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10 Tips for Getting the Most Out of SuiteWorld 2013

With a new location, a new slate of sessions and a wealth of new NetSuite partners and customers, SuiteWorld 2013 promises to be the best one yet.

The NetSuite conference is moving from San Francisco to the San Jose Convention Center this year to accommodate the roughly 5,000 attendees expected to be at the show May 13-16. And a show with that kind of turnout with more than 180 breakout sessions requires a little preparation. Here are 10 ways SuiteWorld attendees can ensure they get the most out of the conference.

1. Research.  SuiteWorld offers a wealth of information for getting the most out of your NetSuite deployment with sessions that cover every facet of the suite. Factor in some free time, but be sure to spend the time up front figuring out your business needs and the schedule that makes the most sense for you. Then you’ll be better positioned to come home with actionable information.
2. Go Early. SuiteWorld’s preconference in-depth training workshops offer a deep dive into all areas of the solution for intermediate to advanced NetSuite users, spanning reporting, OneWorld, workflows and more.
3. Take Note of the Keynotes. NetSuite leadership (CEO Zach Nelson, CTO and founder Evan Goldberg, and COO Jim McGeever) will open each day with a keynote session providing entertaining, informative insight into NetSuite’s progress, product roadmap and vision for the future of the cloud.
4. Learn at Lunch. SuiteWorld has three ways to make your lunch more than just a break from the show to scarf down some food.  Tuesday offers a chance to sit down with show sponsors to get answers to your questions about the cloud, integration or simply network. Wednesday offers the chance to meet with the user group community and share best practices across multiple roles. Wednesday also presents the chance to have lunch with SuiteWorld bloggers and NetSuite product experts. Just sit down at the table with the topic you’re interested in.
5. Brainstorm. If the excitement of the show and the energy of progressive companies executing on their vision has you inspired, wander over to the SUITEideas area to whiteboard your ideas and get insight from NetSuite product experts on how to execute on your own vision.
6. Network. There’s perhaps no better way to learn and grow at SuiteWorld than by talking and sharing with fellow customers and partners. In the session rooms, the hallways, the coffee area, it’s a chance not only to learn how to get the most out of your NetSuite implementation, but potentially find the right partner or business opportunity. Better yet, chill out in the SuiteLife lounge where you can rest, recharge and network in comfort.
7. Meet the SuiteGuru. Sit down with our technical experts and get your specific questions about CRM, Ecommerce, ERP, OneWorld, OpenAir, the SuiteCloud platform or Web design answered in 30-minute meetings. But be sure to schedule them, pre-registration is required and seating is limited.
8. Tour the Floor. Wander the show floor, pick up some schwag and find the solution your business needs to accomplish its vision. It’s all on display. When you’re done, wander over to the SuiteStore to pick up your official SuiteWorld gift from customers such as Incipio (iPhone 4 or 5 case), Nakajima (Hello Kitty swag), Philz Coffee (lb of coffee), Liberty Water Bottle (official SW water bottle) or School of Rock (t-shirt). 
9. Get Out. You’ve traveled to San Jose, now take some time to get outside. Take a walk, go out to eat at one of the area’s signature restaurants, soak up Silicon Valley.
10. Get Down.  After all the contacts are made, the questions answered and your mission accomplished, be sure to grab a cold drink and have a suite time at Wednesday night’s SuiteCelebration Gala.

We look forward to seeing you. Be sure to follow @NetSuite and #NSW13 on Twitter to keep up to date on the show. If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out the scene
from last year:

 

For more information on SuiteWorld 2013, please visit: http://www.netsuite.com/portal/press/events/nsw2013/main.shtml

Seven Ways Finance Teams Are Being Overworked, and How To Fix It

Accounting and finance teams are being asked to do more than ever to provide actionable analytical insights and help solve business problems on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the haphazard growth of business systems often gets in the way, and the end result is that financial professionals are being overworked and struggling with financial software systems that are simply not up to the task.

Here are some of the most painful ways finance teams are being overworked today:

1. Financial professionals are forced to deal with disparate systems with little to no integration.
2. Manual tasks, such as spreadsheet export/import cycles, are required to answer even the simplest business question.
3. There are no real-time, customizable dashboards available to operational personnel and executives, meaning that every business question has to flow through the financial department.
4. Mobile access to financial data means grappling with VPN connections, or worse, simply having no access to the information while out of the office.
5. There is no company-wide standard for KPIs, meaning there is no clear way to compare costs or performance across different departments or divisions without complex, manual calculations.
6. Subsidiaries are being run on different financial software platforms with no integration or real-time visibility at headquarters, making accurate performance data costly and time-consuming to obtain.
7. Getting hold of data for company-wide reporting, auditing and decision support requires logging in to multiple data systems or asking for IT assistance.

Fortunately, there is a way out of this mess. NetSuite has teamed up with the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) to find answers to these problems. I will be leading a webinar on February 13 at 1:00 p.m. ET and will be presenting IMA research on how these problems are affecting finance leaders, and will moderate a panel discussion of financial executives who will share real-life insights into how they overcome these obstacles in their own organizations.

After the webinar you'll know how to deal with these seven signs of overwork, and know the way forward to improve company-wide visibility and performance. I hope you will join me for the talk by registering now for this free webinar here. There's even a CPE credit in it for you.

-Vishrut Parikh, Director, Product Marketing at NetSuite

Getting the Most Out of SuiteSocial

SuiteSocial, the instant enterprise collaboration SuiteApp, I introduced in my last blog provides instant benefits as a convenient cloud platform for messaging between your employees. But, a little planning and preparation will help unlock even more of its power.

SuiteSocial delivers the most value when you think of it not as a separate function of NetSuite, but as an integrated social element of everything you do in NetSuite. The easiest way to do that is to add the SuiteSocial status newsfeed to your NetSuite dashboard. The status newsfeed shows the latest activity of every SuiteSocial user you have chosen to follow, meaning that from a single screen you can see what the people who matter most to your work have been doing.

People only adopt social media if the system delivers content that is relevant to them without becoming overwhelming. That's what makes the SuiteSocial concept of channels so powerful. Channels can be created for entire departments, special purpose teams such as the cross-functional personnel working on a major client deal, or business topics such as product suggestions. Users can post to channels to advance the conversation, and updates can also be automatically posted by the system itself in response to certain actions. For example, an update to the opportunity status attached to a high-value customer's record could trigger a message on that customer's channel, alerting the client services team.

Making it easier for users to connect with the channels and updates they need to be successful will also help speed adoption. Automated subscriptions can quickly pair professionals and the records they care about most. Users who prefer reading status updates offline, or simply want a more permanent record than a standard newsfeed ticker, can request email digests in addition to their SuiteSocial feed. Digests can be requested on a customizable schedule and can even be configured for weekend-only delivery.

The easiest thing of all to do with SuiteSocial is to get started. A six-step wizard takes your administrator through all of the crucial steps to configure and launch SuiteSocial in your NetSuite environment—most companies can be up and running in less than an hour.

- Malin Huffman, Principal Product Manager at NetSuite

SuiteSocial: Instant Enterprise Collaboration

Enterprise social and collaborative platforms have been getting a lot of deserved attention lately. NetSuite users should know that a powerful social platform, natively integrated into our user interface, is just a few clicks away. SuiteSocial, available to all NetSuite users as a free SuiteApp installation, introduces collaboration newsfeeds and discussion channels to our cloud solution. In the best NetSuite tradition, these capabilities are available and relevant to every seat and role in your enterprise—not just the sales or marketing team.

With the gold rush in enterprise social going on, there are a dizzying number of options. The key advantage of SuiteSocial for NetSuite users is the tight and native integration between the collaborative capabilities and your existing NetSuite records. This means that any collaborative discussions and actions that take place through the SuiteSocial interface are clearly and cleanly attached to the relevant record- for example, a customer record, a transaction, or even a custom record. Creating a new data silo for social media limits its effectiveness. Getting out in front of the issue now, and keeping discussions and action tightly integrated with NetSuite records will eliminate the headaches of missed opportunities and lost knowledge down the road.

At the heart of SuiteSocial is the newsfeed, which displays posts made by colleagues or automatically by NetSuite itself. Like many social platforms, it's easy to follow customers, colleagues, and channels (which are like groups or topics.) Where SuiteSocial really shines is in the ability to create automatic subscription rules, which makes it possible to track very particular kinds of activities. For instance, top executives may want to subscribe to all SuiteSocial updates on pipeline deals with a high dollar value. Other roles may wish to track discussion around specific changes in a customer's record, such as a change in the customer's loyalty or satisfaction status. This pairing of enterprise social data and the complete customer record makes SuiteSocial stand out in this competitive space.

In a typical organization, activating SuiteSocial requires a few easy steps taking just minutes. Like all NetSuite features, SuiteSocial is extensible and integrates well with other platforms. A connector between SuiteSocial and Yammer is already available as a free add-on SuiteApp, and delivers SuiteSocial updates to your Yammer activity stream.

The push for a more collaborative enterprise may be coming from your company's C-suite or from front-line staff frustrated by the limitations of email and IM.

Whatever the reason, cooperation is the cornerstone of a successful 21^st century business. SuiteSocial brings that power to every NetSuite account with the click of a button.

- Malin Huffman, Principal Product Manager at NetSuite

NetSuite for Dummies, SuiteTraining: Opportunities to Expand

Why did we collaborate with Wiley to publish NetSuite For Dummies, when ease of use and minimal training time are two of NetSuite's most valuable characteristics? We know that a number of our customers buy a copy for all of their front-line employees who live and breathe NetSuite every day: the bookkeepers, AP/AR clerks and sales representatives at the heart of thousands of NetSuite-powered businesses.

Adapting to any new business solution can be overwhelming at first. Using the time-tested Dummies approach, our book offers a guided tour of NetSuite for business users. Several common business tasks are explained in a clear and concise manner. We wrote the book knowing that many users come to NetSuite with a long history working in systems such a QuickBooks and Great Plains, and our tutorials respect the experience readers bring to the table. After all, you understand how your business works – you just want to know how to run it more effectively with NetSuite.

The publication of NetSuite For Dummies coincided with an overhaul of the NetSuite user interface. Although we do make improvements to many screens and tabs with each release of NetSuite, all of the illustrations in the book are still relevant and applicable to users today.

But there’s more than one way to become a NetSuite expert. For a more comprehensive learning experience, sign up for NetSuite Training. NetSuite Training offers several courses that compliment many of the topics covered in NetSuite For Dummies. With training you have the added benefit of working with our experts and through hands-on exercises, you can practice what you learn before you apply your new knowledge to your own NetSuite account.

Additionally, our documentation professionals ensure that NetSuite's online help is extensive and exhaustive—and that's a good thing when you are working through a complex workflow, or need to get a customer issue resolved correctly the first time.

NetSuite For Dummies takes a task-oriented approach to learning NetSuite. The book doesn't always define every single field and button on every NetSuite screen as our on-line help does, but in just a few pages you can quickly learn how to process payments, cut checks, record sales activity and manage inventory.

That doesn't mean the book spends all its time in the shallow end of the pool. NetSuite For Dummies includes tips on advanced business operations such as recurring revenue and billing recognition, as well as reporting, dashboards, and even eCommerce setup.

Many NetSuite customers are committed to truly paperless offices. Not to worry. NetSuite For Dummies is also available from the publisher as an e-book.

NetSuite For Dummies won't tell you absolutely everything there is to know about NetSuite's extensive capabilities. But chances are good that it will tell you what you need to know right now. For the rest there’s SuiteTraining.

- Malin Huffman, Principal Product Manager at NetSuite & Dave Schock, Curriculum Development Manager at Netsuite

 

Adoption of Tools to Run Your Services Organization

The Technology Services World conference in Las Vegas recently concluded, and once again we at NetSuite are grateful for the contributions our clients make to the show, and we are energized by the ideas and passion that our customers bring to their businesses. I met with many of our customers, and many potential customers, and I learned from all of you.

Abigail Walker from Bullhorn, the recruitment and staffing software and services provider, led one of the sessions, along with Larry Goldberg of NetSuite, on how to leverage professional services automation (PSA) to address the challenges of a growing professional services team. One question from the audience addressed the issue of getting a team to use a new PSA tool, commonly referred to as adoption.

The group discussed multiple options for encouraging adoption of a new tool. There were “carrot” methods:

• Make KPIs on adoption part of a consultant’s MBO (management by objectives) goals
• Cash bonuses for keeping data updated on a weekly basis

And there were “stick” methods:

• $100 fines for every late timesheet
• “Wall of Shame” for those who don’t input data
• Escalation to management for non-compliance

My favorite angle on this discussion was the following: Make adoption a critical part of your software deployment, with its own project plan, and execute it in lockstep with the deployment. This helps ensure success in a couple of ways:

• First, it gives visibility to adoption challenges. Adoption is no longer an afterthought, but has its own deliverables and metrics just like QA testing or user acceptance testing (UAT).
• Second, adoption becomes someone’s deliverable. It is no longer expected to just happen—an assigned resource is on the hook for ensuring that adoption metrics are achieved.
• Third, you have adoption goals that extend beyond the deployment phase, so adoption is not viewed as an event but as a process.

The ideal approach to ensure adoption of a new PSA solution might be a combination of carrots, sticks, and adoption planning and metrics. But it is important to acknowledge adoption as part of the process, and not something that just happens on its own.

Ed Marshall - General Manager, Professional Vertical

Rose Financial: Suite Success with Cloud Services Resource Planning

I recently spoke to a client with a very interesting story worth sharing. Rose Financial Services is a finance and accounting outsourcing firm that recently became a customer of NetSuite’s services resource planning (SRP) solution. SRP customers use NetSuite SRP for financials, resource and project management, and time and expense tracking, enabling them to have a 360 degree view of their business. 

NetSuite SRP is the professional services industry’s first end-to-end services resource planning (SRP) solution and is designed specifically to meet the unique needs of services businesses, like Rose Financial’s.  Including customer relationship management (CRM), professional services automation (PSA), and accounting/enterprise resource planning (ERP), NetSuite SRP supports the complete services lifecycle from bid to bill, enabling services organizations to realize benefits such as faster project completion, more accurate and efficient invoice generations, lower accounts receivable cycles, and greater profitability,

Rose Financial’s story is particularly intriguing for several reasons. Ranked the world’s #1 finance and accounting outsourcing firm in a customer satisfaction survey conducted by Datamonitor, Rose Financial:

1) Reaps the benefits of a fully integrated solution in driving the success of their services business

2) Handles accounting for hundreds of organizations, gaining a unique perspective on effective financial management

3) Has upgraded hundreds of accounting and ERP systems over the past 17 years and has a great overview of the financial systems world

4) Documented their implementation and use of NetSuite both via a blog and a Twitter feed for their first 90 to 120 days. 

Because Ted Rose, President and CEO of Rose Financial, shared his experiences regularly as he proceeded through the implementation process, you can see how his firm decided to break the project into phases and also read about specific steps they took. I encourage you to take a look at the Rose Financial blog and read their tweets on the project  http://twitter.com/rosefinancial.

Prior to their NetSuite SRP implementation, Rose Financial had about 10 separate applications. As the company was growing rapidly, they wanted a financial and accounting system that would facilitate that success. After a market assessment, they decided that cloud-based NetSuite ERP and PSA integrated solutions would best meet their needs. Here are some of the main benefits they realized:

• Ability to connect how they sell their services with how they budget, record time and invoice, with a single project format from the lead/opportunity stage through to cash collection
• Better decision-making as everyone in the firm has access to the right information at the right time via dashboards; the firm also eliminated many meetings that were previously needed to understand variances
• Reduced time for proposal generation from three to five days to a few hours
• Faster sales cycle and a 75% to 90% faster close rate through the use of templates and better ability to estimate and scope projects, as well as provide more granular proposals that help prospects to make decisions quickly
• Speedier billing by three to four business days
• Rapid shifting of resources if someone gets hung up on a task, reducing the amount of overage on projects and preventing employees from spinning their wheels on tasks not valued by clients, thereby increasing employee morale
• Reduction in service value allowance (which directly impacts profit margin) from 10% to 2% in about six months
• Savings of $100,000 or more per year in reduced labor for billing and project management.

While Ted told me that implementing NetSuite ERP was as easy as implementing QuickBooks, I smiled when he gave the warning similar to “don’t try this at home” for the NetSuite ERP / OpenAir integration. While Rose Financial managed their own integration due to their expertise as accounting system implementers, Ted recommends using NetSuite’s professional services organization or a partner for a sophisticated SRP implementation like theirs. 

I thought this was a compelling story of SRP benefits and an interesting first-hand account of an accounting implementation. Don’t take my word for it though. Take Rose Financial’s!

Ed Marshall - General Manager, Services Vertical 

Mastering Financial Forecasts for Service-Based Companies

According to the SPI Research report "2012 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark," most services firms still report at least 10 percent variance between quarterly billings forecasts and actual results. [SPI report page 174] If missing forecast targets simply meant a little belt-tightening, it would be easy enough to cope. Inaccurate forecasts ripple throughout the entire organization, from agitating shareholders to disrupting future project availability and even professional development schedules. Simply put, the more components you have out of place this quarter, the more work you have to do next quarter to realign your organization to meet the new expectations.

Consistently successful forecasting is built on a foundation laid across the entire organization. Simply building more slack into project proposals won't do. Proper financial forecasting requires the ability to understand where your projects and resources will intersect in the future. That requires the ability to analyze resource deployment over time, and across both current and expected projects. Once that is done, companies can become more precise about resource allocation, not only by understanding exactly which skillsets will be available in the future, but also tightening up personnel transfer from one project to the next.

Getting there requires more than a desire to close milestones faster or cut down on bench time. Services firms must commit to building closer organizational and technological links between sales, service delivery and the back office. Today, forecasts and reality are so far out of sync because the sales force and service delivery teams have no meaningful communication. In a typical company, sales management assigns probabilities to bids and project managers—if they have access to these forecasts at all—are left to fend for themselves to decide how to reallocate or hire in order to meet the potential contract. By the same token, delivery teams with limited insight into scheduling and skill availability often give only the vaguest assurances to sales that the professionals are in place to meet the terms of a pending bid. This approach will be unsustainable for laggards, as forward-thinking services firms continue to distinguish themselves by on-time and on-budget delivery.

When the entire company is not only committed but enabled to allocate the best available resources to meet client needs on a consistent and contracted basis, then and only then will forecast variance shrink and provide both employees and customers with accurate insights into the future. SRP makes it possible to conduct detailed analysis of each pending deal, each in-progress contract, and each available resource and understand how margins and milestones will be affected by any number of possible decisions, including hiring new staff or reallocating existing professionals to meet another client's key needs.

Good forecasting isn't just a benefit to the back office. Reliable forecasts make it possible to understand the utilization, margin and billings of any project and any professional, over time and in the aggregate. This in turn makes project proposals more accurate, increasing your chances of making winning bids that deliver as promised. Moreover, firms that can master forecasting create an environment of stronger professional development and higher retention. In short, they become the kind of company shareholders want to own, and top-level talent wants to be part of.

Ed Marshall - General Manager, Services Vertical

Implementing at the “Speed of Cloud”

When I started out at NetSuite, I was faced with a daily grind of educating CFOs on the virtues of running their business in the cloud.  In those days, the conversations quickly moved to the issue surrounding data security and it took a particularly forward-thinking CFO to take the leap of faith.  I have since met many of those that did, and as they reflect on those decisions, most acknowledged that it was the first step in a complete business transformation towards cloud computing.

Fast forward seven years and those early conversations with CFOs are taking a different path.   As I write this, I am half way through my quarterly tour of South East Asia and I find myself having my third meeting this week, speaking with a CFO about a completely different issue – market agility.

You don’t need to carry a PhD in Economics to know that Asia is a fast-moving environment, with above average growth. As enterprises search for incremental revenue, it is therefore, no great surprise that they are looking to Asian markets to fuel their growth and meet the expectations of their shareholders.  Companies these days need to explore every opportunity offered by emerging markets in order to benefit from the prize that is there for the taking.

Executives that I meet with in Australasia always ask the ultimate question – how can I get there quickly, efficiently and with an acceptable level of risk? And I’m back to preaching the benefits of moving to the cloud.

Without a doubt, cloud computing gives organizations the best possible chance to cut through all the hullaballoo of the typical ERP implementation, and get a functional business system to those growth markets with minimal fuss and cost.

And to best help with the understanding of the cloud and its benefits to business-movers, I have listed below a handful of reasons why cloud software and growth markets are a match made in heaven:

Centralized, outsourced Infrastructure

Cloud software is designed from the ground-up to operate over the internet.  This demands only a web browser from the client, while the software and its associated data are managed centrally by the vendor.  This allows the client to start using the application easily from day one.

Business Process and Best Practice

Most cloud computing vendors offer vertical editions of their products that give the client an insight on the process that most other companies of the same line of business are using. Hence, there will be minimal configuration and customisation work that lets clients immediately see the value of their investment.

Remote configuration

Although it is likely that there will be at least some face time within the implementation plan, configuration and customisation can be performed from almost any location once permission is granted.  This allows the vendor to leverage on lower cost and its global pool of skilful resources, as well implementation teams to efficiently work round-the-clock. Utilising web conference tools such as WebEx, enables the vendor to discuss requirements and make real-time changes as part of the process. 

Configure once, use many

Some Cloud Computing vendors offer the ability to “bundle” configurations so that they may be deployed to customer accounts as a packaged offering, saving significant time and money over a traditional implementation.  This is naturally a win for both customer and vendor.

Upgrades

Vendors shoulder upgrades in most cloud computing applications and they go out of their way ensure that there will be minimum disruption to the configuration.  This is a massive departure from the norm and a most welcome one.Cloud upgrades take away the challenge of version lock facing the on-premise software.

To remain competitive in a tough economy, and to be able to expand further in growth markets such as Asia, organizations need to re-think the way in which they approach implementation projects to drive down costs and capitalize on the benefits.  With a significant reduction in cost and agile deployment, cloud-based technology is fast moving to become the default option for the modern CFO.

- Dean Stockwell - VP of Professional Services

 

Learn Vertical Best Practices at NetSuite SuiteWorld

We hope by now you’ve registered for SuiteWorld, NetSuite’s upcoming user and partner conference in San Francisco, May 8-12, 2011. 

This promises to be a jammed-packed event with not only great customers from North America, Asia and Europe sharing their best practices within the industries of wholesale distribution, manufacturing, services, software, and ecommerce; but also key members of NetSuite’s product management, professional services, and partner community.

I am responsible for the industry track at the event: "Vertical Best Practices".

Each industry will have its own panel of experts discussing what worked and what didn’t, what lessons they wish they knew, if they had a time machine and could go back in time, and most importantly what best practices they can share with you.  This promises to be a great and very interactive track so start thinking up your questions for our panel members now! And if you’re interested in sharing your NetSuite experience with other attendees at SuiteWorld, please let us know via email to SuiteWorld2011@netsuite.com. 

In some of our industries we’ve been conducting industry surveys: WD industry survey was done in the summer of 2010, Manufacturing is being done right now, and a few other industry surveys will be completed over the coming months, right in time for us to share these insights with you.

We are looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

-Roman Bukary, Industries Solution Marketing