SuiteConnect, SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.— From a young, curly-haired girl struggling with the humidity of South Florida to her decision to enter beauty school against her parent’s judgment, Alli Webb always knew she wanted to work with hair.

Yet, what the founder of Drybar (opens in new tab) was not prepared for when she first began driving around L.A. to offer friends and family in-home blow outs was how fast that venture would become a thriving business. In less than 10 years, Drybar has grown to 130 locations with 4,000 employees.

Managing growth and the visibility, control and agility required to do it were central themes of NetSuite’s SuiteConnect event being held in conjunction with Oracle OpenWorld this week. During Webb’s appearance on stage, she explained that visibility was central not only to Drybar’s rapid growth but the investment capital she raised to help power it.

“The bigger you get, the harder it is to see the business,” she told Oracle NetSuite Executive Vice President Goldberg. “It’s what keeps me up at night.”

Goldberg, NetSuite’s co-founder, issued a number of announcements at SuiteConnect aimed at helping Webb and other NetSuite customers sleep a little sounder.

NetSuite Moves to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

From the very day first Oracle acquired NetSuite, one of the benefits of the acquisition that Oracle executives cited was the resources Oracle could put at NetSuite’s disposal. At SuiteConnect, Goldberg announced the latest iteration of that promise—NetSuite is moving to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). NetSuite customers in London and Frankfurt are already live on Oracle’s cloud and in the next 18 months NetSuite will launch 18 data centers on OCI across the US, EMEA and APAC, he said. By next spring, 100% of new European customers will be on the platform and the US will have two regions available to new NetSuite customers.

Moving to OCI not only removes the complexity of managing data centers from NetSuite, it provides customers with significant benefits, Goldberg added.

“The heart of OCI s the Oracle autonomous database—self tuning for performance and self-patching for security and reliability,” Goldberg said. “This really is the same promise to us that we’ve been giving to our customers for 20 years. Don’t worry about the plumbing and wiring and plugging in servers. Now we can focus on being the best business application possible.”

OCI also provides AI, machine learning and Internet of Things capabilities, which NetSuite will make available on the SuiteCloud Developer Network for customers and partners to build solutions upon.

Managing Controlled Growth

By its fifth year, Drybar had raised $75 million in capital from a variety of sources, notably a large private equity firm in Boston. While it’s now set to open 20 to 30 new stores this year alone, at the time that growth was becoming too much.

“We used the analogy of five year olds playing soccer,” Webb said, noting that everyone at Drybar raced to every task, which wasn’t scalable. “It was madness and exciting, but we decided we had to pull back. We needed to make sure the stores that opened are operating like they should be.”

Drybar implemented NetSuite to deliver the financial and inventory controls it would need to manage its growth. It doesn’t stop there. Goldberg detailed a number of capabilities NetSuite has delivered with its latest release to give customers the visibility and control they need to manage growth.

“Every entrepreneur knows about the loss of control,” Goldberg said. “As you grow, you have less direct involvement. You can’t check in on every sales rep or see every warehouse. Control is about bringing order to this chaos.”

New SuiteAnalyitics capabilities in NetSuite 2019 Release 2 include pivoting navigation options that allow users to navigate by the top 10 or bottom 10 items in a list, to identify best sellers or log profitability.

Out-of-the-box workbooks include reports for time off analysis or leave balance by employee in SuitePeople, while SuiteCommerce workbooks let managers see what searches people are conducting on your ecommerce site to help zone in on what’s most profitable and optimize search results.

Additionally, new merchandise hierarchies give retailers, particularly in fashion the ability to segment by size, fabric, category and other attributes to quickly and easily access sales and inventory insights at a granular level.

There are similar capabilities in NetSuite 2019 Release 2 for services companies that provide new project work hierarchies and what-if scenarios to better allocate skilled workers time.

Finally, the new Supply Chain Control Tower provides targeted alerts and preconfigured KPIs to provide detailed visibility into everything happening in the supply chain.

Precision Medical Turns to NetSuite for a Unified View

For Bruce Capagli, chief operating officer at Precision Medical, a leading provider of medical devices that prevent deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot condition that is the cause of 100 deaths per year, NetSuite’s ability to provide a central point of control for all the company’s disparate businesses was a game changer.

“When I walked into the business, we had a glaring gap with our business systems and tech solutions,” Capagli, who initially joined the business as a consultant, said. “Once I understood our growth roadmap and trajectory, we quickly went to an RFP. NetSuite just completely outclassed the comp. and we’ve been a partner ever since.”

With integration help from Dell Boomi, Precision Medical now has insight across multiple business units that allow it to run sophisticated analysis on its own operations even as it sees to provide better data to customers, patients and partners in the future.