Posted by Gavin Davidson, Vertical Market Expert for Manufacturing, NetSuite

I joined NetSuite in August, 2010 as a solution consultant (i.e. demo guy) in the manufacturing vertical. At that time, all of the verticals were relatively young at NetSuite (the company had just switched to a “verticalized” model the year before) but I think it’s safe to say that manufacturing was a bit of a new adventure for us. We had some nice functionality for light manufacturing (basic assembly) and the new feature everyone was most excited about was standard costing—which was pretty funny, because historically I wasn’t really a big fan of that costing method—but who was I to complain.

So the news that NetSuite has been certified by the Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) for Discrete Manufacturing is really quite an accomplishment—in fact it’s a testament to all the hard work that’s been put in over the last 3+ years and something that the NetSuite team takes pride in.
[Insert round of applause here]

As a quick recap, here’s a guide to some of the major functionality we have added since that time:

  • Standard Costing
  • Easily track purchasing and production variances
  • Cost breakdown by category
  • Demand Planning
  • Forecast demand based on historical sales or opportunity status
  • Create planned supply orders based on location specific criteria
  • WIP Tracking
  • Track the value of an in-process product as it goes through the manufacturing facility
  • Cycle Counting
  • Suggests when items should be counted based on category and frequency
  • Production Routings
  • Workcenter definition
  • Multiple and alternate routings
  • Labor capture with detailed cost templates
  • Infinite capacity scheduling
  • Material burden
  • Cost template definition for material receipts
  • Allocation Engine
  • Choose how to allocate available inventory to orders

And those are only the enhancements that affect our manufacturing customers most directly, there are countless other enhancements across the rest of the solution as well that the entire NetSuite customer base can take advantage of—a great example of that is the newly updated iPhone app, available for free in the Apple app store. This new release is essentially a complete overhaul and allows you to create, edit and update transactions.

Oh, and did I mention this is FREE to all of our customers? So what’s next? Well over the last year we have tripled the size of the development team responsible for the manufacturing functionality and so both the number and depth of the enhancements we are able to make should increase dramatically – all without version locking our customers or leaving them to play catch-up to the current release.

TEC clearly gets it. It writes:

NetSuite takes the burden of supporting the ERP off the back of the internal IT group, so that the IT group isn’t burdened with low-value IT operational tasks such as backups, maintenance, and restores of the ERP system.

And finally…

NetSuite’s vision is to “Empower discrete manufacturers with innovative solutions that allow them to delight their customers and effectively manage their businesses with operational control and automation, supply chain interaction and intelligent decision making.” NetSuite not only is a visionary and pioneer in the cloud, but also backs up its value proposition with hard statistics and customer commitments…

Thank you TEC!