Monitoring Performance in NetSuite Release 2013 Version 2

By Jayesh Jain, SuiteCloud Evangelist, NetSuite

Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing companies have complex requirements. As such, they have heavy customizations and their applications have a lot of scripting involved. Due to the complexity, it is not easy to identify how deploying these scripts will impact the performance of various transactions. The problem gets further amplified when there are multiple scripts running on some of these transactions.

To help tackle these issues, the SuiteCloud platform team recently announced the availability of the Script Performance Monitor tool, which measures the performance of user event scripts and provides a breakdown of time being spent across all scripts. If you notice that your transactions are slow, this tool can help you identify the scripts that take an unusually long time to execute. Once the scripts are identified, you can focus your efforts on improving their performance of those scripts.

Let’s look at an example that illustrates how the Script Performance Monitor tool can help identify the time spent across various scripts so that you can identify the ones that need to be examined in an effort to improve performance.

In this use case, the customer has requirements to perform advanced bin management. The customer wants to place the items into the bins depending on the size of the items received at the warehouse. In order to achieve this, the customer has created various customizations such as adding custom fields on their bins to capture the length, width, and height of the bins. They have also added custom fields to capture the package dimensions: length, width, and height of the item. When the items are received at the warehouse, they have SuiteScripts with logic to identify which bin would be appropriate for a given item depending on the item’s dimensions. They have three scripts for this specialized bin assignment processing: Pre Bin Assignment Processing.js, Bin Assignment.js, and Post Bin Assignment Processing.js

The logic used for bin assignment processing is pictured below. (PICTURE)

Once the scripts were deployed, the customer noticed that the Item Receipts were taking longer. Next step is to identify where the time is being spent. The customer already has the Script Performance Monitor SuiteApp installed in the environment. To find out which of the scripts is consuming more time, they review the performance log for the Item Receipt record, shown above. (PICTURE)

They click on the View Details icon to get a breakdown of time spent in each of the SuiteScripts.

They realize that majority of the time is being spent in the Bin Assignment script. They can now look at the Bin Assignment script and try to optimize the logic used to assign the bins. From the pie chart on the previous page, they also observed that the Pre Bin Assignment is taking significantly more time than they had envisioned. It was supposed to be a really lightweight script. So they can look at the Pre Bin Assignment script in detail as well as identify areas for performance improvement.

Another widely used feature by our WD customers is the printing of various transactions. Moving along with the momentum we had in this area from the last release, our platform team has included many more transactions that can use the Advanced PDF / HTML templates. These templates will allow you to easily format and style your transaction printouts and ensure that they are pixel perfect.

To enhance the ease of customization, a new feature-packed WYSIWYG editor is provided for easy template editing. In addition, more elements are now available to customize various transaction printouts. You can now customize in additional ways, such as:

• Alternate table row colors
• Assign left or right text justification
• Print in a grid table
• Control margins

On the next page is a sample Sales Order transaction report using the new template. (PICTURE)

With improvements such as these, printing and emailing transaction records in NetSuite is easier than ever.

With these and many more exciting features in the NetSuite Release 2013 Version 2, the SuiteCloud platform continues to innovate and provide the functionality that our customers need the most. New tools such as the Script Performance Monitor enable our customers to boost the performance of their applications, allowing them to implement increasingly demanding and complex business processes.