NetSuite 2020 Release 2 Delivers Financial Innovations and Supply Chain Automation to Help EMEA Businesses Save Time and Resources – Sneak Peek

July 21, 2020

NetSuite 2020 Release 2 delivers new functionality to customers operating in 94 countries within the EMEA region. From financial and operational excellence enhancements to supply chain innovations and new developer tools, NetSuite 2020 Release 2 offers added capabilities companies need to position themselves for future success.

 

Financial and Operational Excellence

Invoice grouping enables the consolidation of multiple invoices into a single invoice delivered to the customer and allows payments accepted at the group level to be applied to individual invoices. This is designed to help customers reduce manual grouping, ensure accurate invoices and improve cash flows by decreasing days sales outstanding (DSO).

Intercompany cross charge automation enables a customer’s finance department to balance intercompany accounting of the cross-subsidiary fulfilment workflow by starting a process that automatically posts cross charge transactions between subsidiaries. This helps the finance department to reduce the time spent posting, matching and reconciling intercompany transactions and accelerate the accounting period close process by days.

The intercompany AP/AR netting provides a grid balance view of intercompany open payable and receivable balances, fragmented by subsidiary pair and per currency.  Accounting users can net their mutual balances through a netting statement. The system then creates settlements for selected transactions for both subsidiaries, reducing the number of open intercompany transactions and repeatable manual effort required to manage open balances.

Enhanced banking functionality includes the ability to auto-create checks, deposits, credit card charges and refunds based on defined rules, which enables companies to reduce manual effort and data entry error. The Sequential Liabilities SuiteApp provides a view to available cash giving controllers a view of project related receivable (A/R) and payable (A/P) amounts compared to cash in the bank within a single, consolidated view, enabling better cash flow decisions.

 

Autonomous Supply Chain

NetSuite’s new material requirements planning (MRP)(opens in new tab) solution (available to customers who have NetSuite Demand Planning) has been completely re-architected for performance, featuring a dedicated planning repository designed to help planners make decisions based on timely and consistent information.

The new planning workbench slices and dices data by product line, plan, location, user-defined item categories and groups. It helps users highlight situations that require attention, allowing them to prevent both shortages and excess supplies, and provides what-if analysis capabilities for simulating multiple plans.

By focusing on actions, exceptions, aggregation and execution, the new NetSuite MRP lets planners monitor, firm up or release orders for approval and aggregation; review and accept action/exception messages individually or in bulk; and gain visibility into the allocation of demand to supply.

Sales order predicted risks will provide users with greater insight into potential risks on goods not shipping on time. With these predicted risks highlighted, companies can achieve better customer retention by identifying potential issues and addressing them in a proactive manner. The system also provides alternate vendors based on new machine learning algorithms.

Supply allocation can allocate both inbound shipments and purchase orders in context, helping customers to ensure that the allocated quantities are reconciled across these two sources of supply.  Fill rate optimisation allocates existing supply to satisfy as many sales order lines as possible by allocating full required quantities, allocating latest supply that meets ‘required by’ dates and prioritising smaller quantities over larger quantities.

WMS picking without bins allows the user to receive, transfer and pick goods via a handheld device without having to define and manage bins. Customers can leverage NetSuite WMS in either warehouse or store locations in order to avoid the overhead of managing bins.

Enhancements to the Quality Management SuiteApp enable inspections to be triggered from advanced manufacturing production results, as well as item fulfillments.

 

Optimising Project & Expense Management

Project manager notifications have been designed to keep managers alerted to project status. The updated function adds notifications for missing actual time, time to approve and expenses to approve, enabling project managers to manage by exception and proactively take actions to resolve issues.  

New expense report capabilities bring more efficiency to pervasive needs. Expense report credit card integration enables the population of NetSuite expense module expense lines directly from American Express corporate credit card accounts streamlining the process and helping companies to increase user adoption and reduce data entry errors.

Expense report policies are designed to promote compliance based on expense categories, per diem maximums and required descriptions and attachments, and provide controls and notifications to align with policies and contracts. By using this functionality, customers can achieve fewer unapproved overages and limit excess expenses.

 

Platform

NetSuite 2020 Release 2 also offers plenty of new updates for the developer community:

SuiteCloud adds a new records catalogue that makes it easy to discover and view all standard and custom records and fields in your NetSuite account data model.

Asynchronous Execution support for SuiteScript Query and SuiteQL APIs makes it possible to work with significantly larger data sets with fewer timeouts.

Application Performance Monitor (APM) performance health and concurrency monitor dashboards display account health status and integration concurrency metrics to ensure optimal performance and uptime.

Enhanced international & localised NetSuite customer experience with worldwide telephone number formatting, parsing and validation (also accessible via SuiteScript API), easily fetch record localisation context (API returns country context & added support for Tax Type and Code record types), manage translations enhancements, enable data re-use and are available to SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF) processes helping to improve translation consistency.

 

Get(opens in new tab) more in-depth details on NetSuite’s platform enhancements.

Learn More About NetSuite 2020 Release 2

These are just the highlights; there's much more in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 than can be covered in a single blog post. For more specifics on the complete list of new features, be sure to read the Release Notes(opens in new tab) and follow the industry-specific enhancements for:

New to the release process? Learn more about it here(opens in new tab).

Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview(opens in new tab) test account. There, you can preview and test how the new features will work with your own data, workflows and customisations.

 

The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.

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