Audaxium Blog

Implementing a system like NetSuite means introducing change into your company.  There’s no avoiding it.  So how do you prepare during your CRM Evaluation?  Here are some tips.

Explain Why

Often you’ll have one driving reason why you picked up the mouse and found a NetSuite Partner to chat about a new business system.  But often there are a number of other considerations that pushed you over the edge.  As you launch the investigation into a new tool it’s a good idea to write these reasons down and make sure they are effectively communicated with your extended team.  And by team I mean anyone that has anything remotely to do with the application.

The reason you should do this is first, to get everyone involved, and secondly, because your teammates will immediately begin looking for ways to solve the problem.  They’ll tell you what applications meet their needs and what fixes can be made today to make life better.  At least some will.  Those will mainly be your early adopters.

Get Input

Once you get the project rolling a bit I always suggest polling everyone about their ideas, concerns, and requirements around a new system.  Make this fairly free form. Don’t pigeon hole people into clicking answer boxes.  Just ask; “How should a new system improve how we work?”

If some people don’t respond initially make a note.  Then, gently demand their input.  ”You won’t be able to complain afterwards if you don’t give us your thoughts.”  You’ll get 100% response rate after explaining this a couple of times.

Be Broad

Often people will get interested in NetSuite for one part of the application.  As you’re investigating a new business system use the project as an opportunity to improve other systems and/or other parts of your business.  You may get some spin off projects when looking for improvements in your business processes.  And, you’ll probably start to define phase II and III if you choose to go with an integrated system like NetSuite.

Set Expectations

Once you have collected all the requirements of a new system from your team, it’s time to explain to them that they won’t be getting everything they want.  It’s about compromise.  Have another session where people rank or pick out their top 10 must haves from the very broad requirements list. And then remind them that they might not get all those either.

In reality, most people will get most requirements, especially with NetSuite, but lower expectations now will make implementation and change management that much easier.

Talk one-on-one

Now that you understand peoples priorities you’ll need to talk to them. Hopefully face to face.  You’ll have a good idea what on their list is reasonable and what’s not.  Talk to them about what they think of the idea of moving to a new business system and what’s in it for them.

Also start asking people how they want to be involved with the project.  You’ll need lots of different help over the course of the project so collect volunteers early.

Users – 1/3 Early Adopters

A certain amount of your team will desire change just because that’s who they are.  It’s very important to harness this energy and use it to your advantage.  You need to make sure that you give enough attention to their needs so that they don’t get frustrated later on.

While most early adopters will desire change a lot of early adopters have short attention spans.  Their desire isn’t an actual indication of how easy it is for them to learn new tools.  Keep that in mind when planning training.

Users – 1/3 Followers

Followers look to the early adopters to assess where things are going.  This is the most important group to get engaged during the product evaluation and selection stage. They are often the ones who highlight the project risks for you so that you can mitigate them.

Followers often need to be reminded about previous changes that took place in your company and the benefits that emerged.  These stories are very helpful.

The followers are also a good group to start gathering metrics with.  You’ll want to measure the impact of a new tool and one way to get this group engaged is to get them to look at the “current situation” from a data perspective.

Users – 1/3 Cranky

Ah, yes, my favorite bunch, the pessimists.  They’ll think you’re crazy for trying to change out a CRM system, or even put one in for that matter.  It’s important that you focus their rage on what’s wrong now, and then commit to fixing it.  Try to get agreement on what the biggest issues currently are. Then get them to promise you, that if you can fix them, they’ll help you roll it out.

The cranky folks are those that you’ll hold up as examples when you roll out the system.  Often managers will use the early adopters as examples, but everyone in your company knows that they love everything new.  If they see a pessimist saying that NetSuite is working for them then they’ll be more apt to keep pushing to get the system into a highly productive state.

How Ready is Your Company?

Change is about people.  And sometimes processes.  But more often its about the people involved.  If you prep each individual for the system evaluation, selection and subsequent change then you’ll have done 80% of the work at being prepared.  The rest of it is the hard work of making sure the system and project actually work the way you want.

Perhaps you use NetSuite and have gotten into a groove. Perhaps you don’t keep on top of every little option.  Here’s one option that, in my opinion, anyone who is doing email campaigns in NetSuite should use regularly.

Here is the high level.  

First, if you have a large distribution list in NetSuite that you send emails to, you should always test different messages and formats on random group members to see what is the most effective combination.

Secondly, there is no reason to just split your group 50/50.  As long as you have 100-200 members in your second or third test group, depending on the total size,  you’ll have enough data to have statistical significance and therefore make some decisions about what works and what doesn’t.

If you have 1000 contacts in your distribution list, it’s perfectly reasonable to send out a slightly different message/call to action/format to 200 of them.  

If you want to calculate the statistical significance of a sample size check this link here

The other day, I was asked how to do A/B Testing of emails in NetSuite.   It’s fairly easy to do so here’s how. Read More »

Here’s a quick tip if you’ve been using NetSuite for a while and have everything on autopilot.
It used to be that if you were doing a transaction search you couldn’t seem to get the status of individual line items on Sales Orders. The best I ever seemed to do was to search for the status of the order and create a dashboard custom search that showed the number of orders that were:

• Partially Fulfilled
• Pending Approval 
• Pending Billing 
• Pending Billing/Partially Fulfilled 
• Pending Fulfillment 

That search has served me  pretty well and allows you to monitor the different “stages” an order goes through.

But, I think as of version 2008 you can search transactions and display, for individual line items the following:

• Quantity
• Quantity Billed 
• Quantity Commited 
• Quantity Fulfilled/Recieved 
• Quantity Packed 
• Quantity Picked 

When you do your search you’ll want to eliminate certain items from your results with criteria but it’ll be fairly obvious depending on what you’re looking for.

So, if you haven’t looked at these fields to flag you if/when things get missed or become problems check them out.

Once you have your search set up there’s probably more work to do. For my searches I use with this stuff I need to export the list to excel or calc and filter the information.

For Example, I export all line items from open sales orders and include the quantities. Because you can’t do an if, then else, type of forumula in NetSuite I’ll do that in my spreadsheet. Ex. If Quantity Billed is less than Quantity, then “No”, else yes. Then I can filter on unbilled items. I do the same for fulfillments. Then I go and use some pivot tables to see different catagories of items.

Now I can easily see billed/unbilled, fulfilled/unfulfilled items, by class, by department, by location etc.

This is something that could be automated with a little scripting.

It’s a simple tip but I hope it helps at least one person out there.

This post is a repost from NetSuiteguy.com, with minor edits.

As of a couple years ago, a rep, or anyone really, could look at a transaction, and could hit the email button, either on purpose or accidentally, and NS would, without prompting, send an email to the address the transaction was attached to.  Basically we warned people to be careful.  But that’s no longer the case.  (As of when escapes me)

So, if you’re like me you want to:

Email a pdf of the transaction of the attachment
Put an appropriate subject line, email body, and signature in your email
Potentially attach other documents
Use a template
So if you want to set this up go to Setup, Company, Printing Fax and Email Preferences, Email (Tab)

Turn on the button, “Use pop up for main transaction email button”

That will cause the pop up to occur for all users. But your work doesn’t end there. You’ll need to prompt users to make a few more setting adjustments. (Ones which incidentally I believe should be allowed to be done by an admin)

Here’s the procedure I sent to the users.

• Go to, Home, Set Preferences
  • General Tab
  • Add your Signature (Text only)
  • Click, add signature to messages
  • Put in the from email address you want to use
  • Go to the Transactions Tab
  • Turn OFF Print Using HTML
  • Turn OFF Email Using HTML
• Go to the Transaction of your choice
  • Click the email button
• A pop up should appear
  • Confirm the Recipient
  • Add any cc or bcc you like
  • go to the message tab
  • Select a template if you wish
  • Or, type your message
  • Please note you don’t need a signature if you are typing free text.
  • Please note, the field tags don’t seem to work
  • Go to the Attachments Tab if you want to attach the actual Quote, Invoice, etc.
  • Click Include Transaction
• The Default should be fine (if you can follow instructions it’ll be PDF)
   
• Hit Merge and Send when you are ready

So try that and play around with the pop up. There’s a few options there that should allow you to get pretty close to where you want to be.

One important note. I notice that in the email body the fields you can insert into the message don’t seem to work, so test before assuming they are working.

This is a repost from my old NetSuiteGuy.com blog.

DKIM stands for Domain Key Identified Mail.  Check out the wiki here.  Essentially it is a way for you to digitally “sign” your campaign emails and then be authenticated by the recieving email systems.  Doing this will improve the delivery rate, and therefore your response rate, of your email campaigns no matter the volume of email you send.

NetSuite also has a rule that if you send more than 10,000 emails in a month you must have DKIM set up.  We started getting error messages before this cap.  This prevented us from sending emails until it got fixed.  Needless to say, it’s important to turn this on well before you get into trouble.

So, if you are implementing NetSuite, just turn it on in the beginning and be done with it.

Now, if you go read the help files in NetSuite on DKIM you might end up being confused.  Hopefully they’ve been fixed by the time you read this.

First things First

What you need to do is to go to Setup, Company, Printing, Fax & Email Preferences

Now go to the email tab. Look under Domain Keys.

The only thing that you do that is different than the help file is to put in the “Domain Name”.  That’s your domain name probably that you use for your company.  Example “audaxium.com” no www.

If you look up the screen a bit you’ll see “default mail merge domain”  don’t touch that!

Now you’ve read this far.  Don’t click the check box and set up DKIM yet.

When we set it up, maybe it was just us, but when our emails went out they began using a “mail merge domain” that completely messed up all links in our emails.  So… in hindsight, we should of set the mail merge domains first even though supposedly they have nothing to do with DKIM.

The benefit of setting up the mail merge domain is that it replaces the “forms.netsuite.com” or “www.netsuite.com” in the links and uses your domain.  It’s more professional and possibly helps delivery rates.

With me?

So your steps should be:

• Setup your subdomain if you haven’t already at Setup, Website, Domains
• It should be “hosted as” Email Campaign
• Go to Setup, Company, Printing Fax & Email, Email Tab
• Select the subdomain for your “default mail merge domain”
•  example campaign.audaxium.com   
• Create a cname record on your DNS record that redirects “campaign” to shopping.netsuite.com
• Validate that it’s working 
•  open a command prompt and type nslookup campaign.yourdomain.com  
• It should return shopping.netsuite.com as a non-authoritive answer with the proper alias
• Send a Test email campaign, making sure the links all work  
• Take a deep breath 
• Follow the help guide on DKIM using the defaults except for the subdomain 
• Talk to your IT guy and get him to set up the txt record with the “dns entry” 
•   remember the txt name is “selector1._domainkey” 
• After a few hours click the validate button 
• Then, and only then, turn on the DKIM checkbox 

  A couple of tips.  You can’t figure it out using only the first DKIM help file.  Follow the godaddy instructions even if you don’t use godaddy to host your dns record.  It’ll explain how to set up the text record a bit more clearly.

I guess the key message is to validate that the bits are working along the way before turning them on. 

If one person finds this helpful that’s great, please leave me a comment.

Shortest tip ever.

If you ever extract data from NetSuite, and hand it off to someone with the intention that it might get manipulated and imported back in, please remember to export the Internal ID of the record!

End tip.

It doesn’t matter what the record is.  It could be contacts, companies, transactions or items.  It is possible to work without the internal ID but it’s a lot simpler to use it.  Most records have 2 or 3 fields the import utility can key off of but the internal id is the one that gives you the most confidence when messing with data.  

You don’t need to worry yourself with doing this in normal searches, just when you want to re-import your data later.  And if you’re unsure, include it.  It’s also useful if you want to compare data exports later.

I’ll be making a bit of a series out of this I think.  Rather than post walls of text I think I’ll post some smaller, bit sized pieces of information.

I have been managing a NetSuite implementation for 2 years and have helped out a few people with their implementations and in doing so I’ve learned a few things about what made us successful.

One thing I learned is that it is easy to get very distracted by the ROI and high level strategic rationale behind implementing CRM/ERP during the rollout.   Pretty simply, your employees really don’t care a whole lot about that.  Their question?  “What’s in it for me!”

When deploying NetSuite it’s important to get feedback from the diverse group of people that will be using it.  After all, it covers a lot of ground as an integrated system.  Find out what people care about, what’s getting in the way, and how they visualise improvement.

Once you round up that data, and of course, by continuing to talk to people throughout the deployment, you’ll stay on target with what really matters.

Then you’ll be ready to sell the change.  It’s critically important that you can articulate, to each user, just how their life will get better after NetSuite.

Here’s some real, actual examples.

Inside Sales – With NetSuite you’ll be able to hand off opportunities to the sales team without having to craft and send individual emails each time you run across an interested prospect.

Marketing – You’ll be able to run more targeting email campaigns. (Should you choose to do so!) You’ll be able to track in real time the responses to your emails.

Sales Reps – You’ll be able to access the system from anywhere. You’ll be able to track commissions realtime.  You’ll see new leads and opportunities fast.  You’ll be able to spend less time managing spreadsheets and more time in front of customers. You’ll be able to quickly log your calls to keep yourself on track with the sales process.

Sales Management – You’ll be able to track activities by Rep. You’ll be able to see outstanding quotes and opportunities. Forecast review meetings will be able to be focused on the important deals, not just what the rep brings in his latest spreadsheet.

Admin – You’ll be able to process orders much more quickly.  Orders will be cleaner with less fire fighting to do.  Tracking orders, shipments, payments will all be done in one spot with no cutting and pasting.  

Tech Support – You’ll be able to pick up, respond to and close cases faster with NetSuite.  You’ll be able to see case history for a whole company, not just by email address.  You’ll be able to create opportunities for the sales team without switching applications. You’ll be able to see and manage onsite visits and projects in the same spot with NetSuite.

IT – You’ll be able to stop worrying about keep the system up, backed up, and updated and can instead focus on interesting value add projects to configure it and make it work better.

Those are just a few examples.  I think I’ll have to run a poll of some folks and get some other responses of users and managers who have been around NetSuite for a while.

Homework

Before you go and select a new CRM, ERP or Support application, create a survey for your team and ask them what’s standing in their way, and what they want to see in the tools they use each day.  Then think very hard about what’s in it for them before you commit to an implementation.