One of the beauties of working with a product like NetSuite is the fact that the solution is dynamic and constantly responding to customer needs. This enables customers to experience all of the benefits of NetSuite after the initial implementation of the solution while also having the opportunity of continuously improving with the availability of new features in future releases. To demonstrate this, I would like to discuss the transition of a previous client of mine onto NetSuite and how they also benefitted from new features that were available after they originally went live.
This client was a chemical manufacturer in the business of producing water treatment solutions for a variety of customers. With goals of expanding their operations and gaining more visibility into various production metrics, they made the decision to implement NetSuite with the Advanced Manufacturing (AM) module. Generally speaking, this client batched chemicals in a number of mixing vessels to produce a solution that fulfilled their customers’ requirements. Right off the bat, NetSuite provided functionality and visibility not accessible to them in their legacy system. For example, we were able to utilize WIP work order processing and routings to give the production managers real-time visibility into the status of any given order. We established each vessel as a unique Work Center in order to ensure work orders were being released to the correct vessel depending on the set of chemicals that were being batched. The Advanced Manufacturing module added supplemental benefits to the ones already listed. It enabled the production team to view a queue of existing work orders by vessel on a tablet so that they could efficiently plan and prioritize their orders. Prior to utilizing NetSuite, all planning and calculations were done by hand and the queue of existing orders were displayed on paper on a single bulletin board. Furthermore, the AM module allowed the production team to issue components from their bins with accurate consumption quantities, track time spent against a work order, and place finished goods in the correct bins directly from tablets all as the work was actually being completed. This allowed for much more accurate reporting than what they were accustomed to due to the fact they could report scrap and track actual labor time spent in real time. Their legacy system limited them to recording consumed and finished quantities after the fact which was much more cumbersome and error-prone. The production team found themselves making a number of ad hoc inventory adjustments to best reflect accurate inventory levels. This problem was greatly mitigated with the use of Advanced Manufacturing.
After this client had gone live with NetSuite and the AM Module, they were able to take advantage of a number of new features as made available in the release of Advanced Manufacturing 19.2. For example, the new functionality of automatically assigning an ‘Issue From’ and ‘Complete To’ bin and Lot Selection based on a set of predefined rules helped limit user errors in data entry. This also made the data entry process a bit more efficient by removing the need for the user to key in these data points manually. Secondly, they also benefitted from the tablet displaying ‘Built, Buildable, and Unbuildable’ quantities directly in the work order queue. This allowed for more effective planning for the production team. A third feature they leveraged was the ‘Production Unit of Measure’. This no longer required the production team to externally convert between different units of measure for items that were sold in a unit of measure that they did not typically produce in. To conclude, companies implementing NetSuite will experience immediate benefits while also having the ability to potentially further improve their business with subsequent releases. Learn more about NetSuite on our NetSuite Page.
