In what feels like a blink of an eye, SuiteWorld begins its final today and it won't be long before aound 7,500 stakeholders from the NetSuite community are departing home!

Following on from yesterday's Opening Keynote 'Full Suite Ahead', those in attendance yesterday at The Ceasers Forum and the many viewing online with an On Air Pass, heard from Oracle NetSuite SVP of Product Management Gary Wiessinger and others as they delivered the yearly Product Keynote this time named 'Innovation Ahead'.

Much like the Opening Keynote, the Product Keynote is a must-see session, as it delivers insights into the new and upcoming solutions in NetSuite that help businesses 'reach the next level of success'.

This keynote started in a little calmer fashion, as Gary played through an 8-bit game depicting the journey to 'Next Level Growth' with Oracle NetSuite. He quipped that it was probably the highest resolution screen to ever have shown such a low-resolution game but his team thought this was the appropriate level of graphics for his avatar.

Jokes aside, the game depicted how the 'visibility, control, agility, productivity and collaboration' of NetSuite delivers customer success in business priorities such as: acquiring and growing customers, creating and delivering products and services, hiring and empowering employees, and managing cash and profits.

Gary provided some incredible stats such as in the last year alone over 1 billion invoices have gone through NetSuite, which is a whopping 32% higher than last year.

"To help enable that kind of amazing growth, we continuously strive to find ever better ways of solving your most important problems with extraordinary solutions that delight you... In our video game theme, we call these our innovation power-ups. They are Ease, Automation, Insight, Intelligence and Suiteness."

 

Key Takeaways

Guided Learning

Guided Learning is announced as NetSuite look to innovate its 'Ease of Learning'.

"Faster and easier to do your job in NetSuite. Guided Learning provides in-context education right in the NetSuite UI... Smart tips guide you through fields, forms, and entire workflows, explaining not only what is required, but also why, to help you understand your business processes better."

 

SuiteAnswers 2.0

SuiteAnswers, the popular knowledge centre that hosts 50,000 articles and is accessed 30,000 times per month, will become SuiteAnswers 2.0 as NetSuite look to innovate it's 'Ease of Assistance'.

 

Key features:

• More powerful natural language search
• Expanded video content
• Intelligent chat support
• More ways to more easily get the answers to your questions

 

NetSuite Pay

On the back of feedback that it could be easier to get online and running with payments from customers, it was announced that NetSuite Pay has been created to deliver on this and is said to be 'coming soon'.

• Step 1: Apply for a merchant account from within NetSuite
• Step 2: Wait for an approval to be processed
• Step 3: Work with the SuiteSuccess Team to activate the new capability and launch your payment link in 'my account invoice payment capabilities'.

 

AP Automation

As announced in yesterday's Opening Keynote, accounts payable automation is coming to NetSuite, eliminating one of a business’s most painful and laborious tasks. 

The focus yesterday was on the scan and capture capability of AP Automation, but, today GVP Craig Sullivan dived deeper, announcing a partnership with HSBC that has their banking services embedded into NetSuite.

In doing so, users can expect it to be much easier to process invoices and pay vendors, as well as have expanded payment options with the new virtual card offering.

Intercompany Netting

Sticking with accounting, Craig spoke of how growth in a business brings an ever greater number of transactions which doesn't come without challenges. In this regard, Intercompany Netting provides capability of recording intercompany transactions between subsidiaries in OneWorld.

• The balance overview page shows all your subsidiaries in your account and how they have been transacting with one another
• Netting Workbench shows accounts payable transactions alongside accounts receivable transactions that are available for netting.
• 'Suggest netting' functionality automatically populates transactions which add up to the particular balance
• Saving creates a netting statement with links to all underlying transactions
• You've the ability to drill down for full audibility to view all transactions that have been included within a netting transaction

 

NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management

VP of Straetgy & Product Management Hanif Ismail gave us a demo what NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management has to offer.

• The Real-time data of NetSuite shows the financial implications of scheduling on both the surface and on a deeper budgeting level.
• Staff can receive their shifts through NetSuite on their phone and propose shift changes with fellow employees.
• The manager will be notified of employees' intention to swap shifts and provided with the financial ramifications of such a change.
• Past metrics allow for effective shift changes on the day by highlighting where it could be cost-effective to ask an employee to stay on an hour.
• Automatch Approvals automatically approve timesheets that match the schedule (within a certain grace period) and leave only those that don't match for the manager to go through, a huge time saver.

NetSuite SuitePeople Workforce Management is an excellent example of 'Suiteness', having all data in one place and harnessing it to make decisions in real-time before it is too late to make an impact.

 

CPQ

Allison Auclair covered CPQ in more detail after it was announced in yesterday's Keynote Session.

NetSuite CPQ enables those in sales to swiftly ‘configure, price and quote (CPQ) complex products and services with complete accuracy and reliability—directly in NetSuite’.

NetSuite CPQ helps to further improve and speed up the sales process by providing the ability to create 3D product visualisations and automate the generation of sales proposals.

CPQ allows salespeople to quote and sell like experts and maximise sales with an easy error-proof process.

 

Key features:

• Select features and options with the Configurator
• Dynamic Pricing with rules-based pricing
• Single-click quotes with The Lives Quotes feature
• Quick and easy to prepare proposals
• Bill of Materials and Routing to reduce manufacturing costs
• Guided Selling to assist salespeople and customers
• 3D Visualisation that empowers salespeople and online buyers

 

Rebates and Trade Promotions

A new and improved solution to automate the creation, execution, accrual and reconciliation of vendor and customer rebate programmes, with new Rebate and Trade Promotion capabilities.

• Systematic management of agreements and contracts
• Timely execution of promotions and rebate transactions on orders
• Proper accounting of accrued and settled income and expenses
• Settlement of claims and disbursement
• Accurate financial reporting and analysis

 

Evolving Platform Development Experience

Elham Ghassemzadeh stated they will "add support for the popular TypeScript, with higher quality code and better programming practices, allowing all the benefit to come to the end user. 

Suitecloud development toolset will offer more integration hooks with popular third-party systems, so you can automate and optimise your DevOps process to your liking."

"Platform developers will also be able to use the latest Oracle UI technologies... to easily create single applications that nicely embed within the NetSuite experience and native UI's

 

Bringing no-code customisation closer to business users

• In context customisation
• Smart data import
• Easier approval setup
• Admin insights

 

Investment in Analytics

NetSuite have invested in Foundation which is used to create analytical content for you and that you can use to create your own content and do ad-hoc analysis.

Tailored to you specifically, ie your role, your location, your task, NetSuite leverages this great 'Foundation; to build analytical content for you.

Further, In-context Analytics including project 360, CRM sales dashboard, and Employee Change Request, means you can act upon these insights without having to go elsewhere.

By unifying data across your business, NetSuite can generate insight in such a way that others are not able to do and allows you to act on it there and then.

 

SuiteAnalytics Datasets

Create almost any view of your business data that you require, and recently added dataset linking and multi-data set visualisation, enabling analysing between budget and actual.

 

SuiteAnalytics Workbooks

Provide powerful and simple to use pivoting and charting enabling slicing and dicing of data, developing deep insight and then sharing it with others in your business.

 

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting

"Not only provides powerful modelling and planning, but also powerful financial analysis directed from within an SPV, or in Excel, or soon in Google Sheets."

 

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse

"A complete business intelligence solution, that includes a robust data warehouse that includes connectivity to dozens of external data sources, and an ability to process hundreds of millions of rows of data. It also included advanced visualisation with VI driven tools."