Like never before, agility is critical to business survival, nevermind growth. In the early days of the pandemic and still today, companies must be able to move quickly, and they need systems that can support rapid change.
In a NetSuite Now On Air keynote last week titled, “Flexibility, Visibility & Control in Uncertain Times,” product management leaders Elham Ghassemzadeh and Joav Bally detailed several features in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 that give customers new ways to monitor the performance of their business and make necessary adjustments. When users tailor their NetSuite platform to meet their evolving needs, they usually do so with SuiteCloud, noted Ghassemzadeh, vice president of product management for SuiteCloud.
“You might be restructuring your data, updating your workflows or scripts to accommodate shifts in supplier networks, reporting requirements and logistics planning, or any other aspect of your business,” she said.
Ghassemzadeh broke down three features in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 that will help NetSuite administrators and developers meet evolving business needs:
- Customization Manager: The new tool makes it easier for administrators to manage the rollout of customizations, understand their impact and set role-based access controls. When an administrator updates a custom record’s required fields, access type or other characteristics, that change can now be reflected across any new custom records that use the same template. With the customization manager, if the administrator makes a certain field mandatory in one custom record, it can make that option required on all similar forms or SuiteScripts. This simplifies and centralizes administration of mandatory field settings and access controls, ensuring consistent and secure functionality across all user interfaces and application programming interface within the product.
- Performance Health Dashboard: The new performance health dashboard builds on NetSuite’s existing application performance monitoring (APM) tool. This dashboard displays the performance of records, SuiteScripts, saved searches and integrations, as well as concurrency limits, in one place, enabling admins to quickly and proactively prevent stability and performance issues.
- Open Source Developer Resources: The latest release provides access to open source tools including a Node.js based command line interface (CLI) that that gives developers direct access to SuiteCloud Development Framework capabilities such as continuous deployment from their IDE of choice, and the Jest-based testing framework for unit test and quality assurance of custom SuiteScript code modules. These tools are now available from public repositories maintained on GitHub and npmjs.
“Our goal is to make change management easy by putting users in control of every stage of the software development and deployment pipeline,” Ghassemzadeh said.
SuiteAnalytics adds functionality to provide deeper insights
In the second part of the keynote, Bally, vice president of product management for SuiteAnalytics, highlighted several new SuiteAnalytics features that will continue to help leaders develop a deeper understanding of different aspects of their company, informing strategy and improving decision-making.
New features in the 2020 Release 2 include:
- Separated data sets and workbooks: The latest version of SuiteAnalytics splits up data sets and workbooks so users can include multiple data sets in a single workbook. Workbooks allow customers to visualize their data, and the ability to use a number of different data sets enables more advanced and comprehensive insights. Any updates to existing datasets will also be reflected in the relevant workbooks.
- Improved Formula Builder: The formula builder is both easier to use and has additional functionality in 2020 Release 2. The formula builder helps NetSuite users run calculations within the system, and it now checks for syntax errors in real time and offers more intuitive tools for editing and line numbering. In a demo, Bally showed how a company could link multiple data sets to a workbook and then create a calculation in the formula builder to measure quota attainment for each sales rep.
- NetSuite Analytics Warehouse: This new offering builds on SuiteAnalytics by leveraging Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse technologies.
“By leveraging the power of Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, NetSuite customers can slice and dice NetSuite data in multiple ways, bringing in data from third parties, as well as performing advanced scenarios like historical analysis based on data snapshots or predictive analytics,” Bally said.
A beta version will be available soon, and interested customers should email beta.nsaw@netsuite.com for more information.
Today, there are more than 6,000 SuiteAnalytics customers, who have collectively created nearly 35,000 workbooks and data sets and used 53,000 workbook templates, Bally said. These new features will only add to the valuable insights these customers glean and give them a stronger pulse of their businesses.
Get more information on NetSuite’s latest enhancements and plans by registering for NetSuite Now On Air.