Businesses, like children, require constant care and attention to ensure they remain healthy and productive. However, as they grow, they come up against new demands that need to be tackled to ensure that they can keep up with the rigors of modern life and, in the case of businesses in particular, their competition. Nonetheless, this is often more challenging than merely hiring new employees or increasing the marketing budget.
If companies want to succeed and remain competitive as they grow, they need to utilize a swath of technology to help them with nearly every assignment imaginable. NetSuite is one such technology that makes prolific use of cloud applications to help companies manage and maintain a range of core competencies, from accounting to inventory procurement. If you're looking to take your business to new heights and have the technical chops to implement innovative systems, you may have found your panacea in this post.
What Is NetSuite?
NetSuite is an integrated cloud business software suite with a primary mission to help businesses worldwide extract as much as possible from existing operations. It's a combined resource that incorporates a large number of features that make it particularly useful for companies looking to integrate a single solution that covers a large range of operational capabilities into their workflows without causing fragmentation.
In fact, NetSuite has become so popular among business owners and managers that, according to Liberate IT, it is currently used by over 130 companies in the Oceania region alone. When you factor in the rest of the world, and the numbers from NetSuite themselves are to be believed, it has a roster of 34,000 corporations globally utilizing the software to their advantage. Nevertheless, as is the case with most large SAAS solutions, it can appear rather abstract from the outside. So let's take a look at some of the primary features it includes as part of its software.
Financial Management
Growing businesses are more dependent than ever on ensuring that they keep their books in order. This is for several reasons, which range from making sure they are paying the correct amount of tax to reducing waste. These issues are important at the best of times, but they take on increased significance during the fragile growth phase of a company when it's attempting to straddle the line between explosive expansion while keeping costs in check at the same time.
NetSuite includes features that all growing companies can make use of, but perhaps one of most interest to businesses that cross international borders is its OneWorld feature that enables a company's multinational subsidiaries to all manage operations from one system. This includes helping them navigate the tricky situations that arise from diverse currencies, languages, and tax systems.
Operational Assistance
As businesses expand, it's inevitable that things start to become messier. While most companies take this as a necessary evil of expansion, you don't need to settle for it, and by integrating NetSuite into your operations, you can gain access to a wealth of tools that assist in everyday management.
- Inventory management: Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of the growth story is that of managing your inventory. Without keeping tabs on your products, you risk losing significant amounts of money on waste and possible issues if you are unable to meet customer demand.
- Procurement: NetSuite allows businesses to foster deeper relationships with existing suppliers, ensuring prompt delivery as and when products or materials are required.
- Warehouse management: If your business is leasing more and more square feet of warehouse space, it becomes even more imperative to keep tabs on products and employees.
- Manufacturing: This might apply to your business directly, but for those who do manufacture their own goods, NetSuite can be a lifesaver regarding planning, scheduling, and a host of other vital manufacturing-related issues.
- Demand planning: Data is the lifeblood of operations, and as you increase your sales output, you will need direct access to in-depth data harvesting tools to help you get a grip on forecasting future demand based on past performance.
Customer Relationship Management
No business can function without its most important asset: its customers. While many businesses opt for gaining new customers at all costs when in hyper-growth mode, it pays to keep your existing customers happy to ensure you don't suffer from drop-off and have to constantly run the treadmill of new customer acquisition.
Human Resources
Employee satisfaction is second (or perhaps equal) to customer satisfaction. As you scale operations, you will likely have to employ more staff to keep things running as smoothly as possible and avoid bottlenecks that can severely disrupt business and cause growth to stall (sometimes irreparably). With its dedicated HR modules, you can ensure that your employees are getting paid on time and that your payroll is in order when the taxman comes knocking.
Accounting
Perhaps the most vital but laborious task that all nascent businesses face is getting their accounts on point. NetSuite enables you to automate as much as is feasible, lowering the need for a bloated accounting department while ensuring the numbers remain in the black.
In What Ways Will It Benefit Your Company?
As you have read so far, NetSuite features a huge range of capabilities that businesses of all sizes may employ to stay afloat as they embark on their growth story. In order to achieve such widespread adoption worldwide, NetSuite has managed to meet the demands of its own customers by being able to make things straightforward and business far more manageable to navigate. Businesses can engage the help of NetSuite experts to help them with any NetSuite implementations they may need.
Here are a few of the most salient benefits you can expect to reap from implementing their solution in your own operations.
Harmonized Perspective On The Company
Perhaps the most commonly extolled virtue of the entire NetSuite system is the ability of business owners and managers to operate almost every facet of their operations from a single platform. This organization allows those in charge to reduce:
- Software costs
- Fragmentation
- Employee training time
- Complications between departments
In essence, having everything in one place means that companies can keep tabs on what's happening throughout operations, ensure they're meeting targets, understand their direction of travel, and, most importantly, keep their customers happy and wanting more.
Native Integrations
One of the benefits of using a unified platform for all business functions is avoiding the need for third-party applications that could splinter operations and necessitate new sets of rules and procedures. As you expand and add new products and customers to your roster, it becomes imperative to simplify things to avoid issues that could hamper your expansion.
True Cloud Capabilities
Although cloud computing isn't anything particularly new, it has quickly become indispensable for businesses that need to maintain agility. NetSuite is a genuine cloud-based platform through and through, and it has multiple advantages over conventional in-house solutions:
- Scalable costing
- No need for a large technical department
- Reduced hardware costs
- The ability to receive prompt software updates as soon as they are pushed through by NetSuite
- Enhanced collaboration between departments
- Real-time information
- Increased safety Keeping your information safe with industrial-strength encryption
Capabilities For In-Depth Reporting
No matter how big your organization is, it can be difficult to keep up with the massive amounts of data that flow through its systems every day. NetSuite has the capability to parse this information easily and discover a wealth of factors that could influence your future decisions regarding product development to customer acquisition.
Flexibility From The Start
NetSuite gives companies a ton of leeway right off the bat, thanks to its modular design and extensive customization options. While it is one system in theory, it is, in fact, a collection of modules that you can turn on or off as and when required, depending on circumstances.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does NetSuite help businesses?
The short answer is that NetSuite helps businesses in a variety of ways. The longer answer is that it is a single product that integrates almost every facet of business, from deep data analysis to payroll and accounting tasks.
Why do companies use NetSuite?
Most businesses utilize this software to help assist their growth while saving costs simultaneously. Not only can it save money because there is only one product to subscribe to and invest in, but it can also dramatically reduce employee training and onboarding costs.
Is NetSuite a business intelligence tool?
In a word, yes. Although it actually encompasses far more than business intelligence and enables businesses to integrate different departments seamlessly. However, its intelligence tools are unparalleled in their ability to help businesses conduct in-depth analyses of their data in order to determine the best course of action.
Which industries use NetSuite?
In reality, almost any business in any sector can benefit from its range of tools. This includes industries as diverse as apparel and metal fabrication and everything in between!
How is NetSuite different from other ERPs?
One of NetSuite's core competencies is functioning as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) program. However, where NetSuite differs from other conventional ERP offerings is that it offers multiple features that are beneficial to businesses in varying ways. These include accounting and granular financial management.
All in all, NetSuite is a tool that can complement almost any business in pretty much any industry. With its holistic approach to different aspects of operations, you will be able to grow your company more efficiently than ever, all the while keeping everything running smoothly and avoiding painful bottlenecks that could hamstring your future success.
