Oracle NetSuite has rolled out a new solution that helps manage businesses that are both product and service based, which Evan Goldberg, founder and executive vice president, calls "Anything as a Service" companies.
First announced during NetSuite's SuiteConnect event in Manhattan,
"Gone are the days when businesses fell entirely into clean segments such as manufacturing or internet services. Modern businesses develop, distribute and get paid for their offerings in diverse ways that make these artificial categories obsolete," said Goldberg during his keynote presentation. "With this new SuiteSuccess edition, organizations can consolidate and streamline business processes and automate revenue recognition across their product and service offerings to improve efficiency, expand insights and enhance the customer experience."
NetSuite's XaaS solution (the 'X' means a variable that can stand in for anything) is meant to help businesses with diverse offerings. It helps both product and service businesses standardize and streamline their processes across different revenue streams through automated transaction reporting, AP/AR and close.
It also has inventory management capacities that help businesses optimize stock levels, simplify inventory transfers and reduce stockouts by providing real-time inventory visibility across all channels including warehouses, retail stores, drop shippers, third party logistics, vehicle trunk stocks and more. It also manages recurring revenue by automating revenue scheduling, allocation and reporting.
The solution sports project management capacities that can take key metrics from similar past projects and calculate the risk that project will be behind schedule or over budget, as well as recommend people who are the best fit for the project based on skills and availability. NetSuite itself uses the solution for this purpose.
"Now our NetSuite customer success organization uses SuiteProjects Pro to schedule thousands of consultants doing 15,000 projects a year and our managers are getting better visibility into hiring, skillsets and availability," said Goldberg.
The inspiration for the product came from looking at NetSuite's own customers and observing that many product-centered businesses are now offering services and many service-centered businesses are now offering products, Goldberg said in an interview. It was easy to see that, rather than make customers jump from one product to the other, it was better to build a comprehensive solution.
This involves more than just welding together NetSuite's product and service solutions into a single package. Goldberg said development needed more of a coordinated approach to make sure the different components communicated and worked together. This way, for example, people can see the different elements working together as they observe things like how much they spend in each area and how those expenses relate to each other.
"I think it's unique that NetSuite has such a sophisticated manufacturing capability, project management capability and subscription management capability, all in one system," Goldberg told Accounting Today. "That itself is unusual. A lot of the time, these elements exist in different systems. But it's more than just having them all. We have to make sure they all tie together, that each component of the system is cognizant of the other components in the system. That is how you get the real benefit of the suite, when the pieces talk to each other. So it's a combination of having that functionality, but also having it be truly pre-integrated."
New connector, enhanced products
Goldberg also announced that, by popular demand, NetSuite has released a way to connect its software with Microsoft Outlook. The connector automatically syncs with Outlook through a real-time data flow between Outlook Mail, Calendar and NetSuite, which can reduce the need for manual data entry. "[It will] eliminate those data silos, speed up processes and improve the experience and productivity of all users," he said during his keynote address.
He also announced several product enhancements:
- NetSuite SuiteProcurement has now been embedded into NetSuite Advanced Procurement, which allows buyers to directly access supplier catalogs, select items and instantly generate purchase orders in NetSuite, helping to reduce manual entry and decrease the likelihood of delays.
- NetSuite SuiteBilling, used to tailor subscription management processes to the needs of a business, now enables users to invoice and allocate revenue for associated services, projects and hardware prior to activating the subscription service. Users can also configure the bill date of the service automatically using a preference or manually on the subscription line.
- Finally, NetSuite announced it has now integrated with the Digital Business Network Alliance, a nonprofit backed by the Federal Reserve that serves as the legal entity overseeing the
U.S. Open Exchange Framework , which, in March 2024, announced the firstsuccessful electronic invoice transmission over the U.S. network. The integration means that NetSuite has become one of the first ERP systems to comply with the organization's standards for e-invoicing. Users can utilize the network to facilitate orders, invoices, payments and communications between buyers and sellers electronically. While e-invoicing isn't yet mandatory in the U.S., businesses are looking at how they can ensure compliance when the time comes. Goldberg said during his presentation it will dramatically lower invoicing costs for businesses.
