing.
And, of course, it was itself acquired by Oracle, powering its global expansion, added data centers and, most recently, the news that NetSuite will move to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for better performance, scalability and security.
Ellner has seen some of that development first hand. He just finished his fifth implementation when he joined Oxford Road. The move has paid off with substantial gains in reporting, shorter month end close and an integration with the Strata ad buying system that will give the firm the ability to provide far more detail in its invoices and interactions with customers. Also, in the five years since Ellner first implemented NetSuite at an ad agency, NetSuite has introduced SuiteSuccess, a new methodology for implementing and supporting customers that includes pre-built KPIs, dashboards and roles for specific industries, including Advertising Agencies.
“The people at NetSuite I’ve worked with—I’ve enjoyed working with every single one of them,” Ellner said. “It’s been a great experience. If it wasn’t, I’d be off to the next program.”
by NetSuite filed under
NetSuite Lets Global Surf Industries be ‘the Biggest Small Company’
Posted by Jason Toshack, GM ANZ, Oracle NetSuite
Flexible working has become more popular across the globe – and for good reason. Flexible working can empower employees to manage their own time, achieve a better work/life balance and it contributes to an inclusive company culture. Technology plays a big role in enabling companies to roll out flexible working policies, as cloud-based computing can seamlessly connect employees across the globe.
From humble start-up to a $ 15 million-a-year revenue business, the team at Global Surf Industries has been practicing a flexible working approach enabled by NetSuite’s cloud-based ERP.
Founded in 2002 and with a portfolio of some of the most well-known brands in the Surf and Stand Up Paddle Industry, the team lives by the mantra, ‘Life is better when you surf®’ and this attitude clearly shows in the way the team operates.
All employees are encouraged to work flexibly and in a way that best suits their lifestyle. For example, CEO, Mark Kelly, has been known to spend up to half the year running the business from a yacht.
“The most remote land-based location I’ve worked from is a small fishing village in Mexico called San Juanico, which is five hours from the nearest airport. But even sailing up the coast, if you’re off the side of the land you’ll still get a good enough signal that you can connect up pretty easily,” he said.
All of this is made possible with NetSuite ERP, because it brings together all aspects of the business in one place. As it runs in the cloud, the team can manage the business from anywhere.
With no physical office, employees have the flexibility to work from a location that best suits them, using NetSuite as a single source of truth for all operations. GSI uses NetSuite for real-time inventory management with distribution partners across Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America and Africa. The team are able to easily manage subsidiaries in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the U.S. with just a few clicks.
“The amount of time people spend commuting is unnecessary. Not having an office and working from home is irrelevant to our customers because of the service levels we provide,” Kelly said. “Our focus is on driving growth and providing an excellent customer experience.
“We have a ‘biggest small company’ mindset and it allows you to see what the business actually needs and often it doesn’t need people. It just needs better processes and that’s where we’re going with EDI (electronic data exchange) and automation, where we have scripts running through NetSuite. We’re eliminating data entry all together and we’re making all accounts payable electronic from our third-party logistics providers within a year.”
With a team of just 17 employees, Global Surf Industries is certainly on its way to becoming the ‘biggest small company.’ It now sells in 74 countries and is in the process of expanding to Europe. After all, life is better when you surf.
“NetSuite has allowed our team to focus on customers and work towards our main goal—becoming the biggest small company we can possibly be. We don’t feel encumbered by anything and there is really nothing we can’t do, it’s more about what we want to do,” concluded Mark.
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Quotes in this blog were originally featured in The Australian Financial Review.
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