Supply chain disruptions due to global tariffs and the COVID-19 pandemic have left many manufacturers scrambling, forcing them to seek out new suppliers and reconsidering their sourcing. Meanwhile, they’re struggling to forecast demand in a rapidly-evolving environment.
Enhancements in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 can help manufacturers cope with some of these challenges. With new capabilities designed to bring more insight and efficiency to everything from supply planning and allocation to warehouse management and finances, NetSuite 2020 Release 2 gives manufacturers the adaptability and agility they need to thrive in a fast-changing marketplace.
Autonomous Supply Chain
- NetSuite’s new material requirements planning (MRP)(opens in new tab) capabilities for supply planning (available to customers who are using NetSuite Demand Planning) has been completely re-architected, featuring a dedicated planning repository that ensures planners can make decisions based on timely and consistent information. Planners can easily monitor, firm up or release orders for approval and aggregation; review and accept action/exception messages individually or in bulk; and pegging information provides planners full visibility into how demand is allocated to supply.
The planning workbench slices and dices data by product line, plan, location, user-defined item categories and groups. It highlights situations that require attention, helping to prevent both shortages and excess supplies, and provides what-if analysis capabilities for simulating multiple plans.
- The capabilities of Intelligent Predicted Risks have been extended to include sales orders, providing users with greater insight into potential risks on goods not shipping on time. Purchase orders can be identified as being at risk and recommend alternate vendors based on new machine learning algorithms.
- Additional precision can be provided to supply allocation by allowing inbound shipments to be included into the allocation of supplies, in context with related purchase orders. Additionally, fill rate optimization allocates existing supply to satisfy as many sales order lines as possible based on the given supply.
Quality Management
- Enhancements to the Quality Management SuiteApp enable inspections to be triggered from advanced manufacturing production results. Additionally, location- and customer-specific inspections can be triggered from item fulfillments differentiated by shipping status, and enhanced support for high-volume sampling provides the ability to import inspection results by CSV.
Warehouse Management
- NetSuite WMS now has the ability to receive, transfer and pick goods inside a location without bins. Businesses with retail stores or small warehouses benefit from the efficiency of hand-held picking without the overhead of managing bins.
Financial and Operational Excellence
- Invoice grouping enables the consolidation of multiple invoices into a single invoice that’s delivered to the customer, and it also allows payments accepted at the group level to be applied to individual invoices. This reduces manual grouping, ensures accurate invoices and improves cash flows by decreasing days sales outstanding.
Continuous Employee Engagement
- The new SuitePeople Performance Management module provides HR leaders a central place to easily administer the performance review process that not only enables greater performance management efficiencies, but also helps employees stay engaged with goal creation, monitoring, measuring and recognition for achievements. Employees and managers continuously stay aligned on top priorities to maximize performance. (Available in North America only)
Learn More About NetSuite 2020 Release 2
These are just the highlights; there's much more for manufacturers 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).
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) account when it becomes available. There, you'll be able to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 2.
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.