Official NetSuite Blog - Cloud NetSuite

Cloud Software Sparks Award-Winning Innovation at Solio, Not Just Savings

For many, turning to cloud software to run their business applications is an economical, agile way to free up resources and potentially get a better handle on operations.

For Better Energy Systems Inc., it helped save the business while also bringing affordable, sustainable energy to people in rural Kenya.

It recently earned Better Energy Systems and its CEO Andy Howe the Individual Achievement-Turnaround Award as part of the 2013 ML100 Awards. The ML100 Awards are known as the most prestigious awards program honoring manufacturing companies that have transformed themselves through the use of information technology. Past ML100 honorees include 3M, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Eaton, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, L'Oreal USA, Motorola, Nalco, and Raytheon.

The Oakland, CA-based company manufactures Solio energy products, which range from handheld solar chargers for smartphones and tablets to water purifiers to home power systems for emerging markets. Yet, when Howe took over the company as CEO several years ago, he was immediately confronted with a cash shortfall and an urgent need to catch up with R&D, an area where Solio had fallen behind. Howe’s immediate reaction was to focus at once on innovation.

Howe turned to NetSuite’s cloud software to free staff from having to focus on managing servers and software. In turn, NetSuite runs the company’s order to cash, produce to pay, inventory management, eCommerce and other ERP processes, finding efficiencies over the old system. But NetSuite did more than just find efficiencies, it powered innovation.

Solio analyzed customer support cases in NetSuite and found that most support requests were about which tip or connector they needed to connect their Solio charger to a specific camera, phone or other device. Customers were confused and responding took away from Solio core growth and innovation activities

Engineers at the company designed a universal connector that works with both Apple and CTIA-standards based USB-powered devices, providing an all-in-one product that is easy to use. The new product ultimately lowered manufacturing and operating costs while bringing down costs to consumers, boosting customer satisfaction and improving margins.

NetSuite also allowed Solio to focus on another part of its business, bringing Solio products to rural Kenya. Solio has pioneered an innovative “solar as a service” social enterprise in Kenya that enables people to lease a solar appliance in a business model similar to how US consumers do with cable TV equipment. Through the program, Solio products are providing affordable and sustainable energy to households in rural areas with no access to an electrical grid, which may earn just $10 a week and spend half of that on single-use batteries and kerosene to power their home. Run as a business partnership between Solio and local entrepreneurs in Kenya, the program pursues the goal of bringing clean, renewable energy to populations at the base of the economic pyramid.

It’s an example of a NetSuite customer using the solution in innovative and creative ways and it’s a case of a company using cloud software to do more than save on IT costs, it’s transforming the business and maybe, in a small way, the world.

-Andrew Sevillia, Director, Global Customer Marketing References

Five Keys to Understanding the Next Wave in Business Process Outsourcing

The next wave in business process outsourcing (BPO) is coming, driven by the numerous advantages of the public cloud, and global enterprise needs to be prepared for it. Finance and accounting processes will be the next target of global systems integrators (GSIs), but this market will develop very differently than previous BPO arrangements. The lessons enterprises learned over the last couple of decades of BPO engagements will significantly shift the power dynamic between GSIs and clients, because the public cloud levels the playing field and eliminates the "throw it over the wall" and management-by-SLA approach which characterized BPO for so many years.

Here's what you should know about the coming opportunities in finance and accounting BPO:

1. The days of BPO as strictly a labor arbitrage game are over. Enterprises got the cost reductions they were promised, but lost too much control of the business processes and never received any additional business value. Costs were contained, but the relationship between enterprise and GSI soured, so there were no long-term benefits apart from the costs.

2. Enterprises will no longer face the worst of both worlds when it comes to infrastructure. Old-school BPO arrangements turned the processes over to the GSI, but the enterprise remained on the hook, directly or indirectly, to maintain the infrastructure and manage upgrades and other software tasks. Even when GSIs started rolling infrastructure-as-a-service into their agreements, the enterprise still lost out, because the outsourced process now became even more opaque.

3. The next wave of BPO activity will be built around partnerships and transparency. The old contracts were built around client/vendor engagements, not partnerships. As a result, the only real tool most enterprises had to control in the GSI was system-wide service level agreements. SLAs are blunt instruments, and don't provide enterprises with the level of visibility and control they need to ensure that their brand is being protected.

4. The public cloud will give enterprise the visibility they have wanted for so long. Because everyone has access to the same data and workflow, the enterprise is no longer in the dark as to how the GSI is achieving its contracted goals. Moreover, business leaders can collaborate on even terms with the GSI to revise and improve business value after the efficiencies are gained.

5. The standard contract length in the public cloud is significantly shorter than in the traditional BPO world. GSIs will be forced to provide more elasticity to the enterprise and make it possible to shrink or grow the relationship based on the changing business climate, rather than forcing a five- or 10-year lock-in at the start of the agreement.

The next wave in BPO is participatory, transparent, and flexible. And it will happen in the public cloud.

-Charles Simmons, Sr. Strategic Alliance Director - BPO/BPaaS at NetSuite

Seven Reasons Two-Tier ERP Fits Growing Enterprises

Whether your business is growing organically or through acquisition, each time a new business unit joins a typical enterprise it creates new headaches for the financial team. Either work will grind to a halt as a lengthy and costly extension of the enterprise ERP system is created for the new unit, or the finance team will need to develop a new, ad hoc system to pass financial data back and forth with the new entity should it choose to run its own accounting software. Both approaches are costly and wasteful choices for a growing enterprise.

Two-tier ERP takes the cost and fuss out of healthy growth by providing divisions and international operations with a nimble, extensible ERP solution in the cloud. Pre-built connectors between the cloud ERP tier and the corporate finance system ensure transparency and visibility, and protect the investment already made in the head office's on-premise ERP. There are seven good reasons why two-tier ERP is the best fit for today's growing enterprise:

1. The whole purpose of adding a new division, acquisition or regional office is to conduct more business. Two-tier ERP makes new business units operational and ready to perform much more quickly than the build out of a conventional, on-premise ERP system.

2. Standardizing divisions, subsidiaries and regional operations on a single solution with global consolidation and rollup capabilities provides the security of a strategic technology partner. More importantly for your business goals, there will be no need to worry about how business data will be reconciled and integrated with the corporate financial systems—the rollup processes will be consistent and easily repeatable every time a new unit is added to the enterprise roster.

3. A standard two-tier ERP solution reduces the complexity of training and supporting users worldwide. Instead of dealing with the peculiarities of a dozen different accounting programs worldwide, the organization can focus on mastering and supporting one powerful financial application in all markets and divisions.

4. Solutions designed for two-tier ERP architectures automate many of the monthly, quarterly and annual reconciliation steps usually associated with a diverse enterprise. This improves financial visibility for both executives and investors, and improves forecast quality.

5. Platforms designed for two-tier ERP make localization easy, with support for dozens of languages, automatic reconciliation of time zones around the world and virtually every global currency. The best come with integrated taxation and regulatory support for a wide variety of countries and territories, further easing your global expansion ambitions. 

6. The "hub-and-spoke" design of two-tier ERP allows enterprises to gain immediate benefits from modern cloud solutions in their subsidiaries, acquisitions and regional operations without causing wrenching disruptions in the corporate finance office.

7. Two-tier ERP solutions from cloud providers are operational expenditures, not capital expenditures. This makes it easier to locate funding and gain consensus for the project.

We have prepared a free Two-Tier Strategy Kit, with insights from Forrester Research and Constellation Research, to help controllers and executives understand the comprehensive benefits of the multi-subsidiary, multicurrency NetSuite OneWorld solution. It truly is the "best of both worlds"—and certainly beats the alternative.

-Kishore Bhamidipati, Director, Product Marketing at NetSuite

 

Time to Get Your Multi-Channel Strategy Right

With the rise of online shopping, pressure on traditional retailers to compete with cheaper prices and greater variety available online provides both risk and opportunity. This continues to be heightened by the strong Australian dollar, which increases consumers’ purchasing power on overseas sites.

An estimated $6 billion of sales from Australia in 2011 were purchases on overseas websites, which equates to around 40 percent of overall online sales, according to Frost & Sullivan. It is becoming increasingly obvious that if many traditional retailers don’t start consolidating their physical store presence and migrating some sales to the online channel, they are both ignoring a very large opportunity and adding additional pressure to stores.

Surprisingly, Frost & Sullivan’s research also found that only around 50 percent of Australian retailers in 2011 offered online sales capabilities, with the proportion of sales via the Internet still fairly low. Many other retailers use their websites only for marketing and customer support. This just goes to show that many retailers are still missing out on market opportunities from the booming online retail sector in Australia.

The slow adoption of online retailing by large department stores and retail chains in Australia is a key reason for the lag in local ecommerce activity overall. This is showing signs of changing, however, as many are being forced to walk a new path. Leading Australian retailer David Jones, for example, is one of the most high profile recent cases, launching a new and improved web storefront last fall after a succession of poor earnings reports.

Despite a shift in focus, however, it became clear during the failed “Click Frenzy” online sales event in Australia late last year just how unprepared retailers are to cope with online channels, despite the hunger for it from Australian consumers. The heavily marketed Click Frenzy sale involving over 200 Australian retailers failed to perform at launch time because the site couldn’t handle two million hopeful shoppers looking for a bargain. Also unprepared were a number of major participating retailers, including David Jones and Myer, whose websites crashed under the high traffic volumes as well.

The lesson learned is that the sheer number of consumers wanting to find a bargain online should be a wake-up call to Australian retailers to take notice and get the right multi-channel strategy in place now—otherwise they will continue to lose out to overseas online sites. The major challenge for retailers is the increasing range of digital channels that customers use to access the Internet. This fragmentation creates a number of hurdles, particularly when it comes to implementing a common customer experience across all channels.

Ecommerce is not a standalone system—customers want stock availability, discount tiers, payment options and specifications, and retailers need to offer these in real time from the back end, along with invoicing, margins, analytics, etc.

Retailers need a single system with a built-in webstore that adapts to any consumer- facing device in real time, links online systems to central business systems, from ERP and CRM to POS, and addresses Internet latency and reliability issues across all channels. For many retailers though, the complexity and cost of running a single transactional system optimised across all digital channels and integrated into internal business systems is overwhelming.

This is where cloud computing really opens doors, by unifying separate retail channels to provide a single view of the customer, sales and revenue. Cloud computing changes the game by offering the opportunity for a lower cost and much lower risk rollout of the ecommerce software needed to support multi-channel retailing, which is particularly attractive for smaller businesses with limited resources. 

The cloud can give you real-time visibility into your entire retail operation, accessibility from anywhere at any time, as well as a single view of a customer across all channels. You can also ensure that your order, inventory and financial information are always up to date. Its infinitely scalable nature can give you the confidence that your site will stay open no matter how many customers cross its digital threshold.

For further information about NetSuite for Retail visit - http://www.netsuite.com.au/portal/au/industries/retail/main.shtml

-Mark Troselj, Managing Director of Asia Pacific for NetSuite

Five Ways On-Premise ERP Fails Growing Enterprises

The cloud is the best way forward for businesses of all sizes, but growing enterprises are particularly handcuffed by the on-premise model of the past. By locking in to a single vendor's costly, infrastructure-heavy products, enterprises actually harm their own interests. Extending the typical "big iron" corporate ERP system to a new subsidiary or operating region is a costly and cumbersome process that can slow a business to a crawl, just when it’s looking for speed. Here are the five top reasons on-premise ERP is failing to serve the interests of growing enterprises.

1. The overhead and complexity of many "big iron" ERP systems are greater than many small and growing business units can take on or need to. Instead of providing tools to help these new operations grow, the on-premise system can actually stifle creativity, flexibility and speed.

2. Expanding an on-premise system to new territories and subsidiaries almost always means investment in servers and networking hardware, which can represent additional capital expense and increase the burden on IT.

3. Expanding on-premise ERP requires careful coordination with enterprise IT. In fact, expansion can be as costly and disruptive as a new implementation. But IT organizations are already so resource-constrained that in some large companies the wait for serious projects is as long as three years—not counting time needed to customize the solution. These holdups inhibit growth and innovation, and force business leaders to either defer their ambitions or expand the IT roster at significant costs.

4. Organizations that try to pass along the true costs of extending their on-premise ERP to newer divisions and regions sometimes actually steer those units towards underpowered, boutique software packages. Rather than take the hit on their own bottom line, these smaller entities will instead buy off-the-shelf software that supports their short-term goals. (IT delays, as mentioned above, can also drive a business unit to select an easy-to-install, underpowered boutique product.) But these programs are rarely able to interface with corporate ERP. That leaves the organization with no real-time visibility between headquarters and the division, and when the new unit outgrows the smaller system, a costly and time-consuming upgrade will be necessary.

5. Once an on-premise system is installed organizations will ultimately be confronted with an upgrade. Already expensive, time consuming and disruptive to the business, upgrading on-premise systems only gets more complicated if it’s spread across businesses and locations. Businesses can wind up with upgrades in some locations, older versions in others.

Global companies have experienced business pains using multiple, disparate on-premise systems that lack integration and provide little visibility into their business. Plagued by manual processes, bottlenecks, version control, an inability to consolidate global financials, and slow financial reporting, companies are limited in their business efficiency and growth potential. In addition, the high up-front costs and long implementation times for on-premise systems hinder growth even further. Version lock, costly upgrades and maintenance are the burdens companies have to deal with.

Fortunately, enterprise companies don't need to compromise on capabilities when consolidating an acquired business or expanding to a new continent. Two-tier ERP strategy preserves the investment in corporate ERP capabilities while providing a powerful, faster and less expensive alternative for growth units. Want to see how two-tier ERP can serve your interests and support your vision?

Visit http://www.netsuite.com/portal/landing/two-tier.shtml

-Kishore Bhamidipati, Director, Product Marketing at NetSuite

NetSuite in the Twittersphere: Acquisitions, Media Coverage, and Toolkits

NetSuite has an active and engaged community of followers, customers and fans on Twitter. Today we’re highlighting some of the feedback, comments and shout outs we saw in the last quarter. To keep up to date with the NetSuite Twitter community, be sure to follow us @NetSuite.

NetSuite’s acquisition of Retail Anywhere got some positive reaction at the National Retail Federation 2013 Conference.

Netsuite's purchase of Retail Anywhere shows tech vendors beginning to catch up with the omnichannel aspirations of retailers. #nrf13

— Geoffrey Barraclough (@GeoffreyB) January 14, 2013

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson’s appearance on Bloomberg West and his thoughts on enterprise software found some fans.

The rise of the enterprise with @netsuite's @zachnelson and @boxhq's @levie on a special @bloombergwest

— Emily Chang (@emilychangtv) January 16, 2013

The volunteer work of NetSuite employees and its commitment to service grabbed the attention of SmartRecruiters.

Congrats @netsuite you've been named among the elite of Facebook Employer Branding for highlighting social good! bit.ly/WWg1n9

— SmartRecruiters (@SmartRecruiters) January 25, 2013

The combination of NetSuite, OzLink and SPS Commerce was a winning formula for Lionel NASCAR Collectibles.

"@netsuite, @ozedge and SPS Commerce are fundamental to our operation." -R.Gemereth VP of IT @lionelnascar #TF13 #TFNY bit.ly/WblDg3

— SPS Commerce (@SPS_Commerce) January 28, 2013

The new NetSuite toolkit also found some fans.

Taking my first look at the new @netsuite #phpToolkit. Way slick, and a huge improvement over previous versions.

— Dave Weiss (@DaveWeissDotNet) January 25, 2013

Some Practice Fusion folks were happy to be part of the NetSuite billboard.

Billboard love! @practicefusion @netsuite #NetSuite twitter.com/PF_Kev/status/…

— Kevin (@PF_Kev) January 31, 2013

Seven Surprises of Technical SuiteTraining

SuiteTraining offers technical training courses on some of the most powerful capabilities of the NetSuite SuiteCloud platform, including SuiteScript Application Development, SuiteTalk Web Services, and SuiteFlow Workflow Engine. If you don't think your organization can benefit from technical training, here are seven facts about our programs which might surprise you:

1. We understand that there isn't much value in technical training unless developers have an opportunity to get their feet wet and work in the system. Our technical courses are not bland lectures about APIs and function calls. In fact, about half of the course time is set aside for hands-on exercises so you can learn by doing.

2. You don't have to be a programmer to understand SuiteFlow. All you need is a good grasp of the rules and logic of your own business processes. That's why our SuiteFlow: Workflow Fundamentals course has such a diverse audience and typically includes a number of business and operational professionals, not just programmers. Mapping the rules and requirements of your business processes is what SuiteFlow is all about. If you understand the approval process that your purchase orders need to follow, then you can learn how to use SuiteFlow's visual interface to create the NetSuite logic to automate your business processes.

3. Many of our best SuiteFlow developers got their start with Excel macros. That kind of power user is the perfect candidate for the SuiteFlow: Workflow Fundamentals course.

4. Our technical courses offer insight to help you refine your understanding outside of the classroom. Optional, "take- home" exercises give you step-by-step instructions so you can practice what you learned while providing solutions that you can apply in your production accounts.

5. Some developers have turned their nose up at SuiteFlow because it's a visual interface and isn't pure code. However, while SuiteScript looks more powerful, it's not always the best tool for the job. Approval processing is a lot more complicated in SuiteScript than it is in SuiteFlow. That's why we recommend that even veteran developers take the SuiteFlow: Advanced Workflows course before racing off to write scripts for everything they want to accomplish.

6. Although SuiteScript is based on JavaScript, you don't need to be a JavaScript whiz or a seasoned Web developer to start taking advantage of SuiteScript. Just about any programming background helps set the table for SuiteScript concepts, and many of our graduates have no Web programming experience before they take the SuiteScript: Enhance Productivity through Automation course.

7. We're serious about ensuring that our graduates are prepared to be productive as soon as they finish a technical course. That's why our SuiteScript and SuiteTalk courses are five days long. That may seem like a big commitment, but we structure the classes so that by the time they wrap up on Friday, you're ready to come in to work the following Monday and make exciting things happen on the SuiteCloud platform.

To learn more about our technical courses, please visit the SuiteTraining course catalog. You can also work with our Education Advisor to create a comprehensive, custom learning plan. Sign up for a free Training Needs Assessment to help you achieve your education goals.

-Bruce Tanenholtz, Program Manager: Technical Curriculum

Philz Coffee, Serving Customers via the Cloud – One Cup at a Time

It seems like every time I turn around there’s a hot new coffee shop serving the best beans and the best coffee in town. For some it’s about cost, for some it’s about the beans, and for others it’s about the freshness, but for Philz Coffee the story is different. If you don’t know Philz, it had its start in the Mission District of San Francisco and since 2003 has been taking a “customer-centric” approach to coffee, one cup at a time.

Philz is named after Phil Jaber, who started working on the perfect cup of coffee almost 25 years ago. Phil began his coffee career experimenting and creating great-tasting coffee blends and finally decided to start selling his coffee at the corner grocery at Folsom and 24^th in 2003, but that was just the start. After perfecting his blends, Phil wanted to make sure each cup was made in a way that brought out all the flavors of the coffee and thus the Philz Way of coffee making was born. Using a custom designed coffee station, Philz is all about creating a perfect cup of coffee, one cup at a time.

Phil, together with his son Jacob, didn’t want to stop there. They wanted to bring their particular approach to coffee to the masses. And this was about more than just a single retail location. Jacob knew that if Philz really wanted to scale, they needed to have a technology foundation that would seamlessly support their growth. So in 2010, Philz adopted NetSuite. After a recommendation from a friend and an evaluation of NetSuite, Philz made the move from QuickBooks to cloud-based NetSuite. For Philz, it was a great fit, it matched the company’s current needs, but its all-in-one capabilities provided the foundation for future growth.

Philz has retail, wholesale and online parts to its business and NetSuite provides the technology backbone for all of these elements. Additionally, Philz uses NetSuite for its manufacturing processes, trusting NetSuite and the cloud to manage the secret blends that Phil has taken years to perfect. Since adopting NetSuite, Philz has grown over 400%. Philz now has over 13 retail stores, and five more expected to launch before 2014 Philz also supplies coffee to FaceBook, Google, Twitter and Virgin America. Customers can also order directly from Philz Coffee for their favorite blends.

Philz is just starting its journey to provide coffee around the world, similarly NetSuite is on a similar journey to provide the Fortune 5 Million company an application to run their entire business. And just like Philz, who serves its coffee one cup at a time, so is the approach at NetSuite, bringing businesses to the cloud, one customer at a time.

-Ranga Bodla, Industry Marketing, NetSuite

Distribution is the Word of the Day for SuiteWorld 2013

SuiteWorld 2013 is fast approaching and it should be bigger and better than ever. For this year’s NetSuite’s User Conference, we want to make Distribution the word of the day. As one of the oldest verticals at NetSuite, Wholesale Distribution is also one of the largest verticals and our team is excited to share NetSuite’s latest distribution capabilities. We’ve expanded our strategic partners and enhanced existing functionality like Demand Planning.

One of the things we are most excited about at SuiteWorld, is the dedicated track for Wholesale Distribution. This track will be filled with action-packed sessions featuring presenters from many areas across NetSuite including: pre-sales, product management, technical services and professional services.

But wait, that’s not all… we will also have guest speakers, customers and partners presenting.  We will have sessions spanning the latest in shipping to more advanced topics like SuiteFlow and Scripting. We’ll also cover our roadmap and where we are going with our distribution solution. Add in our SuiteGurus, Product Roundtables and the opportunity for one-on-ones with our distribution team and there will be plenty of chances for you to learn from your peers and domain experts the value-add strategies to enhance your distribution business.

Reserve your spot for SuiteWorld today to stay ahead of the  curve. Meanwhile, here’s a look at some of the SuiteWorld sessions for wholesale distribution.

• Your 1st Year Running NetSuite as a Wholesale Distributor: Learn what you should be thinking about to drive usage and where you should go next.
• Collaboration Ideas for a Wholesale Distributor Using NetSuite: Learn about how you can use NetSuite to better collaborate using standard NetSuite tools for smoother cross-departmental processes, vendor communication, customer engagement, and partner involvement. 
• Wholesale Distribution Roadmap & Vision: Find out NetSuite’s feature priorities for wholesaler distributors and how feedback from users drives the development process.
• Optimizing and Leveraging Demand Planning: Get an in-depth look into NetSuite’s Demand Planning and how to best use it.
• What Trends are NetSuite Wholesale Distribution Companies Following?: Learn what trends are keeping Wholesale Distribution companies up at night and what they are doing to address them.
• Extending NetSuite by Leveraging the NetSuite Partner Ecosystem: Learn about the most popular wholesale distribution solutions across the NetSuite ecosystem, ranging from demand planning to after-sales service.
• Inventory Management in NetSuite: Improved Inventory Intelligence: Learn how NetSuite customers are managing their inventory today and where they want to go. Learn about helpful tools and processes to guide you through inventory management decisions. Learn best practices for inventory reduction, increased turns, and intelligent inventory planning.
• How Wholesale Distribution Companies Are Leveraging SuiteFlow: Learn about the steps of how to build your first workflow and gain a better understanding of how this amazing tool can automate user actions and processes within the NetSuite application.

• Saved Searches, Reporting and Analytics for Wholesale Distribution Companies: Learn the latest analytical data types as they pertain to procuring, managing and selling products within the NetSuite application.

• Top 5 B2B Ecommerce Strategies:  Learn how to leverage advanced ecommerce
  features of NetSuite for the B2B webstore.  We’ll show you how to use these tools to improve margins, enhance customer satisfaction, differentiate your online presence, and reach customers in multiple web venues.

• Scripting and Customization for Wholesale Distribution Companies: Scripting and customization is often a key part of success for wholesale distribution companies. The focus of the content will be around scripted automation that saves time and money across an organization, allowing departments to better streamline processes and day-to-day work.

If you haven’t registered yet, we’d love for you and your teams to join us at SuiteWorld. It promises to be a great event, particularly for distributors. If you’d like to meet with me or members of the extended WD team at SuiteWorld, please work with your sales rep to arrange an appointment.

-Ranga Bodla, Industry Marketing, NetSuite

Every Day Is World Water Day for NetSuite.org Grantees

The statistics are sobering. More than 780 million people around the world lack access to clean water and 2.5 billion live without adequate sanitation, according to the United Nations. More than 3.4 million die each year from water-related diseases—and the global water crisis is only worsening.

Population growth and migration to urban areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America are further straining water resources, prompting bleak forecasts on water availability in the developing world over the next several decades. The annual U.N.-sponsored World Water Day on Friday, March 22, is designed to focus attention on the importance of fresh water and sustainable management of water resources.

Two non-profit organizations running NetSuite to manage their operations are making a difference in alleviating the water crisis. Both are grantees of the NetSuite.org donation program for charities and social enterprises. Healing Waters International and Water For People have been better able to focus on their core missions since moving from disparate on-premise applications to the NetSuite cloud.

Healing Waters International

Healing Waters International, based in Golden, Colo., supplies water treatment and filtration systems in communities in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Guatemala and Mexico, with expansion planned in the African nations of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Swaziland. Working with local leaders and faith-based organizations, Healing Waters also provides health and hygiene training and instruction on treatment system usage and maintenance to the communities.

“One of the key aspects of our model is we want to empower the community to take ownership of the treatment system,” said John Correa, Healing Waters CFO.

Upgrading from QuickBooks in 2007, Healing Waters has improved its efficiency, productivity and focus on its mission by using NetSuite for financials and reporting, inventory management, time and expense reporting, and payroll. The NetSuite OneWorld global solution enables management of field operations with multi-currency conversions.

“NetSuite has been able to accommodate everything we need on a global basis,” Correa said. “I can report with a high degree of confidence on each project as to how funds are used. The flexibility that NetSuite gives us as a cloud-based system has been incredible.”

Water For People

Water For People, based in Denver, Colo., helps improve quality of life by supporting the development of locally sustainable drinking water resources, sanitation facilities and hygiene education programs in entire districts that hold many communities in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and India.

“Our goal is clean water for everyone, forever by bringing people together in a collaborative and sustainable structure,” said Crystal Huish, Water For People Controller.

Running NetSuite since 2008, Water For People uses NetSuite to manage donors and donations, tying its financials to individual projects with drill-through to transactional details. The organization uses NetSuite OneWorld’s multi-currency and multi-lingual capabilities to manage its global offices on three continents.

“The ability to have all of our country offices on the single NetSuite system and do global financial consolidations has been extremely valuable,” Huish said. “We have great visibility and reporting with NetSuite to see more clearly how funds are coming in and how they’re spent.”

Water For People is among 22 organizations taking advantage of the new NetSuite.org
SuiteVolunteers pro bono program, through which NetSuite employees volunteer their time and skill to assist grantees. The SuiteVolunteers are helping Water For People manage their international transactions and get a deeper understanding of the way the platform can work with their multi-currency operations.

World Water Day may be observed just once a year, but for NetSuite.org grantees Healing Waters, Water for People, Charity:Water, The Adventure Project and millions of people around the world, every day is water day. We at NetSuite applaud the efforts of these two organizations, and are gratified that our technology helps them to better channel their resources into bringing safe, clean water to communities in need.

We encourage you to visit their websites and learn more about the amazing work they are doing to help bring clean water to everyone, everywhere.

To learn more about NetSuite.org, please visit www.netsuite.org or find us at @NetSuiteOrg.

-Erin Dieterich, Global Employee Engagement Manager, NetSuite.org