Evan Goldberg, the gentleman that created NetSuite, had worked at Oracle. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle had provided seed money to start out and Larry actually owned a large part of the stock. NetSuite pioneered this whole system and two years ago, Oracle said we want to acquire you guys. Oracle was a little bit late to cloud computing and NetSuite offered them the ability to have a large cloud presence.

Oracle realized that NetSuite has been a huge success in The United States — it's been wonderful. But Oracle is a worldwide company. So they decided to take their development teams and development budgets and pushed into new countries and created new country versions and multicurrency versions. They also decided to move into new industries. So they started doing lots of development for NetSuite.

In the two years since Oracle re-acquired NetSuite, they took on Hyperion, which is one of the leading FP&A Solutions in the world. They created a NetSuite version of it. So, what needs to be improved? There's a lot of development in a lot of areas and a lot of markets that haven't been served.

One of the things that I did, was I had all of my clients going into NetSuite and they were loving it. Still, I also had a lot of pharmaceutical clients, pharmaceutical manufacturers that could not use cloud-based software because it was hard to validate. Not to mention, NetSuite puts out a new version every six months. What we thought were the validation protocols, would not allow us to do that.

For years and years, Pharma has been version-locked into the old system because they don't want to revalidate. Well, we found a way around that and we started moving into the pharmaceutical industry, aerospace, and defense. The security issues related to national security have stated that we can't use cloud software unless it's encrypted. But now the Department of Defense has started saying, "Hey, NetSuite is. We're not seeing security breaches into the data or anything like that".

There's a lot of areas like that, that NetSuite has to mature and grow into. What needs to be improved is the development in the other areas and other businesses that can use NetSuite, but it's rapidly coming about. Five years ago, certain companies, like Pharma specifically, would come and tell us they would like to use NetSuite. We'd have to tell them that we don't do that. Please search elsewhere. They would say, "But our CFO used to work in a company that has NetSuite. He thinks he can do it. He wants to do it". By pushing the market like that, NetSuite got into a lot of areas that they wouldn't have broken into previously, but people had used NetSuite before and they loved it. A lot of it's been driven by the market itself and the development is catching up.

The manufacturing and planning side could be improved. That part isn't up to date. NetSuite could be easier to integrate in general. 

An area for improvement in NetSuite ERP is its accounting functionality because it has certain limitations. You can't maintain sub-ledgers or post accrued expenses in sub-ledger forms, so you'll need to post in journals.

The pricing is another area that can be improved in NetSuite ERP because the pricing was lower when it wasn't part of Oracle, but after Oracle acquired Netsuite and NetSuite ERP was offered as a cloud service, the price went up.

I'd like to see a new feature in the next version of NetSuite ERP: scripting, so you can develop and add your modules to the solution. For example, you want to add a new project accounting module to NetSuite ERP. Still, that module should be yours, meaning that Oracle shouldn't have any rights to it, and you should be able to use that module on NetSuite ERP entirely or even sell it to other vendors. It's just Oracle or Netsuite serving as a host where you can showcase the additional modules or functionalities you've developed.

Our interactions with Oracle have not always been positive. Obtaining clear and transparent information on costs has been challenging, and we often struggle to understand the details of the invoices we receive from Oracle. The communication has been peculiar, and the overall commercial process has been less than satisfactory. Understanding the licensing aspect was particularly challenging for us. We were taken aback by the lack of clarity regarding when costs would commence and which functions necessitated a license.

Maintaining workflow on the solution is very difficult. So, it needs improvement. Improvement in the solution's manufacturing is also needed.

For manufacturing, we are looking at other providers to make it possible for integrations and to maintain every integration to the system. We want everything to be stable here in Colombia since we don't have localizations.

If they could provide more integration options to connect with different products, that would be ideal. Although they provide a lot of functionality within NetSuite, if something is very complex in nature, for example, if you are a manufacturing company, if you're using it for manufacturing, there may be an MRP where we have to do position planning, those advanced features are not available in NetSuite.

From a user spec perspective, there is definitely a lot of scope for UI and UX enhancement. I would expect some screens to be more user-friendly and from the configuration side, so everything in the NetSuite world works on the bundle. If they can provide any mechanism where we can quickly group the bundles based on the need or the process, then that will be helpful. The current process is very time-consuming. We have to do it one by one. 

The pricing may be the only area for improvement. Currently, many vendors and OEMs are using a user-based pricing model, where we pay for each user accessing the system. However, NetSuite has a more modular pricing structure. The pricing could be adjusted accordingly, which could be beneficial. Additionally, adding advanced modules such as AI components or customer service modules could help the system become more scalable.

The integration of Oracle products, such as AutoCAD and CAD Drawings, with NetSuite, is a standard requirement for most customers. However, the current integration available requires a lot of workarounds and manual coding. To make the solution easier to implement, having a middleware to connect existing editions of Oracle would be beneficial. This would make it easier for customers to implement the cost platform solution.

Improvement-wise, it should be more customizable. Currently, you can't enhance the product yourself in terms of development for any applications unless you've got a very strong and big development team. Those are the skills that are in very short supply.

I would also like them to provide the ability to format their reports as required. Currently, it has quite a basic reporting structure, especially when you're trying to generate reports. So, I would like them to spend more time improving its ability to customize the visual formats of reports.

The areas that this product needs to improve on is the implementation and inventory processes. That is my accounting-based opinion. The more automated these processes are, the better.

In NetSuite ERP, they should focus on offering better customization options. In Microsoft Dynamics Business One, we have features like formatted search queries and SDK-level development, which allows us to easily put controls at the front end. NetSuite ERP lacks this level of customization, and if they improve it, the product will be even better. 

Another area of improvement is documentation and support. In Microsoft Dynamics Business One, we can easily refer to Google and manuals to manage things in-house, but with NetSuite ERP, we often have to depend on developers and experts for support. Additionally, since NetSuite ERP uses the Oracle database, mapping extra requirements can sometimes be limited or constrained. They should address these aspects to enhance the product.

I didn't see the NetSuite ERP having the profit center or fund management features we have in SAP, and that's where we are struggling. What we need is a fund management feature, which we didn't find in the current version.

We're mainly looking for the fund management feature in the next version.

NetSuite is good for data management, but it's missing payroll features. 

There's always room for improvement in every system.  It's going to have some functional verticals that just aren't as competitive in the app, due to the fact that there are older systems that have been built for 20 years that are deep. For example, in manufacturing, there's something called process manufacturing, versus discrete manufacturing. There's a couple of systems that'll beat NetSuite on process manufacturing.

In terms of the main improvement to NetSuite is the talent itself. It's grown so fast and there are about 25,000 companies running on it, and it's a relatively newer system compared to other competitors. It's growing so fast that the talent base in the partner organization (there's about 200 of them), is pretty thin. 

There's a lot of bodies. There's a lot of kids there. I call them the kids because they're people in their twenties, maybe in their thirties. If you're under 40, you are still a kid to me. What it boils down to is that I've been doing assessments for 40 years. I have five grown sons between the age of 30 and 44. Not a single one of them, if they worked around the clock for the rest of their lives, could catch up with me on experience, because in today's market people get pigeonholed and specialized. They don't get a broad experience. People aren't building systems anymore, so you don't have that depth. What it boils down to is most of these people working in these ERP projects, in all the systems, are truly not systems people.

They're actually people that just know how to push buttons and settings and workflows and reports, and spit things out. They know how to configure a system, however, they don't really know much about how it would actually do what it does, or how it's built. Therefore, the weakness in that is that when you get into business models that require some real custom configuration, they don't really know how to do that. 

In today's market, young people aren't learning how to really learn a business. What's happening is a lot of systems focused work without first understanding the business that they're actually serving. That's prevalent in the NetSuite world and these newer systems, due to the fact that they've basically been staffed with and around young people who really don't have a lot of business experience. They may know a lot about that application, that system, but then not really know very much about the business. Business experience is an issue in this market today.

The product should improve its warehouse management solution. 

The CRM module just does the basics. I’ve worked with CRM tools for over 15 years, rolling out Siebel and Oracle as a sales manager and as an IT leader. I now deploy NetSuite ERP and eCommerce.

I’ve worked with the SFDC folks in extensive demos as well as some contact management software. I know my way around this CRM subject area reasonably well.

The NetSuite tools perform the needed functions that a sales team needs. Because it is integral to the NetSuite platform with a variety of technical tools, I feel it is more capable for the sophisticated user.

My sense is that sales teams having sophisticated capability without having the time to learn or benefit from it, does not compete with the SFDC approach of rapid start up and simplicity for the end user.

Embedded graphics and a simpler UI seem to win over the sales teams. That is why the CRM within the NetSuite application is best sold as part of an enterprise sale. This prevents the sales team from going their own way in application selection. Companies that choose the best breed of solutions and then choose to integrate them, create a sub-optimized enterprise solution.

Do not treat the CRM capability as a bolt on to the excellent ERP platform.

Give the CRM module the embedded graphics and faster responding user interface for laptops and mobile devices that attracts the general sales and marketing teams.

For more sophisticated CRM users, leverage the native tie in to ERP and eCommerce for real time financial, inventory, and sales data.

Most of the features that my customers deal with I get access to. I can't recall coming across any missing features. We haven't come across areas that are hard to understand or configure. It's all pretty straightforward. 

If you do go through an implementor, you need to be careful that they are actual implementors and not just resellers.

The cloud version lacked the flexibility for some customization. That would've been nice, however, it also then forced us to get out of some bad practices. It really helps you, actually, as it's not as necessarily flexible in terms of customizations, at least the version we worked with. They were working towards improving it.

Some of the features around the payroll and payroll taxes and management of that are lacking. We had to outsource some of that because we found that the functionality isn't there. This has been one of the bugaboos in that product. If the company grows into a lot more markets in terms of the business states and regions, they would need to look at maybe an alternate product for the sales tax and use tax compliance, as that area has gotten more complex in the last few years with the change in laws. NetSuite is well-suited for that.

As with any system offering large volumes of data, there are limitations on processing large volumes of data in custom ways. The core data processing works great but when clients want to process data in custom ways, a limitation exists because of the cloud-based model and shared servers among clients.

I would like to see improvement around the Revenue Recognition module.

Right now, several templates are there, but they are either too complicated, or they are difficult to configure, from a company finance perspective.

In addition, I would like to see improvements in the inventory module and in the manufacturing domain.

NetSuite is still made for small/medium enterprises and needs to focus on bigger organizations, i.e., the Enterprise Edition. NetSuite also needs to provide better budget allocation in order to achieve control over the fund distribution in real-time. For example, if the budget allocated is less and the expense is utilized, the system should not allow the user or needs to warn the user from entering the transactions.

Under Budget allocation: We don't have control over the restriction on over expenses. After distribution of budget on the accounts, if lets say Stationery Expenses budgeted 400$ the actual expenses can not go beyond 400$, unless there is change in the Budget.

SalesForce CRM gives permission to approve transactions without log in to system just form email Note "Approve", "Done" . i.e. if I am the approver I will get an email notification and from that I can revert back as Note "Approve" or "Reject" to approve/reject record without getting in to account. In NetSuite we need to have the access for any approval so we need to log in and approve the transaction.

the functionality as far as I can see is really good. It's modern and really configurable - and even customisations that in other systems I've worked on would take months takes days - sometimes hours - so on the whole, it is a very good solution.

The solution is not user-friendly and it is complex to use.

There are still some bugs in some of the modules. Sometimes the system shows unexpected behavior. I’d love to see quicker fixes and fewer bugs.

To exponentially increase revenue of cloud ERP SW, human intervention could be minimized, and there might be certain ways of optimizing the method of selecting & configuring apps by the end user.

It has been well addressed that especially on the area of complex business process like ERP, there still are areas which needs consulting service from experts. The area may mean assessment, system configuration and set up, etc.especially on the initial phase of implementation. 

Additionally, difficulties for end user to select proper modules from cloud ERP were addressed.

Without having some knowledge about the ERP system, it may not be easy to decide and select appropriate module through the descriptions or even with some trial experience, as what is shown may differ from expectation. 

So, I think that those are typical chasm that prohibit exponential growth of cloud ERP market, by the nature of requiring supports from experts, saying constraints of human dependency.

Role based design in NetSuite may mitigate many issues of the above by keeping the nature of end user perspectives.  

The concept of ‘Role based’ may be extended if there is a feature that allows user to adjust the location/sequence of operation on the screen or the operating procedure based on the industry and size (number of user) of the enterprise.

It would be great if they offered localization for Central America. It'll help us create local taxes, local fiscal requirements, and local reporting issues easily. 

NetSuite ERP's UI could be improved. There are some features that are very complex that do not have to be. There are some aspects of the solution that could be simplified and this can include the documentation. Since it's a very complex tool, you expect to have great detailed documentation to help you implement it.

There is a lot of room for improvement. Multiple manufacturing features need to be updated on NetSuite. More functionalities need to be added. I think there are a lot of functionalities coming out for warehouse management systems and manufacturing automation via advanced manufacturing functionalities. I think they need to improve a little more on those aspects and make it easier on the scheduling aspect. 

In the next release, I would like to see more planning functionalities for manufacturing. I think there are already a few planning functionalities coming out, but more is expected from NetSuite.

The solution is not good in a production company.

The NetSuite fixed asset module needs to be worked on.

There is always a way to improve the tools used for customizing it to the special needs of the customers. They could make it even better.

The pricing is high. For small companies, it is not very competitive.

The manufacturing aspect needs to improve.

The user interface could be improved. The latest technology can be used to improve the list view of records and load pages faster on a browser. This will make the search faster.

It needs better POS features. It’s a point-of-sale system, implemented for retail business.