What Is a NetSuite Administrator?

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If you work or have ever worked as a NetSuite Admin, I’m willing to bet you’ve experienced this hundreds of times, where every NetSuite bug reported to you has the CIO, CTO, CFO — sometimes even the CEO — and a bunch of unrelated people added in Cc.

For the end user submitting the request, here are three major reasons why that practice could be highly ineffective:

#1 – You’ve just lost the ability to properly escalate the issue if not addressed timely

You might think the issue you are raising might cause critical damages to the business if it isn’t fixed in a timely manner, but the reality is that more often than not, the majority of your colleagues believe the exact same thing about their particular problem.

Now, imagine you were in that C-level position, getting Cc’d on every single reported bug (many of which could be the same or similar). It’s unlikely you’d have the time or willingness to properly follow up on each of those email chains.

Considering your busy agenda and long list of priorities, you’d eventually attempt to filter out the signal from the noise in your inbox.

And I can assure you that as an employee, you definitely don’t want your emails being relegated to your managers’ spam box.

I highly recommend you hold off on Cc’ing those C-level folks unless it becomes absolutely necessary to bring an issue up the ladder.

#2 – The leadership staff has probably engaged IT’s full capacity on other critical initiatives or pressing issues

I understand no end user would raise an issue to IT if wasn’t significant to their work; however, it’s also important to understand that as an employee in a company, your issue may not even be in the list of top-10 priorities your leadership staff has already given to IT.

In my past life as a NetSuite Admin, I’ll admit that I’ve had to blacklist some “troublemaker” users. It sometimes felt that their job just didn’t keep them busy enough, so they’d always find time to dig out the most improbable defect in NetSuite.

I’d think to myself: “Dude! How did you even get to that screen? You are not even supposed to be there!”

What ended up happening is I’d always deprioritize those requests to focus on the tasks I was given by my actual boss.

It wasn’t that I intentionally wanted to disregard these troublemakers’ requests; rather, it was the reality of having a great deal of work set on my plate by those higher up the chain.

See, as a company scales and evolves, being the internal expert of a core IT system (ERP) means you become the center of every interaction between departments.

You get pulled into every single project: Marketing, Sales, Procurement, Engineering, etc. Every manager is now asking if NetSuite can do this or if NetSuite can do that….

Naturally, the request that comes from the highest authority will always take the top spot on my list.

For example, I had once blacklisted a NetSuite Financial user prior to her reporting an issue concerning the mapping of a CSV import. This forced the employee to spend an entire week manually reviewing and correcting most of the transactions imported into NetSuite each month before closing.

Meanwhile, the IT staff’s highest priority was to help make monthly financial reports available sooner for the executive staff. As expected, I spent most of my time catering to the leadership team on this initiative. What I didn’t realize then was that this CSV import was meant to facilitate and accelerate the month-end closing process. Hence making monthly financial reports available sooner for the executive staff.

Right there was a week the IT staff could have gained in this leadership initiative had I not disregarded her request so hastily to focus on what I thought was a more pressing matter.

As an end user, never think the issues you are dealing with are not significant enough to raise to IT. And most importantly, just because you were trained to perform a time-consuming task manually, don’t assume that THAT is the only way it should be done.

Your ideas matter!

#3 – You will create a lot of noise, which finally ends up burying your initial request

Unlike many other Netsuite admins and consultants, I have also worked as an end user of an ERP system, which has helped shape my perspective on this matter in ways it wouldn’t have otherwise.

And just like many other end-users, I often Cc’d a whole bunch of managers — not to mention, my entire team — in an attempt to give more authority to my requests. By Cc’ing my team, I naively had assembled a pack of wolves to hunt down the poor IT guy.

Unfortunately by the time the IT admin got to seeing the request, that single email had grown out of control into a 50+ email chain, and not a single manager had commented or given any direction other than, “Please remove me from Cc. Thanks!”

At that point, what was I really supposed to expect from the IT person?

Now how do you get effective support from your IT team or NetSuite admin?

1.Find out the internal process to raise IT issues.

Does your company have a ticketing system? Is there an IT dedicated group email? If yes, this is where you start.

2. Set proper priority on your request and a realistic due date.

Setting the proper priority helps your admin better classify your request among many others he or she has to complete. But if you always set all your requests to High or Critical, you run the risk of being blacklisted. Setting a realistic due date helps your IT admin allocate the right amount of time to deliver a high quality work.

3. Always assume good intent.

Your request is not getting the traction you need? It is not always because your IT admin is slacking off. He might just be too busy.  Try to find out what is in his or her request pipeline, and see if you can help deprioritize a few things by discussing other requests from your team.

4. Escalate only if none of the above worked.

But only bring these issues up to the designated person in your organization for IT escalations, not to the entire leadership team. Most times, a one-on-one meeting, supported by proof you’ve already tried the 3 steps above, does a much better job than a convoluted email.

At OdeCloud we have built tools to help NetSuite Admins connect and stay close to end-users, and provide the proper support and solutions they need.

The post Kill Those Long Chains of Email: How to Properly Request IT Support appeared first on OdeBlog.

But why not start simple? Why not try to gather information internally?

If you look in the right place within your organization, you’ll find that many of your employees readily have that information available and are more than willing to share what they know, saving you the trouble of having to find and pay for third-party services.

1. Why should we encourage employees to share their ideas?

I started my career in IT consulting back in 2006. Much like many other businesses, the company I was working for at that time — an aerospace IT startup in France — had implemented a retreat initiative for their executives.

But with more and more companies looking to add the best talent for even the most menial of tasks, it’s absolutely absurd for a company to completely write-off the ideas of their frontline workers, many of whom have a much more well-rounded and informed perspective than their managers.

And let’s face it — they probably know how to best implement those ideas, as they are the closest to your customers, vendors or partners.

This is but one example of how a good chunk of our modern economy still functions on Taylor’s Principle of Scientific Management, which implies that the manager’s role is to think and the worker’s role is to do.

But we often forget that the intent of these principles was to “convert skilled crafts into a series of simplified jobs that could be performed easily by unskilled workers….”

And that brings us to the question:

As an executive, founder or entrepreneur, how do you leverage this untapped pool of ideas to strengthen and grow your business?

2. What’s the right way to go about encouraging employees to share ideas?

When I was a consultant working at one of the “Big 4” consulting firms, I recall a moment when a few partners came up with an initiative for all the technology practice consultants to engage in a nationwide pitch competition in order to generate the best ideas to help develop our consulting firm.

Being that I had some experience with organizing fun social projects for my co-workers, I was selected to champion this initiative for my local practice. But the first thing that came to my mind was, “Why make this a competition?”

Despite the promise of a substantial reward, the contest didn’t end up fostering ideas that dramatically transformed or expanded the firm’s business, as many employees didn’t see much value in competing with one another.

So my advice here is to keep it simple: Just ask for their ideas. You’ll find that most employees do not need to have equity in your business or need some kind of reward to get them to share their great ideas.

Many executives would be surprised to know just how many employees in any given company are willing to help develop that company’s vision without seeking any reward if that vision is positive and reasonable — most especially in an early stage business or startup.

If you’ve significantly invested in building a work environment where each employee believes and shares your company values, it’s important to trust them to have the best interest of the company in mind when they bring ideas to you.

3. Why do we need to put tools in place to make idea sharing easy and effective?

As you can see, organizing management retreats or hiring third-party consulting firms to conduct an industry survey needn’t be your only source of generating ideas to help improve your company.

In fact, our experience as OdeClouders working to help optimize the ERP of our Netsuite customers has taught us that the most creative ideas for improving a product are most vivid when a client is actively using that product.

Thus, we’ve put our focus into developing a ticketing app directly into Netsuite’s interface, making it easily accessible from any NetSuite screen.

This ticketing app allows end users to not only submit requests for support, but to also submit ideas of NetSuite optimizations that would help streamline and accelerate key business processes.

Below are a few things we’ve developed recently for our customers from employee ideas:

• A custom suitlet to accelerate data entry and eliminate input errors on vendor bills for a large PO. Reducing time in this process means paying bills faster and getting good discounts from vendors, which could be a significant amount of cash saved when running a multi-million dollar business.

• A NetSuite portal allowing our clients to better coordinate sales, procurement, production and logistics operations. Providing access to real-time sales information to the factory (3rd party/vendor) contracted for production has allowed our client to dramatically increase accuracy in their delivery ETAs to end customers.

• A custom suitelet to increase system performance for warehouse operations by handling most work order tasks within NetSuite, replacing RFSmart integration. A faster warehouse process means more orders out during the day, hence more happy customers.

We’ve only recently released a public version of our NetSuite “idea sharing” app.

Feel free to contact us for a free demo and install!

The post Employee Ideas Matter appeared first on OdeBlog.

I often ask OdeCloud’s community members what makes OdeCloud’s Netsuite service platform different from other managed service providers.

The usual response follows along these lines: OdeCloud combines the scale, breadth and depth of a Freelancing platform with the guarantee of getting our assignments done efficiently and effectively — the latter of which is normally provided by most managed service vendors.

In other words, the one thing that makes the OdeCloud model different is its ability to leverage an on-demand, “Information Technology” workforce while eliminating many of the common issues customers deal with when working with freelancers:

• Fear that the freelancer lacks a certain level of expertise and cannot deliver on their own
• Uncertainty with what exact level of expertise is needed to complete the task at hand
• The constant onboarding and provisioning of external resource

There is a tremendous opportunity for businesses — especially midsize businesses — to gain more agility by leveraging IT freelancers. According to a recent study by Mavenlink, “79% of business leaders state that leveraging contractors is a competitive advantage, and as a result, plan to increase their use of contractors in next 12 months.”

That said, effectively leveraging the on-demand workforce is a not an easy task. As the level of expertise increases within the IT domain, so will the level of complexity in vetting and orchestrating this workforce.

Just a few years ago, companies with limited internal bandwidth were constantly hiring IT freelancers to offload some menial, low-level tasks.

Nowadays, companies expect the freelancer to be an expert in solving every complex, technological challenge known to man, or they expect the freelancer to assist in constructing an improved business strategy by leveraging whatever the market deems to be the best technological opportunities currently out there.

Managed service providers play a critical role in providing cutting-edge technology services to their clients, especially for midsize businesses with limited IT budgets; but at the end of the day, it all comes down to the personnel and the technical skills they have available.

With more IT workers transitioning to freelancing, the business model of managed services and consulting firms is facing an unprecedented crisis: What happens when the majority of IT workers completely transition to the gig economy?

However, the rise of the gig economy also presents a great opportunity to overcome significant issues found on both ends of the client-freelancer relationship.

We already mentioned a few on the customer side, such as the uncertainty surrounding what level of expertise is actually needed to complete a specific task and whether the freelancer in question has the necessary level of expertise.

As for the other end of that relationship, there are a number of prominent issues that constantly plague freelancers:

• Fear of being isolated
• Fear of not being able to deliver the work on time without assistance
• Inability to efficiently scale in expertise
• Lacking the capacity to take on and deliver more complex projects

This is often where the journey stalls for most experts in traditional freelancing platforms. They have maxed-out the number of hours they could bill in a day, week or month. They are unable to keep up with the new changes in their domain of expertise. They are unwilling to take the risk of building a team that they would have to financially support until client payment comes in.

So what is next?

Well, this is exactly the question that led me to developing OdeCloud. After 2 years of freelancing, I had reached that point where I could not scale myself.

Due to my limited support network of other IT professionals (and, by extension, lack of ability to crowdsource ideas and solutions), I could no longer provide my clients with leading practices or deliver on incredibly complex jobs without having to ask for assistance.

I technically designed OdeCloud to scale myself to better service the clients I was working for at that time. The concept truly took off when 2 other NetSuite freelancers combined their expertise with mine to create a top-notch service for our clients.

Our collaboration led to more creative solutions, and we successfully developed a service bundle, delivering high-quality consulting at a lower cost to clients. Eventually, other experienced NetSuite freelancers joined our fast-growing OdeCloud community, helping us build to where we are today.

Now, if you ask what the difference is between OdeCloud and a traditional freelancing platform like Upwork, Fiverr or Freelancing.com, it is truly the power of collaboration and crowdsourcing.

Allow me to show you the latest example of the OdeCloud concept in action.

Ahad is stuck with a Netsuite problem, so he reached out for help from the community

I saw his message before going to bed and quickly dropped a few names of folks I knew could help.

Up early on the east coast, TJ responded to Ahad, adding a link to a post he had previously wrote on the subject.

On the other side of the globe, Lea also saw Ahad’s question, and forwarded a very detailed blog post she had written on her professional NetSuite blog.

Just a few hours into his morning on the next day, Ahad had read the suggested solution, implemented it and tested it successfully.

This is but one example of how OdeCloud leverages the agility and expertise of a global network of on-demand Netsuite freelancers to help crowdsource solutions and provide best-in-class NetSuite services.

Keep on the lookout for more examples as we dive further into the year with our growing community.

The post OdeCloud NetSuite Services: What Crowdsourcing Means to Us appeared first on OdeBlog.

And now that January 2019 has come and gone, we’re back with yet another infographic, and there’s obviously a few minor differences we’d like to point out!

Although it should be noted that our more professional channel of #allnetsuite remains our most popular by far, we’ve actually added a new channel to our list of top channels last month: #allintegration.

This channel is primarily used for sharing all the neat tips and tricks many of our experts have discovered over the years. We’ve continued to encourage each of our Netsuite experts to pass on their accumulated knowledge with the intention of creating an environment that fosters lifelong learning and casual networking.

Maybe you have a question concerning new Netsuite integration processes, or perhaps you’re simply looking to further develop your understanding of Netsuite in general; either way, #allintegration is the channel you want to be in if you’re aiming to better your skills as an expert Netsuite administrator.

Our #cool_listening channel surprisingly continues to be a staple of our online community, and both Osar Iyamu and Thierry Klesse have been central to building interest in that channel.

In addition, we have related channels such as #cool_events and #cool_places that we hope to promote a bit more in 2019.

Most importantly, we added five new Netsuite consultants, resulting in a grand total of 25 active users. As 2019 continues to get underway, we definitely expect that number to continue growing exponentially.

And while our goal continues to focus around building our community of Netsuite experts, we plan on inviting more of our customers into the mix soon.

As for overall engagement, we’ve remained pretty consistent, showing an expected bit of growth that coincides with the addition of five new Netsuite experts.

Our primary hope is to not just continue adding more community members, but to have more of them engaging with each other on a more consistent basis.

The post OdeCloud Community of Netsuite Experts Continues to Grow in New Year appeared first on OdeBlog.

There is no doubt that the Netsuite client base will keep growing over the 20% annual rate in the next couple of years, especially with the scale provided by Oracle. Oracle has not only provided a market scale to Netsuite but also a technology scale.

Press Release April 26-2017: NetSuite unveils major global ERP enhancements. Sneak Peak (new industry-specific features): Version 2017 Release 1.

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In summary, NetSuite will offer more and more advanced features with more depth in industry verticals, which sounds awesome for NetSuite customers, but it also raises 2 important questions:

1. Does your organization have the right tech-minded thought leader who could recommend up-to-date industry leading practices and cutting-edge Oracle NetSuite solutions?
2. Does your organization have the right technical skills to setup and build on these advanced and more complex features available to all NetSuite customers?

As the competitive landscape rapidly evolves, so does NetSuite technology. The expertise you need to maintain, optimize and extend your ERP lies far outside the skill-set of a typical NetSuite administrator or developer. Most importantly, it is highly unlikely you would find all the business skills, technical expertise and thought leadership abilities required for this position in a single person.

At this point of your business growth, hiring, staffing and contracting are wasteful and time consuming practices that may not align with your growth plan. This is exactly why as an organization, you should explore the opportunities provided by NetSuite Admin-as-a-Service. Leverage this model to effectively and timely source the NetSuite skills you need, not only to maintain your platform in good standing but to expand its capabilities to meet the evolving needs of your customers and business partners.

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What is NetSuite Admin-as-a-Service?

NetSuite Admin as a Service is a turnkey and affordable solution to help midsize and early stage companies uncover the potential of their NetSuite ERP – A one-stop, on-demand and managed services with a team of NetSuite experts, composed of a NetSuite Administrator, a NetSuite Developer and an Industry Subject Matter Expert, for a fraction of the cost of one full-time employee.

For a flexible monthly subscription OdeCloud’s NetSuite Admin-as-a-Service enables you to have a team of NetSuite functional and technical and subject matter experts in your industry, to support, optimize and extend your NetSuite ERP on demand. Our model guarantees you get the right talent exactly when you need it.

Imagine what you could do with more NetSuite talents, thought leaders and experts in your industry…

Hold off on hiring a new NetSuite Admin, Consultant or Developer. There is a better way.

Let me show you: www.odecloud.com

Cheers,

Osar

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