The roles also do a decent, but not perfect, job of removing extraneous details from the views of users who don’t need to see them. NetSuite could do a better job with record layouts but you can have different folks see a different record layout with some configuration.
Giving users access to see pending commissions and estimated commission calculations sure does help also.
The only beef I have with the commission calculator is that you can set it to calculate on Bookings, or on Payment, or on a combination of those, but you can’t base it off billings.
8 - Stability
I must say that I very rarely get any calls about NS doing something strange, flaking out or getting hung up. This is a huge difference from our old CRM system which caused no end of hang ups with the client. That’s not to say NS is perfect. We had some issues with a script, and for some reason the expense reports sometimes didn’t allow a save but overall we were much better off then we were.
I’d say that this is typical of most web based apps, especially hosted multi-tenant ones.
Most of the time if a user complains about something the system notes step in and demonstrate, that yes, in fact, they did push the button!
7 - It’s Hosted
This leads us to reason number 7. I often hear people say, as soon as I tell them we use NetSuite, and describe it, “oh, but where is your data” or “oh, I wouldn’t want to store important information online.” Then I ask them, do you bank? Online? Where is your email stored? Gmail? Oh isn’t that interesting.
Frankly, if there are still people out there who don’t want to store business data outside their walls they need to get over it. Unless you’re a super duper military contractor, or have data worth billions of dollars it’s pretty likely that others can secure it better than you.
We always used to worry about our data getting corrupted etc. Now we don’t, well, not much.
Having a hosted application can also save money. It’s pretty easy to do the ROI calculations on it. From experience you need to put way more effort into hosting software on your own gear. There’s just way more to go wrong.
6 - Customer Portal
If you’re looking to have an impact on your customers you’ll like how easy it is to give them access via the customer portal. Being able to allow your customers access to your system to see Quotes, Cases and edit contact details is great. On top of that it’s pretty easy to use.
I just wish that there was some utility to allow customers to register from the outside, and then get approve by an admin. Or, have some tools to mass invite customers to different custom, customer centers. Perhaps that’s something I’ll work on if there’s some demand.
5 - Financials
There’s nothing like a nice income statement to make the MBA in you a bit warm and fuzzy. Just over 2 years ago it took me 2 days to ask for and then get a P&L for a particular period. And even then things were always f’d up. Now it’s point and click. It’s brilliantly easy IMO.
And now the financial report builder means you can basically get anything you want out of the system.
4 - Support Module
I swear this module saved my first implementation. It was the first thing to get really turned on and everyone really liked it from the word go. I can’t imagine anyone out there with anything that really can offer a whole lot more, especially for a support team of less than 20 people. We have excellent traceability on cases and issues and I believe our own customers get better support because of it.
3 - Dashboards
I kind of think that Dashboards are a bit passe as cool feature #1 but NS does a pretty good job of presenting whatever data you want to the user. Now, it’s nowhere as customizable as something like a real portal app, but for a business system its fine and keeps people focused. We’ve rolled out some nice kpi’s, custom searches, report snapshots etc.
When you’re talking about content, there’s not a ton more you’d need to see that a user isn’t going to ignore.
I have a vision of a next generation dashboard for users but that’ll stay locked in my head until someone buys me dinner.
2 - Live Customization
We’ve all used systems that had to be rebooted when you update the back end. Heck, scheduling downtime once a month with Goldmine was a regularity, it had to be rebooted all the time.
I absolutely love being able to tweak something for someone and see those changes reflected instantly everywhere I need them to be. It really speeds the time it takes to make changes and make users happy.
Now I wish there was an undo button, or perhaps, a better way to test these things other than the sandbox account, but I often take calls and have to tweak some field, add a form, or change a setting and I don’t have to tell everyone to log off when I do it.
1 - End to End Integration
Probably about half the value that’s buried in NetSuite comes from it’s end to end integration. Are all the parts “best in class?” Probably not for everyone. But having one source of the truth on a customer is the Holy Grail and NetSuite is about 90% there in achieving it. I don’t know of another app that can come close to it without causing you to either pay through the nose, or take your company down with the complexity of the implementation.
There’s a few more spreadsheets to eliminate, and it could be a bit easier to enter and change data, and perhaps present a simpler view to the user, but if you have NetSuite, and everyone’s doing their job, you’ll have an excellent understanding of what’s going on in real time, no matter if they’re still a lead, or if they’re a 15 year old customer with an issue.
You just can’t get that if you try and pick a system for CRM, ERP, Support, Webstore and a few other things and try to patch them all together.
