LAS VEGAS - After a brief intermission in 2020, NetSuite founder and executive vice president Evan Goldberg returned to the SuiteWorld stage yesterday, announcing several new product offerings in a superhero-themed keynote. The goal: Help customers “power their growth.”
“Despite the origin stories — we hear all high points — there are low points, challenges and failures,” said Goldberg. “How you respond to those is what propels your business to new heights. So we want to provide more superpowers to fuel your mission so you can grow even faster.”
Goldberg outlined the three critical superpowers businesses need to succeed in today’s landscape — automation, insight and agility — and how new innovations from NetSuite can help.
Automation to Drive Growth
Companies cannot move fast if they are bogged down with inefficiencies and manual processes, said Goldberg. And the larger and faster a business scales, the more these bottlenecks increase.
“What we hear is, ‘I want to focus on my mission as a business. I don't want to focus on these manual tasks,’” said Goldberg. “It's all about being able to accomplish your mission faster, bigger, better than ever before.”
Richard Davis, the CEO of Make-A-Wish, emphasized how automation is helping the nonprofit accomplish its mission of granting between 16,000 and 18,000 life-changing wishes to children with critical illnesses. With 60 chapters plus a national office running on 60 outdated ledger systems, the organization turned to NetSuite to make its operations more efficient and effective.
“Getting back into technology allows us to know more about who it is we're serving and who it is we haven’t found yet,” said Davies.
In its latest effort to help businesses automate core financial processes, NetSuite announced the launch of SuiteBanking(opens in new tab), a new offering that makes NetSuite the first to extend ERP into fintech.
With HSBC as the inaugural alliance partner, SuiteBanking automates accounts payable and accounts receivable processes, improving cash flow by sending out invoices and receiving payments faster. Additionally, SuiteBanking will provide features including mobile expense capture, a global wallet, bill capture and a virtual card to promote further consistency, efficiency and productivity in the banking realm.
Insight To See Behind Data
Goldberg also explained how it’s vital to not only gather data, but to draw insights from it, the often overlooked part of the equation.
“There's more data than ever,” said Goldberg. “But besides just being able to see that data on the screen, you want to see behind it. You want to extract value — that's the business’ X-ray vision.”
Important business data lives both inside and outside of NetSuite. Companies need to bring those sources together to make valuable connections and identify patterns and trends. To fulfill this demand, NetSuite is now delivering the NetSuite Analytics Warehouse(opens in new tab) in collaboration with Oracle.
“It's more than an everyday data warehouse; it's a comprehensive, intelligent business intelligence platform,” said Goldberg. “It has airtight integrity, security and world-class performance. You can activate your flow of data into the NetSuite Analytics Warehouse with no additional configuration ... at any interval you choose.”
With 25 pre-built connectors and 40 unique visualization types in the NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, companies will be able to use statistical analysis and machine-learning capabilities to analyze historical trends, identify patterns and apply models to aggregate data.
In addition to capabilities around aggregating data, NetSuite announced its Customer 360 initiative to provide job-specific insights.
“[With NetSuite providing] unprecedented data about customers — sales data, web data, project data, financial data, shipping data — Customer 360 is a newly imagined user experience to take advantage of that data and deliver insights and actions,” said Goldberg. “It allows your sales, service and collections people, [as well as] your project managers, to best serve the customer and drive lifetime loyalty.”
With consumer expectations at an all-time high, Customer 360 will give businesses a complete view of customer activity, highlighting communications, transactions and financial data that allow sales and service reps to spot red flags that require attention.
NetSuite will detail more Customer 360 capabilities in the Wednesday keynote.
Agility to Drive Adaptability
Automation allows companies to focus on the bigger picture, and data provides the insights to identify which areas to focus on as they make decisions and take action. But to effectively execute on those actions, businesses need to adjust quickly.
That requires the final superpower: agility.
Particularly in the last year, there has been a constant need to adapt, said Goldberg, citing examples from customers ranging from Genexa, an over-the-counter clean-medicine company, to TOV Furniture and Landbay, a buy-let mortgage lender, to Modsy, a fast-growing business providing software, services and furnishings to help customers with interior design. Each business faced challenges that drove leaders to take unique approaches to optimize inventory levels, enter new channels and set up a continuous scenario planning process through the NetSuite platform.
“This year, with supply chain delays, getting visibility into where products are and when they’re delivered and the revenue recognition impacts, we didn’t have the insight into that,” said Shawna Tellerman, CEO of Modsy. “The implementation of NetSuite has been a big game changer.”
However, many customers still struggle to embrace the full range of NetSuite capabilities to meet their specific business challenges and goals. Goldberg, accompanied by David Rodman, NetSuite's senior vice president of customer success, introduced Advanced Customer Support (ACS(opens in new tab)) Playbooks(opens in new tab) to help customers react to change and maximize the value of their NetSuite solutions.
“We've been implementing NetSuite and working with customers for 20-plus years now, so we have leading practices,” said Rodman. “We've seen every sort of challenge with the thousands of customers that we've worked with, so we've brought that all together and codified that into what we would call ‘playbooks’ to allow our customers to leverage those best practices.”
As a rapidly growing organization with multiple business models, furniture company Lovesac, was an early adopter of ACS.
“It has allowed us to keep our internal team tight and still flex when we need capacity and when we need expertise to attack any of our design and development projects, as well as net analysis opportunities where we don’t have to necessarily have a massive team in house,” said Lovesac founder and CEO Shawn Nelson. “And that has been fantastic.”
Bridging the gap between go-live and customer support, the ACS playbooks serve to address the operational challenges and growth milestones many companies face, including going public, M&A, IPO readiness and supply chain planning, with each tailored to a specific industry.
SuiteWorld 2021 is being held October 18 to 21, 2021 at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. For more information or to tune into the broadcast streaming live from the event, visit https://www.netsuitesuiteworld.com/(opens in new tab). Additionally, be sure to follow #SuiteWorld on NetSuite’s social channels for the latest updates.