Audaxium Blog

Here’s a funny video from NetSuite spoofing the Apple vs Mac ads, except this time it’s SAP vs NetSuite.

There are a couple other amusing videos on the NetSuite Youtube channel.

If you’re an existing NetSuite user, you’ll know, because of the notification on your dashboard, that NetSuite 2009.2 is just around the corner.  If you’re new to NetSuite, 2009.2 is obviously the second release of 2009. Each year NetSuite is rolling out 2 releases, the .1 version seems to contain more major enhancement, and the .2 release some of the less sexy, but still worthwhile improvements.

To find your sneak peek documents, simply click the help button, and type Sneak Peek into the search tool.  But since it’s out there in the wild already, you can also link directly to it here.

While this version didn’t knock my socks off at first glance, there’s a few things in here that I think demonstrate how NetSuite is improving the product to better align with how businesses work, rather than rolling out flashy, but useless functionality.

Here’s a few of the things I think will make existing customers smile.

Attachment Support for Online Case Forms

Previously you could use a case form on your website that would create a case directly inside the system, but you couldn’t attach a file.  This lead some customers to create their own forms which would then send an email to NetSuite that included the attachment. NetSuite has a 5 mb file attachment limit on this method so some customers then would use a YouSendIt form as well.

Now you don’t have to worry, and can have customers attach files directly, saving a few extra steps for the support reps.

Trend Graph Support for all Dashboards

Previously you couldn’t add a “Trend Graph” to other tabs.  Now you can.  Yay!  It’ll make those other tabs that much more useful, especially when you want to keep your Home dashboard nice and light, and move certain information to the other tabs.

Additional Custom Search portlets

Today you can have one “Custom Search” on a dashboard.  Now you can have 3.  The work around was to use report snapshots but this will give end users that much more flexibility in dashboard setup.  It’s small but I love this enhancement.

CSV Import – Select Custom Form Option

“In previous releases, the user’s preferred form for an imported record was automatically used for validation and to display the set of fields available for import.”  Man was this ever annoying.  Now I’ll be able to select another form that doesn’t have restrictions when importing.  There’s nothing like importing 5000 records and then having it fail because your preferred form didn’t like what you did!

CSV Import – Purchase Order, Vendor Bill & Vendor Bill Payment Support

For those out there who didn’t want to code up complicated web services apps to import POs this could be huge.  If you’re a reseller and you’ve been hand keying in Purchase orders this will be one thing you’ll want to test ASAP.

Lead Qualification and Conversion

It’s been rather busy here at Audaxium but just as soon as were eager to look at the new Lead Qualification and conversion rules in depth.  NetSuite will now help with the capturing of critical information on the lead record, and attaching it to existing prospects, opportunities etc.  Don’t let your sales team keep processing leads the same way, check out these enhancements and see what they can do for you.

To turn on this part of this feature you’ll have to go to “Setup, Company, Enable Features”.  Then you’ll see a “Lead Conversion Mapping” setup in the sales section where you can define what information gets copied over to Contacts, Opportunities, and Tasks.

You’ll also see a “Convert” button on a lead.  If it’s an “Individual” you’ll be able to hit the convert button, and create a contact, company, opportunity, and task at the same time.  Neat.  I know a lot of companies create leads as companies only, and not individuals.  They’ll have to ponder this now.

Absolute Item Pricing per Customer

We all do it.  We tell a special customer that they can buy product X for a specific price.  But what happens when that doesn’t conform to one of your price levels?  Previously you’d have to remember every time you created a Sales Order. But now you’ll be able to set a custom price level right on the customer record.

Just make sure, when you are updating prices, that you have a search that shows you all those customers with custom price levels!

Period Close Process Enhancements

In 2009.2 you’ll be able to lock, check and update, then close periods.  And there will be a better audit trail on who has closed and opened periods.  Previously a period was either open or closed, and if an adjustment needed to be made, you couldn’t tell who opened the period. (Although you could tell who made the change to the transaction of course)

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It seems like a decent release for NetSuite.  If you’re a NetSuite user, head over to Beta and check it out. If you want to get a demo of NetSuite and it’s new functions, just let us know!

Last night NetSuite announced their 2008 Q4 results. You can listen to the audio of that call here.

In listening to the call it was clear to me that the reason why NetSuite was successful, when so many other software companies are having troubles, is that the value offered by NetSuite really stands out in tough times.  It’s a valuable application that is much easier to start using than what we’ve been used to as consumers of enterprise software.

The second thing that stood out was that NetSuite is enabling progressive companies to continue to invest, first to get better now, and secondly to improve for when the economy starts coming back.  Now’s a good time to update systems and NetSuite allows it with it’s pricing model and implementation ease.

NetSuite continues to add customers, improve the application, and increase customer satisfaction.

One thing is for sure, the tone of the call was very positive, and so was the sense that NetSuite is very well aligned with the needs and desires of the customer.  

To read more on the numbers and analysis check out Michael Faucette’s Blog, Dennis Howlett’s Comments, or some quick numbers on ZDNet.

If you’re thinking of implementing a new business system you’re probably wondering just who is going to do all the work to get it going.  No matter the system, it’s never a trivial task to implement new things.  Given the varied nature of the work here are some things to consider before you get down to business.

Find a Generalist

NetSuite is a little different than the traditional application. If you’re reading this blog you’ll know that it can touch many different parts of your business.  And for this reason you should be looking for a person in your organization who has experience with these different pieces and can bring them together.

Don’t make the mistake of giving the project to a person who is an expert in only one field.  Turning NetSuite over to an IT expert, or Sales, or Marketing, and especially accounting will mean problems down the road.  There’s too many ways that the system can be tweaked to favour one group over the other.

Obviously the person will need to come from some department but should have a decent understanding of  each part of the flowchart that takes a customer from lead to cash to support.  For Example

• Lead Gen
• Marketing, Web and Email
• Sales Process
• Order Processing
• Items (your product lineup)
• Accounting
• Technical Support

Technical Skills

In my opinion your project leader needs to have a basic understanding of how databases work and best practises on how information should be organised.  There’s no need to be a Javascript programmer or database specialist.  Of course these things don’t hurt but those skills will not be used in the capacity of implementation manager.

Team Building

Make sure you get a person to lead your project who can get others involved, and, at the same time, balance the competing needs of different departments.  Sometimes you need kind words and understanding, other times you need a big stick and some mediation skills. Your project lead will also have to manage NetSuite people, an implementation partner if you choose one, and other team mates with specific roles.

Project Management

Implementing NetSuite for most companies isn’t going to take forever like it does with other systems.  But you will have to manage the initial 1-4 month project and the first year of changes with some attention.  You won’t need to over do it on the project management side but it helps to simply be organized and make a plan.

Training

It’s very important that you have someone internally that can teach your employees how to get the most out of NetSuite.  There is online training available from NetSuite that covers the basics, and, your implementation partner, like Audaxium, can provide initial and follow on training, but you’ll want a great communicator in house to maximise your investment.

Passion

It would be nice if your project leader gets kind of excited starting with a clean slate like NetSuite and shaping it to improve your bottom line.  Even when the going gets tough it’s still a fun project.

Conclusion

If you are considering implementing a system make sure you have someone internally who can provide most, if not all, of these attributes.  If you don’t have a person you can certainly bring in a contractor, like us, to help but the only way that that is going to provide long term value is if we can build a product champion within your organization.  We’re always here to help but at the end of the day you own it.

Coming up… a post on what other skills and roles the project team needs to be successful.

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.

The other day I wrote about implementing CRM, NetSuite and the WIFM principle.  It’s very important that you think from the end users perspective “What’s in it for me.”   After writing that post I asked, via email, a number of users what was the first thing that came to their head when asked, “What impact has NetSuite had on your day to day”

Here are all the responses, unedited and my comments.  It’s great to see such positive answers. 

Read More »

The Holidays are winding down, and while I am stuck in the middle of nowhere I have managed to gain reliable access to the web.  

I’ve been wanting to re-write this post for some time.  There’s a lot of reasons to take a look at NetSuite.  As a customer of 2 years, looking back, these don’t all match with why we picked NetSuite, but they are the ones that stuck.

This list is meant to give some food for thought.  Different companies are going to have different viewpoints based on their needs and processes.

10 – Role Based

One of the things nice things about NetSuite is the fine detail you have when you design different roles for users within your organization.  Of course, this means that it’s important to understand what all of the hundreds of permissions do.  But that just takes time or a little help.

NetSuite, by default, has the permissions of the default roles very close to what you’ll need people to be able, and not able, to do, and they have the commands laid out in a fairly nice manner relative to where you’d expect them to be.  This allows you to get started with NetSuite a fair bit quicker then you would be able to to if you had to build the layouts by role from scratch.  Most of the roles we used were pretty standard but we did copy the default roles and then tweaked them over time.