By Lisa Schwarz, Senior Director, Product Marketing | NetSuite
Friday, February 5, 2021
As NetSuite customers look ahead to 2021, they are preparing for new growth opportunities, and a critical part of that is optimizing financial and operational business processes. NetSuite 2021 Release 1 seeks to further help the cause by injecting intelligence and automation into everything from financial and project management to multi-subsidiary operations and inventory management.
Smart Financials & Operational Automation
- The introduction of centralized subsidiary purchasing and billing consolidates purchases across multi-subsidiary organizations and generates vendor payments from a single location. This can reduce purchase order volume and automate corresponding cross-charges. The payoff: better spend management and increased productivity.
- New expense commitments and budget validation functionality prevents overspending by validating purchase requests and orders against an organization’s available budget, ensuring that budgets are closely followed.
- SuiteApprovals now provides email approval which makes it possible to review, approve or reject transactions on the go by simply clicking on email links. Staff can use the accompanying email approval log to review and audit email approval actions before they are updated in the system. This leads to more flexible and quicker transaction approvals.
- With the latest global bank feeds feature, companies can now use the Bank Feeds SuiteApp to automate the importing of financial data from banks in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, increasing efficiency and simplifying tedious reconciliation tasks.
Optimizing the Project Lifecycle
- NetSuite 2021 Release 1 brings the debut of SuiteProjects, a professional services automation solution built natively on NetSuite. SuiteProjects combines capabilities in project management, resource management, project budgeting and project accounting, providing complete visibility into, and control over projects and billable resources. When combined with NetSuite CRM, financials and SuitePeople, SuiteProjects becomes the finishing touch on a comprehensive single platform for running a services business.
- Project purchase automation and visibility functionality lets project managers initiate purchases directly from projects, providing project views of purchase transactions and enabling the routing of purchase approvals. Purchasing and project management staff can collaborate more effectively, and the simplified user experience lets project managers easily view how purchases are affecting projects.
- Expense report policies can be expanded to set limits for each expense line in a project, and additional filters allow for control of policies based on billable line items. The combination of controls and notifications ensures alignment with company policies and client contracts.
- By clicking the new “retract” button, employees can easily correct weekly timesheets before they’re approved, saving time for employees, approvers and administrators alike.
Automated Inventory Management
- The NetSuite Pack Station is a new touchscreen packing solution that can be used to consolidate shipments, pack multiple cartons simultaneously, manage multi-level packing and scan weights from scales. This provides an extra layer of verification before orders are shipped, potentially preventing customer dissatisfaction and avoiding the cost of having to reship an incorrectly packed order.
- Warehouse management system (WMS) enhancements in NetSuite 2021 Release 1 include wave automation (for taking advantage of off-peak wave processing), tally scans (which improve picking by making bar code scans quicker and more reliable), cart put-away, bulk picking, added support of mobile status changes and automatic label printing.
- Channel allocation and reservation functionality enables order allocation by channel and lets you enter inventory reservations in advance of the sales order. This leads to better tracking of sales and operations activities. The new order management dashboard and enhanced sales reports provide improved insight into channel sales operations, and improved allocation and fulfillment translates to increased customer satisfaction.
- Finally, with the new supply allocation against the blanket PO feature, location assignments are now based on the earliest availability and required-by date. This means orders can be promised more accurately by using the best location recommendation to match those timeframes.
Platform and Analytics
- New application performance management (APM) dashboards monitor and analyze the health of REST web services-based integrations. Support for REST web services has also been enhanced.
- With new internationalization and localization tools and processes, the NetSuite user and administrator experience can feel local for global businesses operating in any country. There is now native language support for SuiteAnalytics workbooks, a wide range of fields that can be localized, and the ability to extend support for analytics development and automation.
- SuiteScript APIs have been made more powerful and easier to use for application development and account customization projects, and the new secrets management feature set enables developers to securely manage authentication information.
- Developers are now able to work with significantly larger data sets by virtue of asynchronous coding techniques. They can also use native Chrome debugger support for SuiteScript to test and debug applications without leaving browser context.
Read this blog to get more in-depth details on NetSuite’s platform enhancements.
Learn More About NetSuite 2021 Release 1
Any customer that has gone through previous NetSuite refreshes knows that no blog post can do justice to all of the new functions and capabilities in NetSuite 2021 Release 1.
For a more complete picture of the new features, be sure to read the release notes and check out the industry-specific enhancements for:
If you’re new to the release process, learn more in SuiteAnswers.
Most importantly, don’t forget to request access to your Release Preview test account. Nothing substitutes for getting to test how all the new features will work with your data, workflows, and customizations.
