Oracle recently announced the 2023 Release 1 update for Oracle NetSuite, and it brings added efficiencies across the board to help businesses like yours do more.
To that end, it brings new features and functionalities to help optimise your financials, warehouse management, data analytics, customer experience, and project lifecycles.
Through this, the 2023 Release 1 update helps you manage human resources more tightly, find savings where possible, and automate as many of your operations as possible to position your business well for exciting times ahead.
Just like the previous update, 2023 Release 1 focuses on adding new features and functionalities to NetSuite across the board.
Let’s take a look at the highlights of the first major update of 2023 for Oracle NetSuite.
Disclaimer: The following is solely intended for informative purposes, and Oracle is not committed to deliver any material, code or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionalities described may change at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.
Improvements To Employee Engagement
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Overview of Workforce Management ; Source: Oracle NetSuite
2023 Release 1 will see improvements to SuitePeople Workforce Management that benefits your finance professionals, managers, and employees.
Streamlined shift scheduling provides your managers with essential workforce insights, such as sales data, to help you align your labour supply with business demand. This ensures you can have the right number of people to serve your customers at any time.
Your managers will also receive workforce insights, such as sales data, to help match your labour supply to business demands. This ensures that your business will always have enough people on hand to serve your customers.
Your employees will be able to capture their time and attendance, view their schedules, clock in and out, and request to swap shifts from any device, anywhere and any time.
For those of your employees who work on multiple tasks or for multiple clients, or under regulated conditions, they will also find it easier to change their status throughout the day and keep track of pay rates and hours worked by location and task.
Your financial professionals will benefit from the built-in wage rules engine, which automatically calculate hours, overtime, and holidays. With this information, you can avoid overscheduling your employees and thus violating regulatory requirements.
Smart Financials and Operational Excellence
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Overview of NetSuite AP Automation functionality; Source: Oracle NetSuite
The 2023 Release 1 update brings new automation and standardization capabilities which frees up your finance function for more complex, value-added tasks.
NetSuite AP Automation now gives you the option to upload vendor bills simply by emailing them to NetSuite. These are automatically processed to create digital versions, with relevant details such as vendor name, PO number, items ordered, quantity and pricing included, and also matched to the corresponding purchase order (PO).
If your business offers subscription services, SuiteBilling now has a new uplift at renewal feature which automatically applies a percentage price increase to a customer’s renewal pricing. This can be particularly valuable for keeping pace with inflation, or for shifting to the latest pricing.
The Rebates and Trade Promotions SuiteApp will now be able to automate rebate and trade promotion calculations on kits and assembly items, on top of your standard inventory items. This helps you error-prone and inefficient manual calculation on more item type than before.
If your business operates with tax-exempt units, you can now assign nexuses to a subsidiary, classify it as tax exempt, and skip the assignment of a tax engine. This would effectively disable tax calculations on transactions for that nexus. With this flexibility, you’d now be able to run both tax-exempt and tax-registered businesses on the same NetSuite account.
Lastly, if your business is a non-profit organisation (NPO), you can now improve your indirect cost allocation by entering a provisional rate for a custom segment, like a grant. You can then tag which direct costs on the custom segment are allowable according to the agreement, and specify any amount limits.
Indirect costs are then automatically calculated and posted to the custom segment each month. With this information, your NPO will now be able to recover these indirect costs from a custom segment.
Building An Autonomous Supply Chain
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Enjoy ease of picking with NetSuite Warehouse Management System; Source: Oracle NetSuite
The 2023 Release 1 update makes picking more efficient with the NetSuite Warehouse Management System (WMS). Multiple employees can now pick the same kit based on zones, and new picking flows allow your warehouse employees to mark partially picked orders as complete, which can be useful if you want to reserve low-stock items for other customers.
Your pickers can also mark a specific bin as empty, which prevents their colleagues from wasting their time walking to empty bins, and also sends an alert for the bin to be restocked.
Other improvements that come with 2023 Release 1 include NetSuite Smart Count, which allows your employees to perform cycle counts without shutting down poerations. It has been improved to handle serialized and lot-numbered items to enable forward- and back-tracing.
The new Costed BOM SuiteApp will provide you with a breakdown of all expenses related to producing assembly items, such as material, labour, machinery, setup, and overhead costs. This helps you better control costs, set the right expectations when setting budgets, and help your R&D teams evaluate how viable and profitable new products will be.
The Manufacturing Mobile SuiteApp will now support standalone assemblies without an associated work order. This can come in handy for simple manufacturing processes, or the occasional case when you need to build a product quickly on short notice, such as when you need a replacement for a demo model.
Last but not least, if your business uses contract manufacturers to produce your goods, your quality assurance (QA) teams will now be able to create inspection requests in NetSuite Quality Management for items that were made by them. This allows you to inspect items to ensure these third-party manufactured products meet your quality standards and customer expectations.
New Features For Analytics Warehouse
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The manufacturing dashboard captures an inventory overview, sales and production by period, and shortages by item; Source: Oracle NetSuite
With NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) like yours have been able to leverage data analytics to derive useful insights on the level of large enterprises, while avoiding the cost and complexity problems of building out their own analytics capabilities.
With 2023 Release 1, you’ll gain access to nearly 90% of NetSuite transactional record types, and the ability to enhance their analyses with new data sets in areas such as sales, inventory, financials, purchases, and support management.
Other new improvements that 2023 Release 1 brings to Analytics Warehouse include:
- An expanded collection of pre-built industry-specific dashboards and visualisations for professional services businesses, software vendors, and manufacturers
- Direction connections to Salesforce, Shopify, and Google Analytics
- The ability to connect to other applications via CSV files or spreadsheet import.
Enhanced Customer Experiences
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Intelligent Recommendations Feature Based on Customers' Purchase Behavior/History; Source: Oracle NetSuite
The 2023 Release 1 update includes a slew of enhancements to ensure that your customers’ digital experiences exceed expectations, across multiple touchpoints.
For example, the Intelligent Recommendations feature compiles data from purchase histories, transactions, customer behaviour, and other sources to provide you with a better understanding of your customers, so you can make smarter product recommendations. However, it was usable only by accounts with a large number of inventory items and historical transactions.
With this update, Intelligent Recommendations will now be available for most accounts, regardless of transaction history and inventory size. With this, your sales representatives can benefit from the feature much earlier in the sales funnel.
Another feature which will see enhancements with 2023 Release 1 is NetSuite CPQ, which enable businesses to capture complex customer requirements, and ensure that configurations are not only manufacturable, but also that accurate prices and final quotes are generated.
The update will introduce a new dropdown helper on the ruleset maintenance page, which makes building configuration rules quicker, easier and less error-prone. Your managers will also be able to limit access to the CPQ Maintenance UI to specific individuals or groups.
Last but not least, SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced web stores will now support Google Analytics 4 and ACH payments in the checkout flow.
New Tools For Optimising Project Lifecycles
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Cost-Based Percent Complete Method for Recognizing Revenue; Source: Oracle NetSuite
If your business is a professional services firm, you’ll gain new tools such as an improved Project 360 Dashboard, and project costing capabilities, with 2023 Release 1.
With the Project Cost to Cost Percent Complete SuiteApp and Advanced Revenue Management, your finance teams can gain the insights they need to accurately recognise revenues and costs over accounting periods, even during years-long engagements.
And NetSuite’s charge-based billing, you can now configure customer-specific rules that align with your company’s accounts receivable (AR) process and customer preferences, as well as create charges through project records or directly against a customer record.
Easier Platform Development
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Developers can leverage on SuiteCloud Development Framework to perform server-side validation. Source: Oracle NetSuite
With 2023 Release 1, you’ll find a new Visual Studio Code Extension and other capabilities in SuiteCloud Platform. This includes eight new standard REST records, support for Java 17, and other enhancements that make it easier to build and manage customisations, as well as integrate with other applications.
Questions About Oracle NetSuite’s 2023 Release 1 Update?
Just like the previous update, the 2023 Release 1 update focuses on providing new enhancements to its feature set, which you can read about in more detail in the following links:
- Continuous Employee Engagement
- Smart Financials & Operational Excellence
- Autonomous Supply Chain
- Level the Field with Analytics
- An Enhanced Customer Experience
- Optimising the Project Lifecycle
- Platform Development Made Easy
Alternatively, you can find the release notes for Oracle NetSuite’s 2023 Release 1 update here.
With the new enhancements introduced with the first major update for Oracle NetSuite in 2023, your business will have more tools to manage employees, maximise savings, and increase automation of poperations, putting it in a better position for challenges in the near future.
To learn more about Oracle NetSuite, and what the true cloud ERP software can do for your business, click on the image below.
Highlights Of 2022 Release 2
Oracle recently announced the 2022 Release 2 update for Oracle NetSuite, and it’s designed to help business owners like yourself protect your bottom line by improving the efficiency of your organsiation.
To that end, it brings new features and functionalities to help you proactively manage your inventory, automate tasks, minimise human error and adjust your budgets.
Through this, the 2022 Release 2 update positions NetSuite to help you develop insights and focus on what’s in your control, and thus instill the confidence you need to help you prepare for the future.
Where previous updates have focused on introducing sector-specific enhancements, 2022 Release 2 instead focuses on new improves across its basic feature set this time around.
Let’s take a look at the highlights of the second major update of 2022 for Oracle NetSuite.
Disclaimer: The following is solely intended for informative purposes, and Oracle is not committed to deliver any material, code or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionalities described may change at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.
New Smart Count Mobile App Enhances Inventory Counts
NetSuite Smart Count eliminates manual inventory counts. Source: NetSuite
With the 2022 Release 2 update, Oracle introduces the NetSuite Smart Count mobile app, designed to help retailers carry out accurate inventory counts while keeping the impact on sales and store operations to a minimum.
It does so by introduce an automated, live cycle-counting feature that allows your employees to start a cycle count of portions of your inventory, without inconveniencing your customers by freezing transactions where the count is being carried out.
Smart Count does this by taking the inventory level used for the count at the time it starts for each individual item. Whenever any transaction activity involving said item while the count is being carried out, it automatically alerts your employees so they can react accordingly.
Smart Count can also be set to automatically trigger a count with predefined criteria. For example, if the inventory level in a bin fall below a preset reorder point, it can automatically start a count to check the accuracy of that bin. This helps ensure that reorders for the item are placed only when your inventory level is truly low.
Additionally, the update also introduces the Item 360 dashboard to simplify inventory planning and management. It consolidates inventory data in NetSuite, and displays data in a single dashboard such as relevant KPIs, current transactions, stock levels, inventory counts by current location, and alerts.
This helps you address any inventory and supply chain issues that could hurt your business’s bottom line in a proactive manner.
New CRM Dashboards, Roles and Reports
The new sales manager dashboard. Source: NetSuite
To expand the customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities of NetSuite, Oracle will also introduce a new CRM Add-on to provide enhanced sales automation, marketing automation and customer service management capabilities.
It provides new roles and dashboards that are specifically tailored to the needs of sales managers, sales representatives, and marketing and customer service teams, providing them with access to real-time lead and sales activity data.
These new roles and dashboards help you strike a balance between personalised user experiences and cross-team connectedness, depending on the needs of each user.
For example, your sales managers need an aerial view of what’s happening on the ground with your sales representatives, so they can ensure the latter have the support and resources they need to close deals.
The new customer service representative dashboard. Source: NetSuite
And while your marketing team gets functionalities that enables automated multichannel marketing campaigns that are aligned with your sales efforts, your customer service representatives also need a wide range of information – such as customer details, past orders, payment history, product catalogues and inventory – to find and deliver the answers to your customers’ enquiries.
The CRM Add-on will also include a new CRM Workbooks SuiteApp, which comes with 10 pre-built SuiteAnalytics reports to save you the time and effort of building your own sales reports from scratch.
These CRM Workbooks are configured to help you access crucial sales performance metrics and KPIs, such as sales conversion, opportunity forecast, and won vs. lost opportunities.
Questions About Oracle NetSuite’s 2022 Release 2 Update?
Breaking from previous updates, the 2022 Release 2 update does not focus on new sector-specific functionalities.
Instead, it provides new enhancements to its feature set, which you can read about in more detail in the following links:
Alternatively, you can find the release notes for Oracle NetSuite’s 2022 Release 2 update here.
With the new features and functionalities introduced in the second major update for Oracle NetSuite in 2022, your business will be better positioned to handle market uncertainties and be better prepared to thrive in the days ahead.
To learn more about Oracle NetSuite, and what the true cloud ERP software can do for your business, click on the image below.
