NetSuite has unveiled comprehensive details about its initial 2021 update. As noted by prominent NetSuite alliance partners, this release focuses on enhancing the intelligence and automation capabilities of NetSuite software tools. Observers believe that the latest NetSuite release 2021, aims to strengthen the suite of operational tools, facilitating new growth avenues. Similar to previous updates, this one also offers something beneficial for every segment of the NetSuite ecosystem, catering to various sectors such as Retail, Manufacturing, Saas, Wholesale Distributors, and Nonprofits. Let's dive into the key features of this update.
SuiteProjects
SuiteProjects represents a suite of tools that incorporates PSA, CRM, HR, and ERP to deliver an all-encompassing solution for the service industry. Given that the service-oriented business model is expanding into various sectors, this solution is likely to gain traction across multiple industry niches. NetSuite partners in Australia are enthusiastic about these enhancements, which are specifically designed for the service sector.
Project management
Resource management
Time and expense tracking
Invoicing with flexible billing is fully integrated with financials
Project Accounting
Advanced analytics
Project revenue analytics powered by NetSuite’s Advanced Revenue Management features, including revenue forecasting, allocation, recognition, reclassification, and auditing.
SuiteProjects integrates with CRM, facilitating smooth client relationship management. It includes SuitePeople integration, enabling the synergy of HR functions with project scheduling, onboarding, and skill development. It will be interesting to see how SuiteProjects garners interest, especially since many features were already part of NetSuite. The product boasts numerous improvements, including updates to timesheets, expense tracking, project purchasing, and more.
Smart Financial Tools Operational Automation
The latest update has revamped the purchase and billing processes for centralized subsidiaries, streamlining purchases within organizations having multiple subsidiaries. This enhancement enables centralized processing of vendor payments, allowing companies to oversee purchase order volumes and automate cross-charges in transactions. Ultimately, this development aims for superior expense management and increased productivity.
There's also a novel approach for gauging expense commitments and validating budgets, which minimizes the likelihood of exceeding organizational budgets. This assists in better budget adherence. SuiteApprovals now features an email approval option, enabling employees to review, approve, or reject transactions simply through email links. Authorized individuals can utilize the email approval log to review and audit transactions before they’re finalized. This functionality accelerates the approval workflow for all transactions.
A new global bank feed feature allows organizations to automatically import financial data from various banks in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, enhancing efficiency and simplifying reconciliation tasks.
Accelerating Project Lifecycle
With the introduction of SuiteProjects, which provides extensive automation solutions for the service sector, several functionalities are consolidated. Capabilities include resource management, project management, budgeting, and accounting.
When SuiteProjects merges with NetSuite’s CRM, financial systems, and SuitePeople, it forms a robust all-in-one platform for any service-oriented business. Automation of purchases and enhanced visibility empower project managers to make quick purchases directly from projects. This ensures clarity regarding procurement transactions and smoothens the route for purchase approvals, improving collaboration between project management and procurement teams while enhancing transparency.
Improvements have also been made regarding expense reports, allowing for specific limits on various expense lines within a project, and easing the inclusion of filters. This leads to better controls for procurement and expense policies overall.
Automated Inventory Management
The recent update introduced a touchscreen packing solution that streamlines the shipping process. This enhancement allows organizations to pack multiple cartons simultaneously, manage multi-level packing, and scan weights efficiently. This additional verification level prior to shipping decreases the chances of customer dissatisfaction arising from incorrect shipments, offering significant cost savings.
Moreover, the warehouse management system (WMS) in NetSuite 2021 has seen enhancements with wave automation for off-peak processing, facilitating quicker bar code scans, cart put-away, automatic labeling, and bulk picking. New features for channel allocation and reservation ensure proper inventory reservation before sales orders are placed. This upgrade enhances sales tracking and oversight of operational tasks. A newly designed dashboard for order management, along with more detailed sales reports, provides valuable data-driven insights into channel sales and operations, contributing to optimized inventory allocation and fulfillment, key aspects of improving customer satisfaction.
Autonomous Supply Planning
Significant enhancements to the supply chain snapshot now provide comprehensive details about inbound shipments, blanket POs, and allocated demand. These insights grant planners greater clarity and awareness of the supply process and available quantities at various locations.
Improved supply planning features offer more versatility in observing supplied items on the Planning Workbench. Information can be filtered based on data, providing insights into expected demands and inventory movements. Collectively, these advancements assist in making informed supply management decisions.
Platform and Analytics
A new application performance management (APM) dashboard has been integrated to analyze the capabilities of REST-integrations based on web services. The update also improves REST web service support.
Today's release includes novel internationalization and localization tools, allowing global enterprises to provide localized experiences on NetSuite for users and administrators. It now supports native languages through SuiteAnalytics workbooks, with the added ability to localize multiple fields.
A substantial upgrade to SuiteScript APIs has simplified their use for application and custom account development. In addition, a secrets management feature has been introduced to enhance the security of authentication data.
Finally, the update introduces asynchronous coding support, offering developers greater flexibility with extensive data sets. Support for native Chrome debuggers allows developers to test and debug applications more effectively without constant browser supervision.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, this stands out as one of the most significant and adaptable updates from NetSuite, offering numerous value additions and advantages for all users. The upgrade is packed with essential features that modern industries relying on cloud-based software require.
