The past six months have demonstrated the importance of being able to adapt and focus on what’s important. NetSuite announced this week that it is continuing to develop new ways to enhance the role of every NetSuite user so they have more time for the most important parts of their jobs: pouncing on new opportunities and reacting quickly and effectively to manage change. That’s the promise Oracle NetSuite’s co-founder and EVP Evan Goldberg made during his keynote earlier this week to launch NetSuite Now On Air (opens in new tab), a new virtual event series running through October.

“Business as usual” looks infinitely different than it did a year ago. As the changes continue to roll in, businesses are making bold moves to build onward. Goldberg encouraged them to take advantage of the latest round of NetSuite product enhancements, which deliver even more automation, intelligence and insights to key roles including finance, operations, customer experience and more.

“Agility and automation will be important coming out of this,” said Goldberg. “We need to be ready to adapt. It’s not going to be an instant snap back to 2019.”

Goldberg also noted that some customers have seen growing demand during the pandemic — and used NetSuite to capitalize on it:

-Consumers and restaurants had been utilizing delivery before COVID-19, but the pandemic accelerated this trend. For Postmates, it’s not just the volume of orders that has gone up — order size has also seen a steady increase. Postmates has trusted NetSuite since 2017, and it continues to trust NetSuite as it scales.

-Cowboy boot-maker Tecovas (opens in new tab) saw demand at its stores dip initially, so it used the slowdown to nurture its existing customer relationships and build its community. NetSuite fueled both efforts.

-ZoomInfo engineered a successful IPO during the pandemic, using NetSuite to deliver whichever data regulators and auditors needed in the process with impressive speed.

Doing Good When Times Get Tough

Another customer, Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB), has seen a huge increase in the need for its services. When the pandemic began, GBFB noted that food insecurity numbers were rising in Eastern Massachusetts. At the same time, it was faced with volunteers reluctant to come in and warehouse workers considering the risks of performing their jobs.

GBFB positioned itself for resilience and scaled. Despite its growth, the organization didn’t add any accounting staff, a win that CFO Pranita Amarasinghe credits in part to NetSuite.

“When the food insecurity numbers were going up and demand was going up, I was thinking, how do we continue to distribute food with the limited resources we had?” Amarasinghe said during Goldberg’s keynote. “We had to do new financial projections, and we made it through somehow.”

Doubling Down on Collaboration and Productivity

As these stories suggest, NetSuite delivers improved insight and agility and allows for tighter control of the business. In a pandemic-dominated economy, Goldberg said NetSuite is also focused on two other benefits in its newest release and upcoming enhancements: collaboration and productivity.

He drew a strong correlation between effective collaboration and data consistency. Goldberg stressed that having a single source of data and a common operational language allows various departments and functions within the business to operate off of the same playbook and collaborate in ways that provide “exponential value.”

Automating frequent, repetitive tasks can fuel productivity and allow a remote workforce to take quicker, more decisive action, then deliver more value by turning their attention to higher-value tasks.

For some activities, it’s better to remove the need for employees to interact with technology at all, according to Goldberg.

“The best UI is often no UI,” he said.

Engineering a Pandemic-Optimized Solution

In order to inject additional collaboration and productivity capabilities, NetSuite continues to focus on automation, intelligence and the compounding effect of integrating business functions within the system — what Goldberg called “Suiteness.”

NetSuite defines “intelligence” as a combination of insight, automation and improved interaction, sometimes with the help of AI, Goldberg said during a Q&A session following his presentation.

“We’re not trying to boil the ocean,” he said. “We’re trying to find discreet examples where intelligence can deliver value.”

Whether that means more operational automation, improved customer self-service, beefed up application performance management or simpler onboarding or payroll processes, NetSuite is committed to giving customers the tools they need to emerge from these times healthy and ready to tackle new opportunities.

For example, NetSuite has invested heavily in the concept of continuous accounting. Instead of performing reconciliations and intercompany transactions at month’s end, the accounting system automates manual tasks and takes advantage of machine learning to continuously update the books, pulling data from across the suite and even making assumptions based on, for example, historical accruals.

“This is all about spending less time managing cash and more time managing your business,” Goldberg said. “We want to put an end to period end.”

Watch Goldberg’s full NetSuite Now On Air keynote (opens in new tab) on demand.