During the NetSuite Now On Air virtual event which happened last month, Evan Goldberg – the founder and Executive Vice President of Oracle NetSuite – announced that a broad set of new enhancements are coming for the cloud ERP software.
“It’s been an overwhelming year of change and businesses have been forced to build for a new reality,” said Goldberg, explaining the reasoning behind the new improvements that Oracle is planning to roll out for NetSuite.
To help NetSuite customers navigate the uncertainty that could well extend into 2021, Goldberg added that Oracle will introduce “new innovations across the entire suite” to help them “reduce IT complexity, streamline business processes, improve decision making, and enhance the customer and employee experience.”
They will include new features and capabilities for:
- Finance and accounting
- Supply chain and operations
- Project management
- Human resources
- Sales and marketing
- Administrators and developers
All in all, things are looking exciting for NetSuite customers now and in the future. Let’s take a closer look at some of the new innovations that have arrived or will be coming for Oracle NetSuite.
Finance And Accounting Enhancements
Some of the enhancements for NetSuite will greatly benefit the finance and accounting functions in your business.
For example, new cash management capabilities will enable your finance leaders to easily connect to thousands of financial institutions around the world, and automatically import transactions and accounting balances directly into NetSuite.
This will greatly reduce the time required for financial reconciliations thanks to the automatic matching of bank data with your transactions, and give your finance leaders the real-time insights into bank activity they need to inform their decision-making processes.
Upcoming updates to the Accounts Payable (AP) component of NetSuite will also streamline the financial management of your business, by enabling your finance function to digitally manage workflows.
The AP component will also enable automate entry of invoices, electronic payment processes, and schedule payment runs.
Your finance function will also be able to automate time-intensive and repetitive tasks in the future, such as invoice grouping, intercompany cross charges, as well as creating and posting transactions.
A dedicated budgeting solution is also in the works for NetSuite, designed to help finance teams to reduce the time needed for each budgeting cycle by automating the budgeting process and data collection. It will also come with added capabilities for projecting revenue and expenses.
Supply Chain And Operations Enhancements
New features that enhance your supply chain management processes are also coming for NetSuite. According to Goldberg, these features will ensure that “you have the best plans and can make the best decisions when things inevitably change.”
The first of these will enable your supply chain personnel to automate order fulfillment based on user-defined criteria, including lead time, shipping cost, and fill rate amongst others.
This will enable your supply chain to automatically find products that are on the manufacturing floor, in your warehouse inventory, or is currently being shipped, and reallocate them to fulfill urgent customer orders in order to avoid cancellations.
New planning features for material requirements planning (MRP) are also planned, which will help your supply chain function align the supply of your products with current customer demand.
Oracle is also planning to roll out a new Intelligent Predicted Risk feature, which uses machine learning (ML) algorithms to identify purchase, sales, or transfer orders with potential risks, and recommend alternative options.
With Inteliigent Predicted Risk, your supply chain function will gain a greater insight into the potential risks of delayed shipments, allowing them to act promptly to resolve the situation.
Project Management Enhancements
Oracle is also planning new features for NetSuite that will make the work of your project managers that much easier.
Chief amongst these are plans for automated expense management, which will streamline the process by populating expense lines directly from American Express corporate credit cards. This would also serve to minimise errors in data entry, improving the accuracy of the expense management process as well.
Your project managers can also look forward to enhancements in project resource planning, which will provide them a unified view of project budgeting and assignments.
This will allow them to maximise project profitability by identifying skilled resources, and keep an eye on their budgetary constraints.
Enhancements To SuitePeople
New features to enhance the Human Resources (HR) function of your business are also coming to the SuitePeople human capital management (HCM) platform.
One enhancement for SuitePeople includes active, real-time goal updates and monitoring for the performance review process. This will help your HR function manage the process centrally and apply performance metrics across the suite “so you can build smart goals that are specific, measurable and timely,” according to Goldberg.
SuitePeople will also get enhancements to its payroll function, which will help your HR function manage retirement plan deductions more effectively through facilitating compliance, as well as automating employee and employer match contributions.
Lastly, your HR function will soon be able to create role-based onboarding checklists with SuitePeople, and use them to engage new employees.
These checklists will help ensure that all steps in the onboarding process are completed, from offer and employee orientation to payroll direct deposits and equipment ordering.
Sales And Marketing Enhancements
If your business has an e-commerce store, you’ll be glad to hear that some of the improvements to NetSuite will enhance your ability to manage it.
One of these upcoming improvements is an intelligent agent that will recommend the optimal set of features and user interface for your customer-facing e-commerce shop.
You’ll also get other site management capabilities that will improve end-user experiences, monitor the performance of your website, and offer deeper analytics.
Finally, new capabilities for NetSuite’s online self-service account management are on the way, which will help your business improve the customer experience.
These include B2B features which helps sellers manage new wholesale buyers, while buyers will be able to convert online quotes to sales orders quickly, pay invoices, and process bulk purchases.
Enhancements For Administrators And Developers
Oracle will be rolling out improvements for NetSuite that will enhance the decision-making process for your administrators and developers.
One such improvement will focus on enhancing SuiteAnalytics, more specifically enabling the support of multiple datasets in the SuiteAnalytics Workbook.
This will help your administrators and developers build reports and analysis across the business by taking advantage of new pivot tables and advanced visualisation capabilities.
A new capability in the pipeline is the NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, which extends SuiteAnalytics by integrating with Oracle Analytics Cloud and the Autonomous Data Warehouse.
This integration will aggregate multiple sources of data, leverage interactive visualisations and predictive analytics etc. to deliver real-time metrics across your business that informs your decision-making processes.
In addition, your administrators and developers will soon be able to customise SuiteCloud records, to provides greater visibility into all standard and custom records.
Lastly, there will be a new Application Performance Manager Dashboard coming to NetSuite, which your administrators can use to view the overall performance of your business, flag system bottlenecks, and stave off disruptions for your NetSuite end-users.
NetSuite Helping Businesses Adapt And Build For The Future
Some of the various new innovations that we’ve covered in this post are currently available for Oracle NetSuite today.
Other capabilities will be made available in future platform releases, and we can expect to see them go live with the updates that are planned for 2021.
These enhancements are intended to enhance decision-making and unlock new growth opportunities for NetSuite customers like yourself, which are especially important in light of the uncertainty that has persisted throughout 2020.
According to Goldberg, the “latest updates will help our customers gain real-time visibility into their entire business so that they have the agility and control required to successfully build for what’s next.”
As such, these new innovations will position NetSuite as a key asset for businesses like yourself, that are adapting to the new normal through adopting more agile business models.
For a deeper insight on how modernising the IT function – such as implementing a cloud ERP software like Oracle NetSuite – is key to supporting a modern business (especially in these tumultuous times), click the banner below.
