Building on a Solid Foundation

By Jayesh Jain, SuiteCloud Evangelist

Manufacturing companies have complex requirements. They must manage a diverse and global supply chain, have real-time inventory management capabilities, manage the production processes efficiently, have quick responsiveness to changes in demand, and cater to a variety of wholesale distribution and sales channels. Meeting these demanding requirements calls for a solid platform such as NetSuite SuiteCloud.

As one might expect, manufacturing partners and customers are among the heaviest users of various platform features and are the leading adopters of the platform technologies. For instance, when the new Single Sign-on functionality based on SAML 2.0 was released, one of our manufacturing customers started using it within a couple days of the release. The updated Single Sign-on, which is based on XML protocol to exchange user information between the identity provider and NetSuite, enables standards-based, cross-domain Single Sign-on functionality.

CSV import is another heavily used platform feature among manufacturing customers. Many improvements have been introduced to make CSV imports perform even better.

The manufacturing vertical was further strengthened with the introduction of new record types: Item Demand Plan, Item Revision, Item Groups, and Item Supply Plan. To provide a well-rounded solution, support for these record types was added in SuiteScript and SuiteTalk web services.

As manufacturing customers rely heavily on SuiteScripts to implement their advanced business processes, this year the SuiteCloud platform saw the launch of SuiteCloud IDE. With features such as auto completion on standard NetSuite records and also custom records, SuiteCloud IDE makes it easier to edit SuiteScripts and also upload these scripts in NetSuite with the click of a button.

Many of the Scheduled Scripts process large amounts of data, and at times these operations can be I/O intensive. This often causes the scripts to exceed the governance usage limits. New yield management and governance usage management APIs have been introduced to enable developers to better manage the execution of the Scheduled Scripts that have been deployed. Below is an example of how users can leverage these new APIs.

All governance usages are reset to zero when the yielded scripts resume execution.

In order to build complex business logic, manufacturing partners make heavy use of custom records. The platform now provides an additional layer of protection with optimistic locking turned on automatically on all new custom records. This ensures data integrity and prevents “race” conditions during custom record updates—when multiple users are trying to update the same custom record.

Since manufacturing customers are becoming increasingly global, enhancements have been made to allow customers to easily import the currency exchange rates via SuiteTalk. New operations such as getCurrencyRate make it easy to look up exchange rates in effect as of a specified date.

With these and many more exciting features, the SuiteCloud platform continues to move forward to ensure that manufacturing customers and partners realize significant cost savings for themselves and their customers. The SuiteCloud platform provides a solid foundation that allows our manufacturing customers to build innovative and sophisticated manufacturing processes and excel in this highly competitive environment.

In this space, Jayesh Jain explores solutions for businesses via the SuiteCloud platform.