2 More Reasons Manufacturers Trust NetSuite

In the previous installment of this two-part blog series, we covered three benefits manufacturers experience when utilizing NetSuite’s fully integrated cloud-based ERP and its other modules. Enterprise-wide integration, streamlined upgrade processes, and scalability were the focal points for the first blog.

We are going to concentrate on two themes in this blog that are cornerstones of NetSuite for manufacturing. Enhanced visibility along with new data, and business intelligence.

End-to-End Visibility Across Your Business in Real-Time

It goes without saying, that visibility in manufacturing is critical, even if your company operates a “lights-out manufacturing” facility. KPMG’s Global Manufacturing Outlook stated that full supply chain visibility is among the top three most important strategic priorities for manufacturing companies, but only six percent of respondents believed they were successful with their efforts.

This leaves the door open for ERP systems to innovate and provide solutions for visibility that are customizable and scalable. Luckily, NetSuite and its 2019 Release 2 boast a number of updates that address these items and more.

NetSuite recently announced its Supply Chain Control Tower and Snapshot Simulations features that increase visibility and help with management across multiple systems. Combined, these features provide a real-time 360-degree view of the supply chain and facilitate secure data sharing between manufacturers and supply chain partners.

Supply Chain Control Tower enables active viewing of inventory balance, supply, and demand via a defined planning time horizon. NetSuite customers can filter results by subsidiary and location, drill down into transactions, and they can easily export entire grids of data to excel for analysis and sharing with other partners. Supply Chain Control Tower also comes with pre-configured KPIs and targeted alert functions to track performance and monitor potential issues within a timeframe set by the NetSuite customer.

In addition to targeted alerts, NetSuite customers receive a Predicted Risks feature and “what if” scenarios that enable them to simulate future demand/supply requirements along with the potential impact on planned work orders, sales orders pending approval, and more.

Would you like to learn how manufacturing companies like yours use NetSuite?

New Data and Actionable Business Intelligence

It’s no secret that capturing data and analytics is important for succeeding in Industry 4.0, but the real key is ensuring that everything is actionable. Mastering the process of capturing, analyzing, and reacting to data will dictate a manufacturer’s ability to increase on-time deliveries, optimize efficiencies, automate manual processes, and more.

For this reason, 66 percent of manufacturing CEOs selected Data Scientist as the most-needed type of worker for future growth according to a KPMG survey.

The updates from NetSuite 2019 Release 2 reflect its understanding of manufacturing and supply chain industries, along with the importance of data and analytics. This release features new analytics-driven Merchandise Hierarchy, Commerce Search Analytics, new SuiteAnalytics Workbooks, enhancements to Advanced Manufacturing, and new customizations for the tablet application used by shop floor personnel.

All of these updates combat industrial downtime, which costs $647 billion per year, according to the International Society of Automation. (source)

The Merchandise Hierarchy provides insights for all attributes and item types, while Commerce Search Analytics reveals the search patterns of web customers. 2019 Release 2 also includes pre-built manufacturing analytics that enables users to quickly navigate the data, and drill into specific data sets with complex criteria filters.

Manufacturers can use SuiteAnalytics Manufacturing Production Workbook, Master Schedule Analytical Workbook, Purchases Workbook, and Inventory Workbook. Leveraging these workbooks provides access to better data and can lead to faster deliveries, and more efficient processes.

To this same end, NetSuite improved its Advanced Manufacturing module to optimize shop floor productivity and streamline activities. It has Serialized Components for recording assembly build data, Inventory Status for prioritizing work orders based on status, and new Production Unit of Measure options to expedite the process of recording production quantities.

NetSuite’s tablet application for shop-floor personnel received an update to the Quality Queue Customization for better prioritization and identification capabilities during inspections.