Oracle NetSuite’s SuiteConnect event has reached London, with the announcement that the platform developments teased in the US last month are now available to UK customers.
Incoming are NetSuite Text Enhance, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Analytics Warehouse Multi-Instance Connecter, Electronic Invoicing and Field Service Management.
Additionally, NetSuite has brought a flexible licensing model to the region, set to offer users access to task-specific areas of NetSuite without requiring a full license, such as warehousing roles. It’s hoped the initiative will reduce costs for users, though NetSuite could not share the expected savings just yet.
Opening the event’s keynote, NetSuite’s VP EMEA, Nicky Tozer, expressed that companies are still looking at “doing more with less” and doubled down on the necessity for expanding companies to utilize NetSuite technology to achieve this: “As you grow more, you need to tap into more of the Suite”.
Evan Goldberg, NetSuite executive VP, followed, adding that the ‘doing more with less’ adage is not just about reducing expenses, but about “finding engines for profitable growth across people technology and processes and efficiently”, noting “again and again, our most successful customers ‘Suite up’”.
Customers including Bloom and Wild and Rixo joined Goldberg and Tozer on stage, both citing the scalability benefits of NetSuite in their respective missions to push their business growth internationally. Bloom and Wild, co-founder and CEO, Aron Gelbard shared the importance of the technology backing, specifically that having “the infrastructure in place to be able to visualize and analyze metrics […] meant the expansion into countries is much simpler”.
“Having real clarity of purpose about what we were trying to do, really accurate real-time reporting on how we were doing day-in-day-out were really critical foundations to be able to successfully achieve that,” said Gelbard.
What’s new for UK customers?
Getting into the new offerings, NetSuite Electronic Invoicing looks to help UK businesses send and receive invoices in a structured data format to better align with tax authority standards.
Next up, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse Multi-Instance Connector is set to help UK and Ireland businesses with multiple NetSuite instances expand and combine insights across their entire portfolio into a single environment, for reduced costs and enhanced decision-making. Meanwhile, NetSuite Field Service Management looks to simplify field service scheduling and dispatch, automating inventory and customer asset management to build customer satisfaction and loyalty.
One UK customer, PSV Glass and Glazing, cited the FSM system as increasing efficiency by 40 percent for the firm, enabled by ensuring staff can have the correct inventory and be on location at the right place and time.
NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is set to help users connect data across their planning, budgeting, forecasting, account reconciliation, financial close, and reporting processes. This element of the platform aims to enhance insights and decision-making, but also will assist in readying users’ stacks for more emerging data-driven technologies, such as AI instances.
GenAI with Text Enhance
The biggest buzz came around the announcement of new generative AI tools, offered at no additional cost to users, and as Brian Chess, SVP technology and AI at NetSuite explained, “built in, not bolted on” to the NetSuite platform, with an “AI everywhere” outlook.
NetSuite Text Enhance will now assist UK users in the authoring of contextual and personalized content across tasks throughout businesses, including finance and accounting, HR, supply chain and operations, sales and marketing and customer support departments.
With English speakers as the home territory, NetSuite is looking to expand this to a further 28 languages in the future.
Thoughtfully, NetSuite offered up some real-life use case suggestions by industry:
Finance and accounting: the notation of journal entries, sales, purchase and other accounting transactions, customer and vendor communications and personalized collection letters.
Supply chain and operations: item descriptions, vendor engagement letters, procurement orders, warehouse management support tickets, shipment summaries, supply chain snapshots, project tasks and task assignments.
Manufacturing: critical data entry and tracking activities including work orders and creating consistent definitions for manufacturing cost templates to avoid confusion and errors when assigning them to the manufacturing operation.
Sales and marketing: email content for marketing campaigns, lead-generation communications, sales quotes and sales events summaries.
Human resources: job descriptions and requisitions, employee goals and summaries of employee performance based on feedback gathered from peers, managers and progress against goals throughout the year.
Customer support: online comment responses and summarizing customer events and issue records including root cause and resolution.
A ‘Suite deal’?
Hearing from numerous NetSuite leaders today, there’s no doubt that the message to users from the vendor is that they should be going ‘all-in’ with NetSuite, with Goldberg stating the offerings were surely “Suite deals” for customers.
With plenty of positives to take away from the London announcements – accessible, no cost uplift AI and flexible licenses included – this is a vendor doing all it can to keep its offering sweet, and its users (Net)Suite.
