Oracle NetSuite is a powerful ERP that includes some of the top software solutions every business needs. Modules from warehouse management, SuiteCommerce, CRM, and Advanced Financials help companies become more efficient. The key to maximizing efficiency with your NetSuite instance is to harness the automations you can create with the platform.
Here are some tips for areas in your business that you can automate to save your organization time by saving your employees time.
.NetSuite Automation Tip 1: Ecommerce SEO
If you have an ecommerce website, meta descriptions are key to keeping your Google rankings high. Search engine optimization (SEO) relies on meta descriptions to tell Google the primary focus of the web page. The meta description shows up below the page title in the Google results, so it's also important to effectively demonstrate to a potential customer what your page is about. For ecommerce, meta descriptions can be automated for the product detail pages (PDP) that hold your item information. For companies that have thousands or millions of SKUs in NetSuite ERP, you will want to ensure data integrity for this particular field.
NetSuite Automation Tip 2: Customer Center Portal
A customer center portal in NetSuite allows your customers to be able to access the information you make available to that customer. It's not the most pretty-looking portal, but has plenty of areas that you can customize/automate to make it more effective for your customers.
If your business sells B2B and customers utilize this portal to place sales orders, you can add a customization that shows items to purchase in a table, allows customers to enter quantity, and press a 'place order' button. Then, you can auto-populate these items and quantities on the sales order. This automation requires approximately 30 hours of development time and can duplicate the ecommerce grid ordering. In comparison to ecommerce licensing fees, this might be an ideal solution.
NetSuite Automation Tip 3: Tax Automation
Maintaining tax tables for all state taxes can be a pain, but there are a couple of preferred software solutions that can make this easier. In addition to table maintenance, their solutions also provide other tax automations in NetSuite to make your life easier...especially during tax season.
We recommend two solutions that integrate very effectively with NetSuite.
These are both excellent options and based on your need; either one will likely do the trick. If you do international business, OneSource, at this moment, has a slightly better solution. Otherwise, they have a comparable solution.
NetSuite Automation Tip 4: Marketing
If you already have NetSuite, it may seem like it can't do any marketing automations, but that is not true. In fact, it probably has the most automation potential out of any other software solution. However, it also requires more technical knowledge to get it to the level you may desire. It is likely a good idea to pull in your consultant or developer to build out this section.
Email Templates can be beautified by a developer as the foundation for an email marketing campaign. Email marketing is quite effective in NetSuite since you have all the data living in the ERP already. However, your company will probably outgrow the native email marketing features of NetSuite rather quickly. So, you may want to connect a more robust email marketing platform like Mailchimp to use alongside your NetSuite system.
Take a look at workflows to get marketing automation set up. When a workflow isn't working for what you want, a NetSuite developer can build a script to make it work. There are essentially no limitations to SuiteScript where you may hit a couple of dead ends using workflows.
NetSuite Automation Tip 5: Pain Points
For some reason, companies let their pain points continue for way too long before they build out automation. It often doesn't take too much math to figure out if a manual task is worth automation by using a NetSuite customization. Don't be afraid to customize NetSuite...it is designed to be able to do this. If your NetSuite pages are not loading fast enough, it's a good idea to revisit with your developer to find ways to improve the script code to perform better.
NetSuite Alliance Partner & Commerce Partner
Hopefully, this post gives you something to work with while trying to understand NetSuite and what it can do for your business. If you have general questions about NetSuite or more specific questions about setting up dropdown tabs in your NetSuite environment, feel free to contact the Anchor Group crew at any time. Anchor Group is a certified Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner & Commerce Partner and is equipped to handle all kinds of NetSuite and SuiteCommerce projects, large or small!
