NetSuite Announces Brainyard, a Research and Benchmarking Website

Fritz Nelson, Editor-in-Chief

April 4, 2019

Imagine if, for the past 20 years, you had a front row seat into the machinations of 16,000 businesses in more than a dozen industries, from the smallest family business to the multi-generational conglomerate, from the shiniest new startup to the industry incumbents, from the friends-and-family funded to the private equity backed and the publicly traded.

Imagine if you had watched them spin a can’t-miss idea into a household name, seeing every stumble and misstep along with every triumph, as they grew into an employment machine, stomping their footprints around the globe, shaking loose of new ankle-biting competitors.

Imagine if you’d seen them move from shoeboxes filled with receipts or wrestle with ledgers tucked into spreadsheets to their first, full-blown financial system, their first real business process now automated and endless possibilities ahead.

You’d have a veritable treasure trove of data and insights to help the next 16,000 in the decades ahead.

You’d have the blueprints for success, for how to grow just about any business in any industry. You’d probably even be crazy to give those blueprints away.

But that’s just what NetSuite is doing. At SuiteWorld19, NetSuite is launching Brainyard(opens in new tab), a website that unlocks the collective wisdom it’s gained from having that front-row seat.

What you’ll see on Brainyard is research, benchmarks and the analysis of both. There will be a full research calendar across each vertical industry, which will turn into “state-of” style reports. Those reports will also be used to craft other deep-dive content. Some of this is the very research that has helped to evolve the NetSuite product.

One of the common requests from business leaders is that they want to know how other companies like them are performing. They want to benchmark various aspects of their operations and performance. NetSuite has vast amounts of data at its disposal, some of it qualitative, based on the experience of industry experts, and much of it quantitative, including performance data from Finlistics, an analytics firm. NetSuite has built resource pages for critical KPIs across 12 vertical industries, and there’s more where that came from.

Brainyard will not only analyze the research and the benchmark data, it will also provide prescriptive advice. In fact, the site will feature content primarily from NetSuite industry principles and extended roster of subject matter experts. The data won’t simply be thrown at you either. Understanding what good Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) looks like in a given industry might be interesting, but Brainyard will tell you some of the other KPIs that influence a good DSO metric, like invoice cycle time and accounts receivable FTE/$100m in revenue, and what good values look like for those metrics.

If you like to nerd out on inventory turns and fill rate and DSO, or you want to understand how consumers view brick-and-mortar stores in an e-commerce era, or new ways that nonprofits are thinking about social accounting, Brainyard is your jam.

It will deliver all of this not only in articles, but in infographics, research reports and videos—again, featuring NetSuite industry principles.

NetSuite is giving this knowledge away because it’s not just about selling software. NetSuite knows that every business journey is different, and wants to help your business grow.

NetSuite has packaged the experience gained from tens of thousands of worldwide deployments over two decades into a set of leading practices that pave a clear path to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there's continuity from sales to services to support.