Gearing Up for 2024 ERP Plans? Here are the Highlights from the 2023 NetSuite SuiteWorld Conference

Before planning 2024 NetSuite ERP projects, users of the cloud-based ERP platform and its potential customers should revisit the NetSuite SuiteWorld conference for the ‘Suiteness’ factors behind its innovations for 2023 and beyond!

Lately, generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI has been generating a lot of buzz for its ability to produce high-quality text, imagery, audio, and video content within seconds. This technological breakthrough has created opportunities for ERP providers like NetSuite Cloud ERP to augment their offerings with GenAI capabilities to transform businesses for the future.

Previously, we revisited NetSuite’s latest integration trends in 2023 to boost data readiness across the organization for better decision-making. In this blog, let’s catch up on the recent product updates announced at NetSuite SuiteWorld conference, other enhancements, and keynote highlights.

Updates from the NetSuite SuiteWorld Conference

NetSuite SuiteWorld conference had the largest turnout from the development, partner, and customer community. NetSuite made its official announcements about the features expansion and AI-powered capabilities embedded in the product suite and the NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

The idea of stitching AI into ERP is not hot off the press. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), NetSuite’s parent company, has spent years establishing low-cost, high-performing AI infrastructure. Its GenAI offerings include enterprise-ready applications and infrastructure with considerations such as cloud-to-on-prem data, deployment to business apps, data privacy and security, and the best large learning models (LLMs). Commemorating 25 successful years at the NetSuite SuiteWorld conference, NetSuite unpacked new OCI generative AI services on the OCI or NetSuite product suite.

The latest GenAI and product updates guarantee enhanced user experience (UX) and end-users’ accessibility to powerful tools over a secure cloud architecture. The brand-new product line-up also included traditional AI features for higher productivity, cost, and business efficiencies. This year’s theme of NetSuite SuiteWorld conference, “SuiteUp”, laid emphasis on the power of the suite as a force multiplier with enhancements such as:

1. NetSuite Text Enhance: The newest addition to the NetSuite Cloud ERP, NetSuite Text Enhance leverages OCI generative AI and built on Cohere’s foundational models to generate contextually relevant text. It enables users to write targeted and personalized content by providing word prompts as intent or context. The created content can be easily edited and reviewed for use across finance, HR, supply chain, sales, and customer services functions.
2. NetSuite Planning and Budgeting: The predictive algorithms-powered NetSuite Planning and Budgeting helps monitor and analyze financial plans, forecasts, and variances enabling users to observe trends and anomalies. With the new AI capabilities, organizations can boost decision making by automating data analyses.
3. NetSuite Bill Capture: The NetSuite Bill Capture’s AI-based feature is designed to capture and assort expense data based on historical information without the need for manual data entries. The automation of billings eases the burden on accounting teams, improving their overall efficiency.
4. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse: The NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is a pre-built cloud data warehouse and analytics solution. It is built on Oracle Cloud Analytics and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW). The solution taps embedded AI capabilities and analytics-embedded dashboards to aggregate and centralize data from a variety of warehouse data sources and systems, enabling organizations to accelerate data reporting and visualization. The AI capabilities provide users with transaction-level data and activity records. The granularity and visibility of data help detect patterns and trends for valuable insights to power decision-making.
5. NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM): NetSuite recently introduced Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) to elevate financial operations by enabling financial leaders to improve productivity, performance, and efficiency. The NetSuite EPM is built on Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Platform Management and integrated to the NetSuite. The NetSuite EPM includes some of the pre-existing and newly launched NetSuite solutions built on top of AI functionalities for planning and budgeting, accounts receivables, corporate tax reporting, and more.
6. NetSuite Capital: A new service within the platform is NetSuite Capital announced at the NetSuite SuiteWorld conference to help users improve cashflows and reduce days sales outstanding. The service helps customers speed up the payment and invoicing process by reviewing, pricing, and submitting accounts receivable reports.
7. NetSuite Pay: This digital payment option within NetSuite payment processing solutions is NetSuite Pay. Like SuitePayments that is PCI-compliant and accommodates users’ payment acceptance needs, NetSuite Pay also enables faster payments. It helps users onboard new merchant accounts and integrate solutions from payment processing providers with pre-determined rates and fees to enable transparent payment processing. NetSuite Pay has already established strategic ties with payment partners like Versapay.
8. NetSuite Electronic Invoicing: The Electronic Invoicing SuiteApp helps users create and use e-docs in XML and JSON formats that are compliant with the legal requirements. They help customers easily optimize payment processing, automate cash collection processes, and also exchange business transaction data with customers, tax agencies, and regulatory agencies using standard data format. NetSuite Electronic Invoicing SuiteApp offers custom e-document template and standards support for users to generate country-specific documents.
9. NetSuite Transaction Line Distribution: Customers can now leverage the capability to distribute an express across their subsidiaries, departments, locations, accounts, and segments with the NetSuite Transaction Line Distribution. It also helps users add rules and operate without pre-defined rules for distributing costs and entering vendor bills and credits with the help of reusable expense distribution templates. Also, it supports multi-language users, makes direct manual transaction adjustments, and generates hourly journals from approved transactions, improving speed and accuracy of financial reporting.
10. NetSuite Benchmark 360: Organizations can leverage deep analysis and create and track relevant KPIs to measure their performance against their industry counterparts. The NetSuite Benchmark 360 as the name suggests, provides a complete overview of a business performance and taps advanced ML-algorithms to generate predictive insights, and simplifying complex data sets to help leaders and stakeholders understand pain points and use actionable insights to improve efficiency and drive decisions.

During 2022, Oracle NetSuite conducted a survey to observe tech investment trends and leadership outlook of 500 executives and managers from firms with over $250 million annual revenue. The results revealed that about 90% of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) said they will use automation, AI, and fintech tools by 2024. The release of NetSuite’s EPM and other solutions built on top of AI functionalities aptly fulfills financial and cash management requirements. NetSuite is slated to include recommendation capability in the upcoming versions to aid financial teams take meaningful actions with timely analytics and insights by leveraging the platform’s combined concept of experience, intelligence, and ‘Suiteness’.

11. Field Service Management: In addition to the GenAI tools integration to the product suite, NetSuite also introduced latest increments with the acquisition of the Next Technik to extend field services management solution for customers to achieve higher operational efficiency. The field services management solution boasts of enhancements in core areas such as:

• Advanced Dashboards: For a quick overview of all the field operations and processes, NetSuite Field Management includes a dashboard that powers real-time visibility and swift decision making.
• Intelligent Resource Scheduling: Users can leverage the solution to create work orders from NetSuite projects, sales orders, or cases to schedule the right tasks to the right personnel based on their skills and location.
• Real-time Resource Tracking: Back office and field technicians can track their job status, customer or asset history, and inventory details. Reporting functions enable tracking of resource utilization, productivity, and profitability data as per job, customer, contractor, or the technician assigned.
• SuiteCommerce MyAccount: This new product is available for U.S. and the U.K. customers. Users can deploy self-service options and online account management. It helps easily make invoice payments, place repeat purchase orders, manage subscriptions, and convert quotes to sales transactions.
• NetSuite CPQ: The latest feature in NetSuite CPQ includes options for subscription and helps customers discover better opportunities for driving revenue.

12. Flexible Licensing Models: Another interesting mention from the NetSuite SuiteWorld conference is the company’s new licensing model includes task-specific licenses for employees of NetSuite customers that don’t require complete access or full subscription to the platform. This flexibility is available in the NetSuite Warehouse Management solution and will be advanced to other products to ease user accessibility to the NetSuite platform.

Other Keynotes from NetSuite SuiteWorld Conference

The keynote from NetSuite SuiteWorld conference also included exciting trivia that 37,000 NetSuite customers are already running 10 petabytes of data in NetSuite and clocking a trillion daily searches. The slew of releases and announcements at NetSuite SuiteWorld conference resonated with the customers’ requirements to do more with their ERP product suite. NetSuite also mentioned exciting plans and is slated to release suite editions with functionalities, roles, and dashboards specific to healthcare, hospitality, and restaurant businesses.

For the majority (90%) of customers who are already running on OCI, the migration would be completed over the next 12 months. Also, NetSuite will update its service to run on Oracle ADW by the end of 2024 for higher speed and reliability.

Did you know, NetSuite Release 2023.2 is already here? At COX-LITTLE & COMPANY, we can guide your NetSuite ERP projects with our certified ERP consultants and experts. You can focus on streamlining your business growth without the overwhelming pressure to assemble experienced teams and resources to help keep a check on risks, costs, and outcomes.

Stay tuned to COX-LITTLE’s latest updates about ERP systems and products and how our ERP staffing solutions can serve as a catalyst for maximizing ROI from ERP investments.

Get in touch with our team to let us know how we can help!