NetSuite has come up with all the details about its first update in 2021. This update according to leading NetSuite alliance partners, is more about making Netsuite software tools more equipped with intelligence and automation.
According to the expert observers, the new NetSuite release 2021 is more about strengthening the suite of operational tools to avail of new growth opportunities. But just like most NetSuite updates released as of now, this one also offers a little for every member of the Netsuite ecosystem of tools for diverse niches including Retail, Manufacturing, Software, Services, Wholesale Distributors, and Nonprofit.
Here we discuss the key highlights of the update.
SuiteProjects
SuiteProjects is the cluster of tools including PSA, CRM, HR, and ERP that together offer a comprehensive solution for the service sector. Notably, as the service-oriented business model is making its way into several other sectors, the same solution is going to find traction across various industry niches. NetSuite partners in Australia catering to leading service industry players are excited about the enhancements for the service sector.
SuiteProjects consists of the below-mentioned elements.
- Project management
- Resource management
- Time and expense management
- Billing with a flexible feature for invoicing having complete integration with finance
- Project Accounting
- Analytics
- Project revenues with the power of NetSuite Advanced Revenue Management feature such as revenue forecasting, allocation, recognition, reclassification, and auditing.
SuiteProject comes with CRM integration to make the process of maintaining client relationships smooth. It also comes with integration to SuitePeople allowing the integrated NetSuite HR functions to integrate vacation, onboarding, and skill development with the PSA.
Now it is to watch how SuiteProject gets traction as many of the features were already existing with Netsuite. The product also comes with several key enhancements such as NetSuite Content and Experience. Apart from this, you have several other enhancements and value additions with timesheets, expense reports, project purchasing, and a few others.
Smart Financial Tools Operational Automation
The new update introduced the purchase and billing process of centralized subsidiaries bringing together all the purchases in an organisation with multiple subsidiaries. This will help processing vendor payments centrally from one location. This can help companies to control the volumes of purchase orders and automating the cross-charges in transactions. In the end, this new enhancement will ensure optimum expense management and better productivity.
There is also new practice for expense commitments and validating budgets to reduce instances of more spending than the organisational budget. This helps maintain the budget closely.
SuiteApprovals comes with a new email approval feature to help with reviewing, approving, or rejecting of transactions on the go just by tapping on the email links. The designated employees can make use of the email approval log to make review and auditing of the email approval activities before updating them. This will help faster approval processes for all transactions.
There is a new global bank feeds feature that can be used by enterprises for automatically importing financial data from various banks in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. This will help boost efficiency as reconciliation tasks will be easier.
Speeding The Project Lifecycle
With the bringing of SuiteProjects which is a well-equipped automation solution for the service sector, various capabilities are brought together. These capabilities include resource management, project management, project budgeting, project accounting, etc.
When this SuiteProject gets integrated with NetSuite CRM, financials, and SuitePeople, it offers a robust one for all platforms for any services sector business.
The automation of the purchase and clear visibility allow project managers to make purchases straight from projects. This ensures getting a clear view of the purchase transactions and smooth routing of purchase approvals. This helps in easier collaboration between purchase and project management staff and there is more transparency to evaluate how the purchases are impacting the projects.
There is enhancement corresponding to the expense reports and setting limits for every specific expense line within a project and adding additional filters becomes easier. This creates more specific controls for purchase and expense policies in general.
Automated Inventory Management
The new update gave NetSuite a new touchscreen packing solution to help consolidate shipments. This will help packing multiple cartons at the same time, handle multi-level packing, and scanning weights through scales. This new enhancement opens up a new additional verification layer before the orders can be shipped. This will also reduce the scope of customer dissatisfaction because of wrong shipping and resulting cost factor for the company.
There is also an enhancement with the warehouse management system (WMS) in NetSuite 2021. There we have wave automation to allow off-peak wave processing, tally scans to help quicker bar code scans, cart put-away, automatic label printing, bulk picking, etc.
We also get channel allocation and reservation features to help proper order allocation as per channel to ensure reservation of inventory well in advance before the sales order. The enhancement will ensure better sales tracking and monitoring of operational activities. We also have a new dashboard for order management and more detailed sales reports to deliver more relevant data-driven insights into channel sales and operations. The enhancement will help with better allocation and fulfillment that directly translates into higher customer satisfaction.
Autonomous Supply Planning
There is a great enhancement with the supply chain snapshot that now offers detailed information on various things such as inbound shipments, blanket POs, and allocated demand. These details allow the planners a lot more clarity and visibility into the supply process and available quantity in different locations.
More powerful and enhanced supply planning capabilities ensure more flexibility in the way supplied items are seen in the Planning Workbench. The supplies can be viewed based on data to give insights on expected demand and inventory transactions. All these enhancements together help to make better supply management decisions.
Read More: NetSuite Supply Chain: Best Automation Tool To Drive Automation For Global Supply Chain
Platform and Analytics
We now have a new application performance management (APM), dashboard monitor, through which we can make an analysis of the power of REST-integrations based on web services. With the new update, REST web services support has also been improved.
There are all new internationalization and localization tools that can help global businesses have a local experience through the NetSuite user and administrator experience. It also offers support for the native language with SuiteAnalytics workbooks. The capability to localize a lot of fields is an additional value addition.
There is a powerful upgrade of SuiteScript APIs and it has been made easier to use for app development projects and custom account development projects. There is also a great secrets management feature to help developers manage authentication data more securely.
Lastly, the new update allows asynchronous coding support to give developers complete flexibility to work with larger data sets. The introduction of support for native Chrome debuggers will help developers test and debug apps more easily without keeping any eye on browsers.
Conclusion
No wonder, this comes as one of the most powerful and versatile updates from NetSuite with a lot of value additions and benefits for everybody. The upgrade is loaded with almost everything that modern industries relying on cloud-based software suite needs.
