This month, record numbers descended on San Jose for NetSuite’s Annual SuiteWorld Conference. The final tally was over 8,000 registrants
and included customers, channel partners and employees that came to hear firsthand the major new product releases, take a deep dive into advanced functionality and hear from businesses on their transformational journey since implementing the #1 in Cloud ERP.
1. Make Bold Happen
This year’s conference theme ‘Make Bold Happen’, took centre stage as soon as attendees arrived at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center and it continued to be highly visible throughout the keynote and breakout presentations.
NetSuite’s vision was bold… The #1 in Cloud ERP. A position the company has successfully secured in the competitive global ERP market.
And why not? NetSuite is the enabling platform for businesses serious about growth and transformation. The platform has been built in such a way that it provides the foundations for scalable and profitable business growth while at the same time being flexible enough for businesses, no matter what size, to compete in a global and fast moving business environment.
The technology has enterprise class business scale. There are trillions of business records and petabytes of data going through the system, enabling 300m+ email messages to be sent per year, $10 billion+ in revenue transacted and facilitating 60m+ packages shipped per year. All of this is made possible because the cloud infrastructure has been built to handle this level of performance, maximize security, availability and data management.
NetSuite is the #1 in Cloud ERP with over 30,000 customers globally.
Bold doesn’t follow. NetSuite is leading the pack.
2. Business Model Innovation
Businesses are driving rapid growth through business model innovation. Constantly asking “why?” and challenging the status quo. By looking at the ways of working and challenging this, businesses are streamlining and automating processes, end-to-end.
Rather than relying on people doing manual tasks, technology is doing the heavy lifting, freeing staff up to focus on creating value – in business development, product innovation and delivering outstanding customer experiences.
With the right systems in place businesses can react quickly to changes and take advantage of emerging opportunities. Comprehensive financial reporting and analysis and real-time dashboards are creating actionable insights.
Companies are moving away from disparate systems, with poor inventory accuracy, a lack of traceability, labour intensive processes that are error prone, inefficiencies and poor utilization. As volumes (of orders and transactions) continue to scale, operations become more complex and costs can spiral upwards unless these areas are addressed.
Margin pressure with rising costs continue to put increasing pressure on businesses. NetSuite deployments are allowing businesses to get their house in order. Manual tasks that can be automated are being removed and inefficient processes fixed. The result is streamlined operations that are flexible and scalable.
NetSuite Cloud ERP is a solution that enables businesses to manage invoices, orders, customers, vendors, partners and employees. It is a platform that supports the agility a modern company needs. From order capture, order management, supply, bill and support, NetSuite is true end-to-end. Using NetSuite companies can source, make, move, sell and ship.
Technology plays a vital part in being able to deliver outstanding and unified customer experiences across all channels from sales rep, web, call centre, in-store, mobile and POS.
3. Complete Customer Engagement
There are plenty of horror stories around ERP implementations that spiral out of control in terms of both time to deploy and costs vs budget – with some never going live at all.
A true partnership approach is key to ensuring what is sold is delivered and what is delivered is what was sold. When silos in the delivery model are removed, there is an increase in customer satisfaction and the likelihood of delivering a successful project on-time and on-budget drastically improves.
A business should have one voice. From sales, to delivery and through to support. This should extend when multiple solution providers are working to deliver a total solution. Following this approach, the implementation will be delivered with increased efficiency and the customer’s ROI will be accelerated.
Clear expectations using proven methodologies and repeatable processes that are based on previous customer success will keep the implementation moving through each phase in a structured and coordinated fashion.
NetSuite and the expanded eco-system of skilled partners are getting specific. With a specialized focus on verticals and gaining a deep understanding of the unique requirements and business processes needed for these verticals. Targeted solutions are then built to solve specific business needs. Channel partners are increasingly playing an important role by delivering deep business expertise in their chosen verticals, creating third-party applications built to work seamlessly with NetSuite to solve specific needs and expanding geographic coverage.
Through engagement that is unified across all phases, customers have a clear roadmap of how they will interact in the process from sales through to delivery and support.
The end result: More efficient, faster implementations and delighted customers
But the engagement shouldn’t stop at “Go Live”. A successful Cloud ERP implementation should be a continued journey and not a one-off investment. Businesses should approach an ERP implementation with a focus on getting business ready. Ensuring core functionality is set up and data migration completed is fundamental to building the foundations for long-term success.
Once users of the software are using the core functionality, a plan should be put in place to add value from advanced functionality and further customisations.
4. Helping Small Companies Act Big…
NetSuite has delivered a platform that empowers growth and agility, with industry specific functionality built in.
Leading practices and industry expertise have been gathered from thousands of successful (and I am sure some key learnings from a few unsuccessful) implementations. These key industry insights and knowhow have been used to develop the framework to get businesses experiencing the true power of the software, tailored to their needs, in record time.
A strong vertical focus has meant getting really clear on how these businesses operate, their ways of working, what their challenges are and where the opportunities lie for transformation. Creating repeatable and scalable frameworks to minimise the disruption to migrate to NetSuite and get up and running quicker, realising value from Go Live and keeping their focus on their core business.
Take wholesale distribution for example, NetSuite’s largest customer segment. NetSuite has become a recognised force in this industry based on proven and repeatable success. The key priorities in 2016 for distributors are:
- Revenue growth
- Increasing profitability
- Customer retention
By understanding this and focussing on addressing each of these areas with a successful ERP implementation each project is set up for success.
Flexible to start small and scalable to grow big, NetSuite is the first and last business system a business will ever need.
5. Competitive Advantage: It’s all in the people
Technology may be the enabler but it’s people that are creating businesses that are leading the pack. Engaged teams doing meaningful work that is aligned to the organisation’s purpose are powering the way forward. When a business clearly understands its ‘Why’ everyone can be focussed on achieving this. And the good news for growing businesses is it is not just monetary incentives that create a high performing culture.
There are six fundamentals of building a differentiated competitive advantage: compensation, work environment, gratitude, authenticity, engagement, innovation and collaboration.
When team members know their purpose, it is the start of the journey to getting there –
A great culture provides the context for people to deliver their best work. Over the past 18 months building an awesome culture at JCurve Solutions has unlocked our potential. Our culture is values-led and aligned to our vision of empowering growth – for our customers, our people and our company. We have access to a world-class technology platform in NetSuite but our competitive advantage is in our team’s approach to help our customers get the most out of the technology, innovate their business models and grow their businesses.
6. Champions run the #1 cloud ERP:
One of the fast growing movers and shakers that has been disrupting the telecommunications market is tech start up, “Snapchat”. Snapchat has managed its explosive growth running on NetSuite. Other innovative customer successes that were showcased at SuiteWorld included Hyperloop, Daqri, Saddleback and Alton Lane.
More companies in the US go to IPO on NetSuite than any other financial management system. It’s easy to understand why when companies can start small but scale quickly – and even go global with multi-entity set up delivering global financial control, including easy management of multi-currency and intercompany transactions. With scalable enterprise grade functionality, a business with bold plans can be confident that they won’t outgrow NetSuite.
After an inspiring conference networking with the wider NetSuite community, we are excited about helping more forward-thinking and innovative Australian and New Zealand businesses serious about growth to get started on their NetSuite journey using JCurve.
Keynote Videos: Learn more about how NetSuite continues to deliver the best cloud business management software to customers like you around the world, watch the SuiteWorld 2016 executive keynotes.
With over 160 breakout sessions offering inspired thought leadership content, here are the top six themes everyone was talking about over these action-packed three days.
