NetSuite this week announced its Advanced Customer Support (ACS) Playbooks, a set of services and best practices guidance that leverages the NetSuite service organization’s experience supporting thousands of customer implementations. The prescriptive playbooks will help customers solve some of their most difficult business challenges, like ensuring profitable project delivery, managing complex supply chains and optimizing cross-functional processes like quote to cash. The ACS Playbooks also provide a proven roadmap for businesses as they reach business growth milestones, like international expansion, going public or making acquisitions.

ACS Playbooks are available to customers of ACS, a subscription-based proactive managed service. ACS encompasses a large, global team focused on keeping customer systems running at their best. It prepares customers for new NetSuite release functionality, helps to extend and adapt their implementation and integrate with third-party applications, provides advice on design and architecture, and bolsters overall NetSuite system support.

Meeting Core Challenges with Earned Expertise

Although every business is unique, they all face a common set of hurdles as they grow. Similarly, as businesses chart expansion plans, those too follow well-worn paths.

For example, adjusting finance and accounting processes is one of the most common problems growing companies face. For businesses whose expansion plans include creating subsidiaries, they’ll need to create intercompany accounting processes. As businesses grow, routine processes like closing the books at months end become more difficult to accomplish with efficiency and accuracy. All companies create budgets, financial and operational plans and forecasts, but at some point, doing so in spreadsheets becomes too labor intensive and error prone, so eventually they need more robust processes and tools that allow for faster and more frequent planning and budgeting cycles, especially during times of rapid change.

Similarly, companies looking to go public need to fine tune or establish their financial governance framework to satisfy their reporting, audit and tax requirements. Due to the extra scrutiny, these companies need to address challenges like GAAP and IFRS reporting, SOX compliance, segregation of duties and internal audits.

Different industries also come with their own set of functional requirements. If you’re a growing wholesale distributor, you’ll quickly need more sophisticated capabilities beyond inventory management, like warehouse management. If you’re a manufacturer looking to sell directly to consumers, you’ll need to focus on building out new ecommerce capabilities. A software or high tech company may need help managing a subscription business model, and subsequent consolidated billing and revenue recognition practices. An organization that’s adding a services component will wrestle with recognizing revenue separate from project billing. And in each of these scenarios, you’ll want to fast track these new initiatives.

Last, but not least is an all-too-common situation: you’ve added users, integrations and customized workflows to your NetSuite system. How do you make sure your environment keeps performing as expected as the business scales?

This is where ACS Playbooks come in, with the experience to help companies improve core functions, get the most out of NetSuite and accelerate their return on investment.

Expanded Services to Help Accelerate Growth

With ACS Playbooks, your business can bypass the pitfalls and roadblocks other organizations have encountered in the past. Whether it’s supply chain issues and compliance concerns or human capital matters and beyond, ACS Playbooks ensure that NetSuite helps drive your next stage of growth.

The following ACS Playbooks are available today:

  • Financial Management: Improve operational efficiency with advice and guidance on how to optimize key financial methodologies such as planning and budgeting, forecasting, accounts payable and accounts receivables automation, revenue recognition, financial consolidation and month-end closing.
  • Human Capital: Simplify key processes with HR, such as payroll, workforce management, compensation, performance management, FTE analysis and onboarding new employees.
  • Supply Chain Operations: Increase efficiency across the supply chain by tapping into expertise on inventory management, warehouse management, demand and supply planning, costing, outsourcing, procurement and production management.
  • Customer 360: Improve customer engagement through advice and guidance around deploying omnichannel ecommerce, mobile and point of sale revenue streams, customer relationship management, order management and customer analytics reporting.
  • Project Profitability: Simplify key project related processes, such as project accounting, project billing, project management, resource management, timesheet and expense management.
  • Cross-Functional: Leverage the power of the suite to ensure that cross-functional processes, such as quote-to-cash, procure-to-pay and design-to-build are optimized.
  • Industry: Take advantage of deep industry expertise in retail, software, services, manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and more – to optimize core business functions and improve industry-specific KPIs.
  • International Expansion: Adapt to the added financial complexities of entering international markets with advice and guidance on transacting in multiple countries, managing multiple currencies and languages, tax compliance, bank automation and localization.
  • Performance and Risk Management: Ensure NetSuite is tuned and optimized to maintain the highest level of performance and security as your business scales by exploiting expert knowledge and experience with system architecture, capacity planning, integrations, environment management, access controls and script reviews.
  • Capital Markets: Prepare for a public listing or merger/acquisition activity by establishing and optimizing required governance and internal controls or developing the financial reports needed to comply with audit requirements and tax regulations.

Expertise and Support

Exclusively available to ACS subscribers, ACS Playbooks are designed and implemented by NetSuite’s in-house global solutions team, which has unrivaled expertise across industries, markets and business sizes. NetSuite provides all the hands-on product guidance, configuration support and ongoing optimization assistance your business needs to proactively improve efficiency and productivity. A designated team is available to provide advice on all functional, technical and development needs. You’ll also partner with a Customer Success Manager to ensure your strategic goals are met and you receive the direction and management to get the most out of NetSuite.

Learn more about why Advanced Customer Support is good for your business.