Automating work orders using a NetSuite Suitelet can do wonders for your business’ overall speed and efficiency. Unfortunately, not many companies have the time or expertise needed to develop custom Suitelets.

Missouri Star Quilt Company (MSQC), an OdeCloud client, was having issues recording individual work orders through NetSuite.

It would take far too much time finding a specific work order, only to force them to go through the hassle of having to manually fill in inventory details — just to create ONE assembly build.

About the Missouri Star Quilt Co

Location: Hamilton, Missouri
Industry: Retail, Consumer Business
Number of Users: 200+
Number of Subsidiaries: 2

The Solution: Automating Work Orders, SN and Lot # via Custom NetSuite Suitelets

OdeCloud assigned NetSuite expert Thierry Klesse to tackle MSQC’s problem concerning their work orders. Creating two custom Suitelets, Thierry was able to expedite their business processes exponentially.

Sticking to OdeCloud’s promise of making things fast and easy, Thierry’s Suitelets allowed MSQC to simply scan a work order, bringing up a summary of all necessary information regarding that order: the work order number, assembly item, product image, quantity to build, serial/lot number, bin, and more.

Furthermore, serial/lot numbers were programmed to autofill based on pre-established criteria, and the bin field utilized an algorithm to autofill based on the previously determined bin.

After submitting a work order, the page would automatically revert back to the original screen, allowing MSQC to easily scan work orders in rapid succession.

The Process of Automating Work Orders

Work Order Process Before Automation

1. Take time locating a specific work order in NetSuite

2. Click to open

3. Click ‘Create Build’ to open Assembly Build page

4. Manually fill inventory details

5. Click to save Assembly Build

6. Manually navigate back to Home screen

7. Repeat

Work Order Process After Automation

1. Scan Work Order

2. Review Information

3. Repeat

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The Results from Automating Work Orders

After rolling out the solution and after they had used it for a few weeks I asked the main point of contact at the customer how things were going with the solution, if they had any problems.

He told me that there were no problems and furthermore the operations department had seen a measured time improvement in cutting fabrics. He was very happy to tell me that the time taken for the cutting fabrics process had improved by 75%.

As a developer/consultant, things can be very abstract and it is not always made clear that your solutions have such a large real world impact. For me, it is always great to hear that the solutions I implement have a concrete impact on my customers.

More solutions like this – NetSuite Business Solutions by OdeCloud

About the author, Thierry
Senior NetSuite ERP Consultant, Solution Architect and Developer @OdeCloud

Thierry with Colin Emberley, NetSuite Administrator at Missouri Star Quilt. Thierry has over 15 years of experience with Enterprise Resource Systems (NetSuite, MS Dynamics SL, Movex Lawson), Database development (TSQL, DML, DDL), Javascript and .NET.

OdeCloud is proud to remain the Missouri Star Quilt Company’s favorite NetSuite service provider.

Click here for more information on hiring a NetSuite consultant on OdeCloud.

For another OdeCloud NetSuite case study, click here.

The post Automating Work Orders in NetSuite Using Custom Suitelets appeared first on OdeBlog.

Fellow NetSuite Consultants and members of the OdeCloud NetSuite community,

It’s only Tuesday, but feels like Thursday already . First of all, it’s really exciting to be part of a thriving global NetSuite community and to be connected with so many NetSuite consultants here on the OdeCloud platform. It’s truly incredible the journey this has been, from a our little community Slack account in 2020 to fully featured and proprietary technology platform. I can definitely tell you we took the longer route. However, we weren’t alone.

We have had NetSuite professionals and business clients since day-one of this platform. We continue to grow in numbers each day, however we remain an exclusive community open to the most experienced NetSuite consultants, and now invite more business technology professionals to join us (Salesforce, SAP, Infor, MS Dyamics and more).

Our Purpose

Business Technology Consultants transitioning to independent consulting seek the freedom and flexibility that freelance work provides, leveraging their expertise and experience for autonomy. However, these professionals often harbor concerns about securing consistent job opportunities, avoiding employment gaps, engaging in vetted projects, and handling large-scale assignments without support. These anxieties underscore the importance of a platform that not only understands their needs but also exceeds expectations in addressing these key fears.

Enter OdeCloud, an acronym for On Demand Experts Cloud, positioned as a reliable marketplace, community, and technology platform. OdeCloud effectively alleviates the apprehensions of independent consultants by matching them with curated hiring managers, projects, and co-workers, exceeding expectations in the crucial aspects of job acquisition

In contrast, traditional alternatives like Anderson Frank, dealing with a large volume of job seekers, fall short in providing the deep technical expertise and personalized support that consultants crave. While Anderson Frank may handle occasional projects, OdeCloud shines by offering a more comprehensive and personalized experience, caring about the success of independent consultants and providing assisted placement services that significantly ease the process of running a freelance business, making it not only more manageable but also more enjoyable.

We are also pleased to have with us many software partners highly recommended in the Business Technology ecosystem by NetSuite consultants.

Lastly, the party would not be complete without the clients we absolutely love! What is more powerful than seeing your consultant call upon his community of over 500 top experts to crowdsource the best solution for your NetSuite projects or help resolve pressing issues, quickly? We are happy to have you here.

Where are. Where are headed

For those who just joined us  and have not meet with Ahad Arain, Vanielle Lee and myself (Co-Founders) yet to chat about OdeCloud, below is the vision we have for this platform

We want to upgrade the experience of technology consultants, better connect them to their peers, promote camaraderie, community and collaborative learning for a greater personal and professional growth, and help them achieve their entrepreneurial goals as freelancers.

Our vision is to be the world’s most human-centric, community-driven and knowledgable talent marketplace where the highest value jobs find their talent match.

Our mission is to improve people’s lives by helping them achieve a more fulfilling and joyful independent career and a greater work life balance.

We have achieved part of this vision with the launch of our social feed “OdeSocial” and our freelance marketplace for NetSuite Consultants. But it’s just the beginning. There is more to come .

Thank you all for your support to OdeCloud and to each other! 

The post NetSuite Consultants – The OdeCloud Vision For The NetSuite Community Is Coming To Life. appeared first on OdeBlog.

And I completely understand his doubts.

You’d hear about the concept of Release mostly in the App or software development world, but rarely in ERP implementations.

And without going into too much detail, I’d say there should be more thought put into methodologies that involve project implementation before immediately choosing to implement Agile or stick to the more traditional Waterfall model.

But when it comes to ERP implementations, there is one thing you simply CANNOT skip over: DEFINING YOUR IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY!!!

But guess what?

You don’t have to chose and stick to one specific methodology. You can mix them up to build the optimal approach for your implementation. Agile is now the most prominent methodology in the software world, but this doesn’t mean it’s the perfect fit for all types of IT projects.

ERP implementation is THE MOST CRITICAL IT transformation for an organization, and the bigger the organization, the greater risk of failure.

Unlike traditional Software development, the customers may not grant you multiple chances to get it right. A little bug in an interface, an hour of system failure can result in millions of dollars lost in revenue, so think twice before fully committing to Agile!

True consultant life story: I remember a mandate I had in a paper mill factory a few years ago. There was an error in the SAP Transportation module setup, which resulted in a mismatch of batch numbers assigned to trucks delivering tons of paper rolls.

Long story short, New York Times was on the other end as the customer, and my client had 5 business days to figure out the issue and solve it. Failure in this task would have likely resulted in the loss of a 5-year, multi-million dollar contract.

My team spent 16 hours a day — including a 12-hour night shift — to find and fix the bug, then manually reprocess hundreds of shipments. Then we spent the next 3 weeks — 12 hours each night — helping the factory workers find the missing rolls and directing the truck lifts to the right trucks.

So when is full Agile Methodology appropriate for a project?

I think we will all agree that in a B2B or large B2C organization, AGILE is NOT ERP friendly, but that doesn’t mean we cannot take inspiration from that concept. The key success driver of my ERP implementations is my ability to mix the Agile and Waterfall concepts together whenever it made sense.

This could be characterized as a hybrid implementation methodology. To describe it in few words, it is the ability to design, prototype, test, deploy and repeat this sequence of events in a short time frame while running a waterfall project.

If you’d like to hear more about my hybrid methodology, I’d be happy to hold a much more detailed discussion with you to see if this concept would make sense in your current or future NetSuite implementation.

Talk to you soon,

Osar

The post Agile vs. Waterfall: Which is Best for Your ERP Implementation? 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.

Few NetSuite clients take advantage of the full range of NetSuite’s out-of-the-box features, built-in processes, native dashboards and standard reports. Beyond the basic setup of NetSuite, there are endless possibilities with integration and automation, extension with add-on apps and business intelligence and analytics.

In my experience working with midsize NetSuite clients, I’d consider the following to be a list of some of common issues:

No significant value added outside Accounting: Despite having the best Cloud ERP, these organizations still struggle to experience all the benefits of NetSuite in other departments outside Accounting.

Many financial and operational inefficiencies still exist: Operational teams have a low utilization of NetSuite. Most of their work is still performed on homegrown, non-integrated software, and reporting is mainly done in MS Excel.

The process automation expected is not there: Business teams are still dealing with a lot of time-consuming, manual tasks, and the accounting team still runs a time-consuming, manual reconciliation process each month.

Constantly spending money and time to fix NetSuite: More cash and time is going towards fixing NetSuite bugs and broken backend processes instead of applying those resources to activities that actually generate revenue.

Does this sounds like your company?

Let me show you why your company is having these issues despite running the best Cloud ERP in the market.

From a purely technical point of view, NetSuite is the most robust, comprehensive, scalable, user friendly and customizable ERP in the market. That’s just one part of the reason why they close thousands of customers each year, and that number is growing exponentially.

That said, the cost of a NetSuite license is not cheap, and it will keep increasing as it grows in functionality and becomes globally adopted by more Enterprise clients.

Regardless of whether NetSuite ERP serves your company well, you will still have to pay the full cost of obtaining a license in order to fully access the platform. 

It is up to you to build your return on investment. As far as NetSuite is concerned, your company is a successful NetSuite client.

When you fail to seize the true benefits of NetSuite for your company, you are leaving a significant amount of money on the table.

Here are the 3 most important benefits you should seek to maximize from your NetSuite application:

Measuring and reporting your company’s performance

Gaining efficiency with business process automation

Building and sharing knowledge across your organization

1. How well is your company leveraging the real-time KPI dashboard and reporting capabilities of NetSuite?

With the right expertise, your NetSuite Administrator can help customize and optimize your user dashboards.

By doing so, your organization will be able to gain clearer insight, make more data-driven decisions, and closely track project performance and resource utilization. 

Along the way, you will be able to eliminate time-consuming processes like spreadsheet-based reporting, allowing you to allocate more resources toward devising new strategies based on the analytics piped into the personalized role-based dashboards. 

2. How well is your company leveraging NetSuite’s process automation tools to help streamline and optimize other business processes?

The automation enabled by SuiteScript can significantly increase your organization’s productivity, helping you rapidly deploy new solutions to help tackle your industry’s evolving needs.

It’s to your advantage to make sure your team’s talent profile includes experts who can capitalize on the powerful customization possibilities of SuiteFlow and SuiteScript.

3. Do you feel your NetSuite users could use a little more help to run the application more effectively?

Given the sheer range of functions and customizable features available in NetSuite, extensive documentation on your business’s processes and customizations is crucial in ensuring that your team works consistently and effectively.

It is also critical for business teams to engage with up-to-date training materials to ensure they’re effectively using the system, which helps further guarantee the integrity of the information they contribute.

Additionally, it’s equally important to have an IT staff that can adequately support your NetSuite platform.

The success of any ERP or CRM implementation hinges on the ability of users to adopt the unique processes and industry-leading practices built within the system.

While NetSuite comes with the ability to be customized and to integrate with a diverse array of business app and analytics tools, your ability to leverage those capabilities depends entirely on the expertise and creativity of your internal NetSuite team.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely your average, typical NetSuite Administrator has such an extensive expertise and all-encompassing skillset. At the end of the day, it’s simply not cost-effective to hire a team of full-time NetSuite admins whose skills encompass all the areas mentioned above.

OdeCloud provides a turnkey and affordable solution to help its clients uncover the potential of their NetSuite platform — a one-stop, NetSuite Managed Service team of NetSuite experts for a fixed monthly fee.

We would love to meet you to better understand how we might help.

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