The NetSuite buyer's guide

NetSuite is a flexible, scalable platform with a unified end-to-end business management suite, which includes ERP/Financials, Supply Chain, Logistics, Manufacturing, CRM/Marketing — and eCommerce.

It is the world's #1 Cloud ERP. Unlike most 'cloud-enabled' ERPs, NetSuite's been designed as a true cloud model from the outset which means it has never needed to be rearchitected. NetSuite has strengths in the following industries:

• Professional services
• Retail
• Agribusiness
• Wholesale distribution
• Manufacturing
• Nonprofit organisations
• Media and publishing
• Finance and insurance organisations
• Food and beverages

In a nutshell, NetSuite will help you harmonise all the moving parts of your business. It is a single, fully integrated platform that empowers your business to be more efficient and less prone to errors. It provides you with greater insights that lead to smarter commercial decisions, and ultimately, gives you the power to confidently take whatever ‘next step’ represents growth and success to your business.

Perhaps you want to scale up, spin-off, acquire new businesses, or launch a new business model? NetSuite supports you all the way with:

• One solution: All the line-of-business functionality you need with in-built, natively integrated Finance, Project Management/ Job Costing, Sales, Procurement, Inventory Management, Manufacturing, CRM, - ERP, and eCommerce.
• Versatility: You’ll do more with a multi-tenant cloud platform and a comprehensive range of cloud development tools and workflow applications that allow you to extend NetSuite to fit your personalised requirements.
• Guaranteed uptime: Enjoy unprecedented availability with an SLA of 99.5% uptime, an average uptime of 99.96%, and full performance transparency.
• A future you can count on: Customise and extend NetSuite without breaking the ability to embrace continuous updates when you’re ready. So, you can grow together!
• Seamless upgrades: Always be on the latest iteration with automatic version and feature upgrades. And best of all - existing customisations are carried forward, not overwritten.
• Rock-solid dependability: NetSuite comes with industrial-strength availability, disaster recovery and security - as standard, not extra.
• Business anywhere: Manage 190 currencies, 20 languages and automated tax compliance in over 100 countries!

Used by more than 21,000 businesses and subsidiaries across over 160 countries, NetSuite customers include some of the world's most popular brands including Go-Pro, Asics and Groupon. So, why do we think you will love it too?

First, NetSuite helps you to adapt and grow your business – your way. Need to meet new quality standards or tax controls? Easy-peasy. NetSuite scales with global companies by providing complete multi-subsidiary visibility without having to log in and out of each company and supports local accounting regulations.

Changing business models? Not a problem. Tailor NetSuite to meet your unique requirements and industry-specific needs.

Starting small, but planning to grow? Or fully-grown, but looking to change direction? NetSuite is modular, so deployment is fast. And thanks to SuiteCloud (NetSuite's comprehensive range of cloud development tools, applications, and infrastructure), you can add and expand at your pace.

Need to be in more than one place at a time? True mobility is more than accessing reports on your mobile or signing off a PO from your home office. It's about being in any country, working in any time zone and conducting business 24/7. Or improving the customer experience by unifying eCommerce and in-store POS to order management, inventory, merchandising, marketing, financials, and service.

Want to wave goodbye to information silos? With NetSuite’s inbuilt business intelligence, reporting is intuitive and development free! No matter where you are, you can populate a single chart of accounts across subsidiaries or use separate charts-of-accounts for each company within a single instance.

NetSuite is one platform that allows you to flex the modules to meet your requirements. Unlike other ERPs on the market, you can seamlessly scale, change or adopt new modules that reflect your business model and direction. And there isn’t any background coding required - it’s plug and play.

By observing how their clients use their software, NetSuite has turned that knowledge into tailored solutions for industries and business types. The platform you receive has over 20 years of customer-focused learning built-in, returning high user-end engagement and satisfaction.

These tailored solutions can be seen at a modular level (with advanced financials or advanced manufacturing) or together in NetSuite’s popular industry specific SuiteSuccess offering.

SuiteSuccess is like a ‘starter kit’. You can expand, flex, personalise or extend it with your unique configurations to meet your business challenges. NetSuite doesn’t box you into a rigid template that you can’t change later.

NetSuite is a highly configurable platform that, regardless of the business you are in, can be molded to fit your needs. There are four primary modules (pre-built & configured), representing the main industry sectors:

• Finance
• Services
• Wholesale Distribution
• Manufacturing

You can purchase each module as standard or premium versions. The premium versions include more features and functionality for added flexibility and are priced accordingly.

A la carte or set menu?

While you can pick and choose from the ‘menu’ of NetSuite modules and capabilities, NetSuite SuiteSuccess offers businesses a cost-effective, leading practice approach that ensures much greater accuracy or mindful understanding of the project that is contracted. Depending on the capabilities you require, there are ‘standard’ and ‘professional’ versions of each module.

Anyone for extras?

You can easily add on any functions not included in NetSuite’s pre-bundled standard or premium offerings. If you want to enhance your advanced financials by adding revenue management or revenue recognition functionality, it’s not a problem!

Going global?

Equip your business to work across multiple locations, timelines, and currencies while complying with local taxation and financial reporting requirements with these modules.

• NetSuite Multi-Book Accounting enables you to simultaneously run one book for transactions (your normal day-to-day business activities) and another for taxation purposes.
• NetSuite OneWorld enables you to create and operate multiple legal entities within one instance of NetSuite, and consolidate the books for each entity at a group level.

Irrespective of your industry, or whether you’re taking the standard or professional option, NetSuite comes with the modules you selected, and a starter set of user roles.

NetSuite user licenses are either ‘full user’ or ‘self-service’. The self-service option allows for highly cost-effective but limited user access to basic functions such as timesheets, employee records, expense claims and raising purchase orders. The full user option allows unlimited access based on granted permissions.

• ERP module: Accounts Payable and Receivable, General Ledger, Multi-Currency and Multi-Language, Item and Basic Inventory Management, Project Management, Bank Management & Reconciliations, Purchasing, Employee Centre, Acceptance of Credit Cards, EFT and Order Management.
• CRM module: Sales Force Automation, Opportunity Management, Marketing Automation, Partner Relationship Management and Case Management/Customer Service Management.
• Ecommerce & Retail Management module: SuiteCommerce Standard, Advanced Order Management, SuiteCommerce Advanced, and SuiteCommerce InStore (for point-of-sale).
• Services Resource Planning module: Resource Allocation, Job Costing and Project Management, Time and Expense Management
• Financial Management module: Fixed Assets, OneWorld for multi company and multi countries, Multibook Accounting, Advanced Financials, SuiteBilling, Advanced Revenue Management Revenue Recognition
• Inventory & Manufacturing Management module: Advanced Inventory, Advanced Manufacturing, Work Orders & Assemblies, Advanced Procurement, Manufacturing WIP & Routing, and Demand Planning.

More than just a menu structure, dashboards are one of the most loved features and readily adopted features of NetSuite, providing users with a clear view of the specific business information they need to perform their job effectively.

With NetSuite, the complete user experience is driven from the dashboard. All Key Performance Indicators, key measures, reports and searches that highlight management by exception, day job activities, what needs to be processed, etc. is all cohesively addressed from a personalised role-based dashboard.

Better still, NetSuite comes with a wide range of pre-configured, role-based dashboards, which can be easily customised by to create a precise, personalised fit to individual and organisational needs.

NetSuite is oriented towards self-service. It provides you with the ability to easily create end user dashboards, reports, create additional fields, forms and functionality - including workflows – using point and click actions.

NetSuite also provides around 200 ready-to-use, out-of-the-box reports which can be customised to your needs. Need to deliver a cross-functional report? No problem. NetSuite creates direct links between the information you need (for example finance and services), so you can extract and join together data from different places in one report.

It’s easy to configure NetSuite to meet your specific business requirements. However, the good news is that SuiteSuccess minimises the need to tailor the platform by providing many of the leading practice industry processes you probably already use or are keen to adopt to support growth and efficiency.

But what if you want to personalise it even further?

As part of your project, your system administrators can be trained to create and customise reports, set up automated workflows, add new fields, and more. Authorised users can make changes to the user interface level through simple code-free drag and drop actions. And at upgrade time, your changes won’t be overwritten.

The factors that typically drive up the cost of your solution are customisation and licenses.

To keep customisation costs down, we recommend adopting a Minimum Loveable Product approach to your first year of using NetSuite. By just implementing the NetSuite modules and functions you need to get on with business, with minimal personalisation, you can decide as you use it, what you need to turn on next – if at all. For example, you may not be ready to buy or use marketing or sales automation now, but plan to train your teams to use them next year.

SuiteSuccess offers leading practices and leaner processes, so a willingness to adopt leading practices, rather than trying to replicate the ‘old’ ways of doing things, will save you money upfront.

As mentioned earlier, NetSuite user licenses come in two forms (full user and self-service). Taking professional advice to help optimise your licensing will also keep control of your budget. Upon approval, NetSuite also offers licensing discounts with contract surety which can reduce overall costs.

As part of the implementation, Fusion5 ‘train-the-trainer’. This approach empowers your super users to train your other employees, and if desired, teach them to customise your platform. If you are buying self-service licenses, you’ll also have full access to learning videos and tutorials direct from NetSuite.

All of our customers have access to Fusion5 Infusion our 24/7 world-class, web-based support solution.
If you need more extensive coverage, and extended hours, Fusion5 PartnerPlus offers a range of support levels to suit every business. You also have access to local people who know your business, your processes, and your solution intimately, so your issues are resolved more quickly.

If you'd like to learn more about implementation and how you can be prepared, check out our latest guide on how to chose your project team and how you can prepare for success.

A great ERP is about fit, affordability and functionality. And taking your business where it wants to go. So, what’s different about NetSuite?

• NetSuite was built from the ground up as a cloud solution. It wasn’t retrofitted; every aspect of NetSuite is designed to leverage the cloud to your business advantage.
• Unlike other ERPs, you can seamlessly scale, change or adopt new NetSuite modules that reflect your business model and direction, without the need for coding.
• By using SuiteSuccess modules and opting for our recommended Minimum Loveable Product implementation approach, you’ll reduce any surprises during the project.
• It’s affordable. We have customers with just five users through to 500 users. And each one went through a process of thoroughly and formally evaluating competitor solutions before deciding on NetSuite.

Why choose Fusion5 as your NetSuite partner?

• When you choose us as your partner, you are making a low-risk, high-return decision. Fusion5 is one of NetSuite’s leading implementation partners. We’ve been a NetSuite 5 Star partner for the last five years, achieved President's Club Partner Status in 2015 and 2016, and Partner of the Year for 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
• We have extensive resources. Fusion5’s team of over 70 NetSuite specialists, from sales and implementation, development to support, are all focused on delivering a platform to support your ability to grow, flex and prosper.
• We add value. We can help you assess which suite will provide the best fit and outcome for your business needs. We will also ensure that your licensing is optimised to deliver just what’s needed, and nothing that’s not.
• We provide leadership. We help you take a strategic approach to adopting NetSuite, so you have time to learn to use and appreciate the platform before you make unnecessary customisations.

If you’re looking to the future or frustrated with your current systems, having a conversation with Fusion5 to discover whether NetSuite could be a good fit for you is a great start.

We offer a complimentary discovery process, followed up with a price estimate, and a demonstration tailored to show how NetSuite can support and grow your business.