After years of expanding its reach into the SMB market, Oracle NetSuite is adding bells and whistles to the suite that will help its customers increase agility and accelerate growth with new commerce, HR, financial and operations, project management and supply chain capabilities.
At its recent SuiteWorld event in Las Vegas, the vendor introduced SuiteBanking for AP/AR automation, cash management as well as invoice processing to strengthen cash position of its customers. By leveraging the Oracle Analytics Cloud, NetSuite introduced NetSuite Analytics Warehouse for embedded decision-support capabilities for midmarket companies increasingly demanding intuitive big data and business intelligence tools to help them spot trends and execute financial and operational decisions.
Additionally, NetSuite is adding Insight from Customer 360 to create a new kind of Customer Data Platform that aims to capture and create unified customer data records across different touch points from email to text.
The bevy of announcements were made before a crowd of thousands of attendees at one of the largest software industry gatherings since March 2020. While NetSuite executives readily acknowledged that the pandemic has dealt a blow to some of its customers in retail and travel, the three-day event at the new Caesars Forum with an open air design(conference rooms with retractable garage doors to let in sunlight, for example) highlighted customers that were agile, tenacious and resilient enough to deploy smart tools quickly to help them navigate the global crisis.
Evan Goldberg, executive vice president of NetSuite, says companies such as Modsy and Lovesac are thriving because of their diverse business models and revenue streams, while running NetSuite ERP systems to accommodate their growth potential by creating and nurturing a data-obsessed culture.
Tom Altman, CTO of Clickstop, a diversified company in Urbana, Iowa, and one of the early adopters of NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, embodies the need to harness metrics and insights into the daily activities of a multi-brand conglomerate that sells everything from pepper seeds and fasteners to transportation and laundry services as it reaches $70 million in revenues in 2021, up from $4 million in 2009.
After running NetSuite OneWorld for 12 years, Clickstop now can download all its historical data once a day and create dashboards and custom reports instantly, rendering obsolete the manual tasks that previously would have taken weeks or months. “The speed is just phenomenal,’’ Altman said, adding that it plans to expand the rollout of NetSuite Analytics Warehouse from 50 current users to 130 users to help his colleagues boost visibility into market opportunities that would not have been apparent without such data warehousing capabilities, which will ultimately change the way it does business.
“We are going to see a lot of quick decisions being made for category assortment,’’ Altman said, adding that the combination of NetSuite Analytics Warehouse and Google Analytics that it relies on Internet traffic could be a game-changer.”
Another example of thriving on chaos is Mann Lake of Hackensack, MN, a 700-person company that sells beekeeping equipment and supplies. Shana Rowlette, its CFO, said her company typically does well during a recession and the pandemic has magnified that by encouraging homebodies to set their sights on new hobbies from honey harvesting to soap making. “Everybody wants our stuff,’’ Rowlett said.
In 2020, Rowlett and her team started implementing NetSuite over a four-month period, a task that was fraught with challenges. Still, the results have been nothing but spectacular as Mann Lake employees now can access customer and financial data on a real-time basis. “It has been a big improvement for sales and manufacturing, which was all done on paper in the past,’’ Rowlett said.
Offering a mix of imported and domestic products through seven facilities in six states, Mann Lake now sets its sights even higher by leveraging advanced inventory management functionality from NetSuite to address bigger problems like keeping the right product at the right location to mitigate soaring freight costs. Bulking up its warehouse management and eCommerce capabilities will be next as Mann Lake plans to increase its IT spend by 25% over the next 12 months.
The optimism is not lost among ERP vendors like Oracle these days as NetSuite continues to chalk up double-digit sales gains every quarter more than doubling its installed base of ERP customers to 27,000, up from 11,000 five years earlier when it was acquired by Oracle.
Goldberg attributes the success to its relentless focus on the SMB market that has given rise to a flood of high-growth companies that are as demanding as large enterprises when it comes to automation. Over 150 NetSuite customers including Duolingo, On24, Roblox, Olaplex and ThredUp have recently gone public.
Its ever-increasing integration into the Oracle stack has also made it easier for NetSuite to stand out. Senior Vice President Ryan Grisso of NetSuite cites allowing its customers to schedule when they want to shift to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for better performance at the time of their choosing as another reason why its customers can easily take advantage of the Oracle Cloud.
Faced with an onslaught of competitors in the midmarket from Intuit on the low-end to open-source ERP providers like Odoo, NetSuite appears to be taking a page out of Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP’s playbook as it becomes more feature-rich than ever by packing in additional capabilities such as Core HR, 401K calculation in payroll, intelligent product recommendation, budgeting and planning, and warehouse management, etc.
Already, NetSuite customers process $3 billion worth of annual payroll through SuitePeople and 1,200 customers now run warehouse management applications through their NetSuite ERP systems.
Jason Maynard, senior vice president of global field operations at NetSuite, said the key is to strike the right balance between delivering all these new features and pricing them effectively in order to resonate with the biggest possible audience that is also consuming them from the first course to the last. If the fast-growing companies showcased during SuiteWorld were the leading indicators, suffice to say that NetSuite has done a good job satisfying their suite tooth.
List of Oracle NetSuite Customers
Source: Apps Run The World, November 2021
