Manufacturing in the Cloud:Enhancing the Suite

NetSuite is no stranger to manufacturing and is heavily investing in enhancing the capabilities it can deliver to that industry. Coupled with the power of the NetSuite Financials, CRM, and ecommerce capabilities, NetSuite truly enables manufacturing in the cloud. Over the last few releases, NetSuite has delivered a number of enhancements to the base application.

From a manufacturer’s perspective, NetSuite continues to regularly and continuously enhance the application. Examples of recent improvements follow.

Manufacturing Work in Process
Manage your shop floor activities with finer control with the new Manufacturing Work in Process (WIP) functionality. This new functionality adds a multi-step process, which includes work order issue, work order completion, and work order close.

Demand Planning
For businesses to achieve best-in-class inventory management they must maintain the right amount of inventory to effectively meet anticipated demand. By doing so, businesses can maintain a delicate balance, neither tying up too much capital in excess inventory nor carrying too little inventory and subsequently risking missed sales or customer satisfaction issues because of “stock-outs.”

With NetSuite’s new Demand Planning feature, purchasing and inventory managers can determine the demand projection of items in the coming months based on historical data and trends or sales forecast information, plan inventory accordingly, and then create purchase orders and work orders to effectively meet anticipated demand.

Available to Promise
NetSuite increases customer service levels for manufacturers and wholesale distributors with the new Available-to-Promise feature, one of the most requested enhancements from product-centric companies. This new feature allows sales departments to get clear visibility into the projected ship date of goods during the quote and order process.

For example, a customer who calls a sales person to ask for a quote or place an order may ask about the projected date of the shipment. With this new feature, the sales rep can immediately provide the customer with the next date the item will be available by simply accessing the new Check Item Availability screen. This provides both a better experience for the customer and improved sales productivity through self-service. In addition, buyers from the purchasing department can more easily review the projected inventory for handling projected stock-outs.

Standard Costing
Standard Costing allows manufacturers and wholesale distributors to more easily identify cost-saving opportunities both in the production and procurement processes. It enables businesses to maintain standard costs broken out across the various cost categories of the product and perform variance analysis between the actual cost and the standard cost.

This ability gives managers more information about when variances occur and why, so they can:

• More easily understand why actual costs differ from expected costs.
• Pinpoint the exact cost categories that might be responsible for the variation, such as materials or labor cost changes
• Take the appropriate action to ensure that cost variances are less likely to occur in the future.

Firms can review variances to identify cost improvement areas:

• Purchase price variances are generated for the procurement process.
• Production quantity and cost variances are generated in the production process.

Revision Control
Manufacturers can track effective and obsolete components in bills of material (BOM) with effectivity dating or revision control. On the assembly item record, there is a new BOM effectivity control field that offers flexibility on how you manage effectivity in BOM. For example, a widget may have multiple versions. The different versions may have different components since the components are revised based on vendor design changes, engineering changes, component item obsolescence, and other factors.

Editable Work Orders
The new editable Work Orders capability provides more flexibility to adapt to change during the manufacturing process. Components on a work order can now be added, deleted, or changed to help deal with events such as inventory shortages.

With this new feature, users can edit the components of a work order as long as the work order status is pending build. If an assembly build has already been performed against a work order, new components can be added to it, but existing components cannot be deleted.

In addition, with the new scripting capabilities for the customization of work orders, SuiteScript can now be executed based on the default work order form during the work order creation process from a special order, or during the mass create work order process.

Lead Time per Location
Enter lead time and safety stock levels on a per-location basis. With the addition of this capability, users can refine their planning process with more accurate safety stock and lead time values.

Cycle Counting
NetSuite now offers a detailed workflow around cycle counting. This new feature provides warehouse managers with a higher level of inventory accuracy, enabling tighter control over the company’s assets. The functionality is built around a new Create Inventory Count Page that allows users to choose a list of items to be counted based on selection criteria such as next count date range, item classification, zero count, and more.

Serial Number Generation
Lot and serial tracking has been in core NetSuite for many years, but with this new serial number functionality, NetSuite can now auto-generate serial numbers with a prefix.

NetSuite has a long roadmap of features planned to continue to enhance its suite—allowing manufacturers to truly operate in the cloud.