Sue Vestri, CFO of Greenphire, a company that provides reimbursement and other financial services for pharmaceutical companies running clinical trials, has been a NetSuite customer at three different companies over nine years.
That lengthy and varied experience gave her some perspective on NetSuite’s growth.
“I’ve seen the evolution,” Vestri said from the stage on the second day of SuiteWorld17, NetSuite’s annual conference. “SuiteBilling is no different. It’s been a great tool for us.”
Introduced last year, SuiteBilling is a cloud solution designed to support the billing needs of any business model, whether product- or project-based or a combination thereof.
“We have a hybrid model with flat fees and usage-based billing,” Vestri said. “And the usage billing is tedious and manual. With SuiteBilling we upload usage-based data and it automatically populates invoices. It literally saves us days of work. I have used other point solutions that are usage base. I love that is core in NetSuite right now in a unified system.”
SuiteBilling and NetSuite Revenue Recognition were just some of the enhancements NetSuite announced at SuiteWorld on Wednesday. SuiteBilling and Revenue Recognition have been updated to support compliance with ASC 606, upcoming changes to the revenue recognition standards, and new billing price books, which allow for multiple pricing schemes with a subscription plan. Other recent enhancements to NetSuite span: global financials; revenue recognition and billing; SRP; supply chain management; Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)(opens in new tab) and system performance. For more details read the press release on Next Ready ERP(opens in new tab).
Go Global, Stay Local
Backed in part by the resources of Oracle, NetSuite’s next phase of international expansion is to “act global, go local” with capabilities for countries and cultures, said Craig Sullivan, Senior Vice President of Enterprise and International Products.
“Being local means going the last mile -- or for those from Europe -- the last kilometer,” he said. “We recognize that being local is critical to your success and the work of your employees.”
As a result, NetSuite plans on more hires to staff local teams and local product managers. Already, NetSuite has announced new capabilities for Nordic-based countries in OneWorld(opens in new tab).
Greater Vertical Depth
NetSuite also continues its focus digging deeper into industry verticals. Executive Vice President of Development Evan Goldberg detailed new grid order management and weekly style trend summary features that will serve customers like Journelle and Toad and Co. In fact, NetSuite is delving deeper into fashion with an offering for fashion accessories and other microverticals like advertising agencies and campus book stores(opens in new tab).
“If you don’t see your microvertical in the presentation today, don’t worry, it’s coming,” Goldberg said.
Other feature enhancements target outsourced manufacturers and professional services with an emphasis on project-centric ERP vs. product-centric ERP. Rather than base the relationship off of a sales order, it will start with the project, enabling businesses to better track labor costs and material costs.
“Our vision is to make every part of the project successful from scoping to sign off,” Goldberg said.
New SuiteCommerce Edition Unveiled
NetSuite also unveiled SuiteCommerce Standard, new ecommerce software(opens in new tab) that provides more than the baseline SiteBuilder software but without some of the advanced functionality of SuiteCommerce Advanced that some customers have said they do not yet need. SuiteCommerce Standard is intended to give customers the ability to quickly set up a webstore with a low total cost of ownership. Additionally, new SuitePromotions allows marketers to create online promotions from right within NetSuite via point and click controls in an enhanced user interface. NetSuite automatically applies promotions to the customer’s cart and can use best offer logic to suggest additional items.
Finally, Goldberg focused on performance improvements NetSuite has made. A two-year effort to focus on the pages customers access most, viewing customer records and sales orders, has resulted in 29 percent faster load times. Additionally, with best practices learned from the SuiteSuccess initiative, some customers have seen improvements of 47 percent faster loads.