When a prospective customer running QuickBooks, spreadsheets and/or on-premise ERP gets in touch with NetSuite, we always ask the business and IT challenges they face. The answers vary by industry, but several themes are common:

Limited visibility into key business metrics

Poor productivity from manual data management across disparate systems

Lengthy and error-prone financial close processes

Limitations on ability to grow into new markets

Inconsistent data on customers, suppliers and products with no single view

And then, the kicker: They haven’t upgraded their ERP package in years because they know it will be a risky and time-consuming ordeal that will require huge investments in IT resources and software licensing. They know they need to transform their businesses, or risk falling behind the competition. So they called NetSuite.

Cloud ERP is the catalyst for business transformation. We saw the results at our SuiteWorld user conference in May, where many of the more than 3,300 attendees had experienced profound improvements in efficiency and productivity after abandoning their Stone Age systems. One cloud computing expert, Michael Krigsman, CEO of the consulting and research firm Asuret, identifies the five key benefits of cloud ERP as:

  • Business process improvement
  • Global, single version of truth
  • Efficient IT
  • Agility and flexibility
  • Simplified implementation

Underpinning those benefits, according to Krigsman, are reduced IT costs because cloud ERP requires no servers or storage, implementations are typically small and iterative, personnel costs for IT infrastructure are avoided and support and maintenance are generally unnecessary.

Michael drills down into how cloud ERP is revolutionizing business in a new white paper, Business Transformation with Cloud ERP (opens in new tab), which is available for download here (opens in new tab). It’s a good overview that outlines key considerations for transitioning to cloud ERP. As Michael writes:

"…(ERP) promises to help organizations improve efficiency and productivity across almost every department and business function. Great things happen to business processes when an entire organization shares a single system that always contains accurate, up-to-date information. By combining ERP with cloud computing, you can realize all these benefits more quickly while lowering IT infrastructure costs."

Funny thing about those five challenges we always hear about from prospective customers. Once they get on board with NetSuite, we never hear about such problems again. What we do hear about from customers is business transformation. You can hear them too at our collection of customer videos on YouTube (opens in new tab).