The NetSuite Podcast

Founded in 1998, NetSuite is the world’s first cloud company. Our suite of business software is used globally by more than 42,000 customers. This podcast features interviews with the people behind the technology and stories from businesses using it every day.

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How NetSuite Helps OPIE Software Improve Patient Care 06/16/2025

How NetSuite Helps OPIE Software Improve Patient Care Learn more about NetSuite for software companies: In this episode of the NetSuite Podcast, cohost Ian McCue sits down with Pate Henderson, executive director of finance and administration at OPIE Software, a practice management software provider for prosthetics and orthotics clinics. They start the episode by discussing OPIE Software and its mission [1:55]. Pate then dives into the company’s adoption of NetSuite and why it was the “Goldilocks” system for them [14:14]. Ian and Pate conclude the podcast episode by discussing what’s next for OPIE Software [31:31]. Follow Us Here: Pate Henderson: OPIE Software: Contact NetSuite Sales - Learn More about NetSuite ERP - Learn More about NetSuite HCM - Learn More about NetSuite Analytics & Reporting - NetSuite Customer Success Stories - Follow us here: LinkedIn: X (Twitter): Instagram: Facebook: #OPIESoftware #FinancialExecutives #NetSuiteERP #NetSuiteSuiteBilling #NetSuiteACS #NetSuiteCRM #MedicalSoftware #ERPforSoftwareCompanies -------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: How NetSuite Helps OPIE Software Improve Patient Care 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:42:02 Unknown Welcome to Perspectives on Health and Tech podcast. Brought to you by Oracle Health. In this series, we have conversations on creating a seamless and connected health care world where everyone thrives. Let's get started. Welcome to perspective Oracle Health and Life Science podcast. I'm your host today Danny Gladden. I'm a licensed clinical social worker and general manager of behavioral health and social care here at Oracle Health. 00:00:42:04 - 00:01:13:15 Unknown As we step into the month of May, we recognize Mental Health Awareness Month, a time to raise awareness, reduce stigma, and highlight progress in mental health care. I'd also like to give a special shout out to our nurses across Canada and the U.S. as we celebrate National Nursing Week. Thank you for your unwavering dedication and compassion. Social workers and nurses make great teams. 00:01:13:17 - 00:01:45:04 Unknown Today, we're honored to be joined by a leader in mental health care innovation. Please welcome Doctor Gillian Strudwick from Kim H. The center for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada's largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital and one of the world's leading research centers in its field. So, Jillian, welcome. Before we dive into big topics here, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the great workhappening at Kim? 00:01:45:06 - 00:02:12:14 Unknown Thank you, Danny, and thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this great podcast. So I might break this into two sections. First, I'll introduce myself, and then I'll tell you a little bit about the organization that I'mfortunate to work for. So I'm Doctor Jillian Strudwick, I'm a registered nurse, and I've worked primarily in mental health clinical settings here in Toronto, Canada, and also in other parts of Canada and internationally. 00:02:12:16 - 00:02:41:21 Unknown Currently, I am the inaugural Chief Clinical Informatics Officer at Kam H, representing our nurses and all of our non physician health disciplines like social work. And I have a couple of other hats as well. So one is that I'mthe head scientist of the Digital Mental Health Lab. And I'm also the scientific director of our Digital Innovation Hub, which is about really accelerating our work in this digital sphere and research practice, education and beyond. 00:02:41:22 - 00:03:10:04 Unknown So that's about me. But I'll move on to talking about Kim H. So Kim H is CAMH, the center for Addiction and Mental Health, and it's Canada's largest mental health and addictions teaching hospital. We think Kim and I think there's lots to suggest that we're we're true in saying this, that we're world leading research and education center in mental health, and we're located right in the heart of downtown Toronto. 00:03:10:05 - 00:03:35:20 Unknown But we serve people across our province, Ontario and across the country as well. So in terms of a few numbers that I'll share with you. We've had, just over 16,000 emergency department visits in the last year. Over 40,000 patients that were treated. Over 80,000 virtual care appointments. And I'll, I'll provide a few more numbers here as well. 00:03:35:21 - 00:03:59:20 Unknown Almost 8000 rtms visits, 60 million and new research funds and more than a thousand articles published. I think you get the point that there's a lot going on at camp, and it's a great place to be. You know, I have been on your campus a number of times and always appreciate that your campus is right in the heart of of Toronto. 00:03:59:22 - 00:04:31:11 Unknown In, in, in a bustling area. And I think there's there's no greater way to reduce stigma than, you know, placing, such a well-respected, mental health and addiction treatment organization right in the heart of the city. Whereas if you go to many other communities, you'll kind of see the mental health hospitals and treatment providers kind of on the outskirts of town, really appreciate, campus role right there in the heart of, Toronto. 00:04:31:13 - 00:04:55:13 Unknown And I think this goes into something, Jillian, you speak about passionately, which is the idea that mental health treatment is social justice for our audience. Tell us what you mean by that. Why is it an important lens? Social justice. Which you view your work? Yeah. I think it's a quite an important point that you bring up, Danny. 00:04:55:15 - 00:05:24:18 Unknown And it's something we're really proud of. Talking about that mental health work is social justice work. And so, part of doing social justice work is to be informed in this space. And part of being informed is understanding that mental illness disproportionately affects marginalized communities, who are also often facing barriers to things like accessing care. And this could be due to racism, poverty, stigma, geography. 00:05:24:18 - 00:05:59:06 Unknown And I could continue. So on and so forth. So and Kim H. We see mental health is deeply rooted in social justice because access to care, dignity and treatment and prevention are, are not, equitably distributed. Kim advocates for policies and systems change that ensure mental health care is not a privilege, but but a right. And so that's really our social justice lens, framing and shaping the last few statements that I made. 00:05:59:08 - 00:06:31:01 Unknown So, we have done some work more recently, in the last couple of years on dismantling anti-Black racism, which has become a more formalized organizational commitment. And so I'll just read a section from one of our documents around dismantling anti-Black racism. And, excuse me for it sounds like I'm reading here because I'm reading from a document, but, system, systemic anti-Black racism is a barrier to high quality health care for black patients at Kim H. 00:06:31:01 - 00:06:57:09 Unknown And across the health care system, the data lay bare with those in black communities have signaled for decades discrimination and oppression based on race delays, care and harms individuals on their way to recovery. Racism also has a negative impact on the quality of work life for black staff. Beyond the damaging emotional and psychological consequences. It limits their career trajectory and it goes on from there. 00:06:57:11 - 00:07:30:21 Unknown And so I bring this out as one of the many initiatives that the organization is committed to. And as a result ofthis commitment, this public commitment. You can read what I just read on on our website, Kamchatka, that there's a number of activities that the organization is doing everywhere, from doing offering more culturally appropriate therapies to education for staff, staff, support groups, creations of processes that support equity, lots of advocacy work with the government. 00:07:30:23 - 00:07:58:14 Unknown And so a lot of this work is ongoing. But this gives you sort of a more grounded, more concrete example of some of the the ways in which we look at social justice as being so related to mental health. My goodness, you know, the, the, the social work, the social worker in me is just grinning from ear to ear, as you describe, you know, the foundation in which camp is, is caring for folks. 00:07:58:14 - 00:08:34:14 Unknown You know, I'm, still like, licensed, clinician. And I'm licensed in Missouri and Alaska. And, you know, particularly I think about, state like Alaska, with a disproportional number of folks who are part of, who are Alaska Native. And we see, you know, those communities so much generational trauma and the impact, you know, and the impact that oppression, you know, has on, sort of repeating traumatic occurrences across the generations. 00:08:34:14 - 00:09:04:15 Unknown And so, so very important, I think, an important perspective to look at the, the experience of mental health and the treatment of mental health through, social justice lens. Jillian, I just appreciate that that, that that is a focus of, Kim H. And I'm, I'm sure the indigenous populations, your organization works with, you see a similar, you know, similar experience in the those in the, in Alaska here. 00:09:04:17 - 00:09:32:18 Unknown Now, as we pivot here thinking about, you know, you're you're I think the work you're describing from a social justice perspective is innovative. It seems like Kim is always at the cutting edge of innovation. We're a technology company. And so, you know, from a technology innovation perspective, what do you seeing? What's Kim H doing? Great question, Danny. 00:09:32:18 - 00:10:14:05 Unknown And because of my various roles at the organization, I get excited about this kind of a question. And it also describes the work that I'm doing every day with my colleagues, with our patients, their family members, and others across the organization. So yes, we're always interested in how we can use technology and to innovate with technology, but we do that so we can achieve various things, and the things that we want to achieve are being able to improve access to care so we can see more patients because, probably unlike or not unlike various organizations in the rest of Canada and in the US, we have long waiting lists for care. 00:10:14:07 - 00:10:39:21 Unknown The second is to be able to improve the quality of care. And not to say that care isn't good already, but more that as we learn and develop evidence and get feedback from our clinicians, from our patients, we can then integrate that into care. So that's the second piece. The third is to improve the patient experience. And the fourth is to really personalize care. 00:10:39:22 - 00:11:03:06 Unknown So when we think about how we innovate with technology, we're really looking to see if we can do those four things. And yes, there's other I'll, you know, other reasons. You invest in technologies for various efficiencies and cost savings. But I'm going to talk about more work, on that. The earlier four points that I described. So maybe I'll provide a couple of concrete examples. 00:11:03:06 - 00:11:31:05 Unknown The first one is thinking about and the opportunity that we have by embedding wearables into to, care processes. So these are things like aura rings or Fitbits. You know, it doesn't matter which company it is. There's lots of wearables out there, but embedding them into care processes so we can look at, sleep and activity, which are often impacted when people have symptoms of depression or anxiety. 00:11:31:07 - 00:11:55:17 Unknown And so we hope I can use this information to better understand someone's individual patterns, which could really help us tailor their treatments, as you can imagine. But also be able to identify early when a treatment may be starting to take some effect, or an early warning sign, or an indicator of someone potentially falling ill or relapsing. Lots of potential in that space. 00:11:55:17 - 00:12:26:15 Unknown And where we're getting going, primarily in the research domain in the wearable space. So that's sort of one concrete example. Another concrete example is rtms. So Kim H has been a leader in the space and doing brain stimulation research for a number of years. Our TMS and case, listeners aren't familiar with it. It's a noninvasive treatment. It uses magnetic fields to stimulate very specific regions of the brain. 00:12:26:17 - 00:12:52:15 Unknown And it's been shown to be particularly effective for people with treatment resistant depression. So these are individuals who have not responded well to medication or therapy alone. And so to date, we've had about 8000 individuals last year who have received our TMS. So we're thinking about it from advancing the science, treating individuals, of course, and doing lots of advocacy work. 00:12:52:17 - 00:13:19:15 Unknown The third example I'll provide is around the app space. So there's a lot if you were to type in depression or anxiety into any app library, you're going to see lots and lots of apps, most of which don't have a scientific backing to them. Some of which may actually be a waste of time to engage in. And so it's also really hard to make sense of that app landscape. 00:13:19:17 - 00:13:51:14 Unknown And so we've been working to develop and integrate into clinical care processes, apps that have that evidence based behind them and have some sort of a portal or interface with clinicians. So that the data can be used for care purposes. So we've got one called my change plan, for smoking, cessation of behavioral modifications. We've got one called app for independence, which is a platform for supporting people with complex behavioral and mental health conditions. 00:13:51:14 - 00:14:25:15 Unknown And it's currently used for recovery process with individuals with psychosis and schizophrenia and now opioid use disorders. And then we also have another app called Hope by Kim Age, which is a safety planning intervention for people at risk for suicide. So there's you know, that doesn't, cover all the ads, but gives you a sort of a flavor of the various apps that we've been working on so that there's the credibility, the science, and the engagement and feedback loop, for those particular areas. 00:14:25:17 - 00:14:49:06 Unknown And then finally, that last one I want to talk about is our electronic health record. So we use, Oracle Health platform. And we're really thinking about how we can optimize our use of it for the best experience for clinicians and patients alike, including this concept of open notes through our patient portal. So where patients can see their notes and so. 00:14:49:10 - 00:15:30:09 Unknown Well, if you're in the US and thinking, well, this is the normal form for us, it's not quite the norm for folks in other countries. It's optional in Canada to share mental health notes. And so we're showing some real leadership by identifying how best we can do that and opening up our notes. So I'll just close on this topic, Danny, by just saying that importantly, we're taking a human centered approach and we're doing this work, whether it be an apps, wearables with our EHR or that we're co-designing with patients and clinicians to ensure that they're usable and they meet the needs that are the most pressing needs, but also that we deliver and implement 00:15:30:09 - 00:16:00:06 Unknown technology that allows us to provide compassionate care. Because I think when we think about technology, it'soften this sort of antithetical approach to compassion and really wish we are showing that to be able to deliver compassionate care in this day and age, we have to be innovative in our use of technology. Well, what a what, just what a robust list of, of innovation. 00:16:00:06 - 00:16:27:05 Unknown You know, the committee is, is sponsoring. I'm not not at all surprised, Gillian, knowing you're knowing your history. You know, Gillian, maybe a part two to this conversation. Separate a separate podcast can be sort of on the intersection of social justice and technology. You know, we, we regularly describe some justphenomenal innovation, consumer facing innovation. 00:16:27:07 - 00:16:55:00 Unknown And, and yet we know that there's, there's consumers of care, that don't always get to take advantage of the latest and greatest innovation, the, the wearables or access to a device to allow, you know, portal or, or ortelehealth, you know, lack of hardware, lack of bandwidth, lack of sort of knowledge or trust in the available tools. 00:16:55:00 - 00:17:26:18 Unknown So, you know, maybe we can well, bookmark that, I think for another day. But in the area of innovation, you know, so cam was part of our clinical AI work group for behavioral health. This was a year long process. You know, Oracle's been an AI space for, for for many, many, many years. You know, I'm sitting in a marriott right now where, you know, I used Oracle tools to check in and to engage with, the Marriott staff. 00:17:26:18 - 00:17:50:19 Unknown And so Oracle knows a thing or two about AI. And it's taken what they know about AI and applied it to health care. And we Oracle Health and Cam and others have taken that and and morphed it for behavioral health. Soour clinical AI agent today is available in the US in behavioral health used across a number of behavioral providers. 00:17:50:19 - 00:18:18:23 Unknown I think to date we've had nearly 20,000, medication management notes, that were documenting documented using Oracle Health's clinical AI agent. So what's MH thinking about, from an AI perspective? Oh, we'rethinking about lots from an AI perspective. And I will just note that while you're sitting at a marriott, I'm sitting at the hospital right now and on the overhead speaker is a code being called the. 00:18:18:23 - 00:18:49:04 Unknown Apologies if you can hear that. We are really quite excited about the potential for AI and what it could bring for things like research, education, of course clinical care and how we operate and potentially achieve some efficiencies. So I think there's a whole bunch of areas where we see the potential for AI. We're fairly early on, early on in our journey, but we're setting up all the right infrastructure so that we can accelerate more quickly. 00:18:49:06 - 00:19:18:04 Unknown The first is that we recently launched just this month, a BMO chair in artificial intelligence and mental health. So that's a research chair role specifically for AI in mental health. And I believe it's the first and only in Canada at this time. So... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/36822910

How Social Selling Company Bomb Party Uses NetSuite to Navigate Tariffs 05/27/2025

How Social Selling Company Bomb Party Uses NetSuite to Navigate Tariffs Learn more about NetSuite Planning and Budgeting: In this episode of the NetSuite Podcast, cohost Megan O’Brien sits down with Jonny Holmes, director of finance at Bomb Party, a direct-to-consumer jewelry company that offers surprise jewelry reveals through live online parties. Megan and Jonny start by discussing Bomb Party, its growth and how Jonny ended up the company [1:43]. They then cover the impact of tariffs on Bomb Party and how the company is using NetSuite Planning and Budgeting to help navigate them [4:08]. Jonny concludes the podcast episode by giving some advice to business leaders trying to navigate global trade variability [17:29]. Follow Us Here: Bomb Party: Contact NetSuite Sales - Learn More about NetSuite ERP - Learn More about NetSuite HCM - Learn More about NetSuite Analytics & Reporting - NetSuite Customer Success Stories - Follow us here: LinkedIn: X (Twitter): Instagram: Facebook: --------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: How Social Selling Company Bomb Party Uses NetSuite to Navigate Tariffs 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:36:20 Unknown Hello, NetSuite listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in to the NetSuite Podcast. I'm Megan O'Brien, co-host of the podcast. We have an extra special episode in store for you all today. We know tariffs are top of mind for many businesses right now, and companies are figuring out the best way to handle them. So we invited Jonny Holmes, director of finance at Bomb Party, which is a direct-to-consumer jewelry company that offers surprise jewelry reveals through live online parties. 00:00:36:22 - 00:01:10:04 Unknown If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend checking them out. Customers purchase mystery items such as rings, necklaces or earrings, which are unveiled during these events, adding an element of excitement to the shopping experience. We discuss how Bomb Party has been using that sweet specifically, and that's what planning and budgeting and that sweet analytics warehouse to address tariffs, plan for addressing possible future trade policy changes, and the advice he has for business leaders trying to navigate global trade variability. 00:01:10:05 - 00:01:43:12 Unknown So stay tuned. You're not going to want to miss this episode. You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'lldive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. We'llalso feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company, and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00:01:43:14 - 00:02:09:19 Unknown Let's just jump right in. So to kick us off, could you tell our audience a bit about Bomb Party and what you do at the company? Yeah. Bomb Party is a network marketing company. We started about eight years ago. I've been here for the last two years. So what we do is we the company, it really thrives on this surprise and delight type of marketing. 00:02:09:21 - 00:02:36:15 Unknown And so what that means is it is kind of like, well, you're just ordering products or jewelry in our case, and you don't really know what you're getting. So it could be one of maybe 30 different rings or earrings or necklaces or something, whichever one you order. And so that is like the driving force around. Everything that we sell, and especially from our owners, is that they want to surprise and delight customers. 00:02:36:15 - 00:03:00:08 Unknown And so everything that we sell drives that. So we sell rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, all sorts of things. And they all are sold in that type of thing where we sell to our wholesale reps that buy in bulk from us, and then they turn around and sell it to the end consumer. Most of it, they do it online. 00:03:00:10 - 00:03:20:14 Unknown A lot of it's through TikTok, you know, so maybe use other social media platforms. But for the most part, they'reusing TikTok and they sell these pieces of jewelry, on what we call a party. And it's just a live party. So they get on and customers join their party on TikTok. They place an order for whatever it is and then, live on TikTok, 00:03:20:14 - 00:03:43:19 Unknown The rep reveals what they have. And so it could be one of many different styles that we have for that collection. And then there is a chance that you could win, like a genuine diamond. So it's just it could you could get anything. And so that really is like that business model of surprise and delight has really driven the growthin my opinion. 00:03:43:20 - 00:04:14:19 Unknown I mean, there's other factors too, but I think that that business model has really driven bond party to, to grow significantly over the past few years. I mean, we're seeing lots and lots of growth, which is awesome. And then, you know, I've been here, like I said, for two years, and I lead the finance group. So I came on to help implement NetSuite ERP, a topic that is top of mind for many of our listeners right now is tariffs as of right now. 00:04:14:19 - 00:04:38:02 Unknown What's the impact of tariffs on Bomb Party. Oh man. It's crazy because we source literally everything we source from China. And so in the tariff world, as many of you probably know, if you don't I don't know where you hit then. But, I mean, China has been hit the hardest, and we have no idea where that's going to lead. 00:04:38:04 - 00:04:59:15 Unknown You know, like it was a few weeks ago when they announced all the tariffs, and then they escalated. And then the next week they escalated again. And, you know, we are, we had a few, maybe panicked, leadership type meetings at our company about what to do. And can the company withstand some of this and what are all our options. 00:04:59:15 - 00:05:20:14 Unknown And, you know, so, like, I don't think I can understand the impact of how it's going to, you know, we don't know exactly how it's going to change or impact the business. But I can't overstate how much it will be part of what we do moving forward. You know, it's something that we just didn't consider at all six months ago. 00:05:20:14 - 00:05:48:12 Unknown And now it's something that's at the forefront of almost all of our sourcing decisions and all of that sort of thing. One thing that's really interesting that I wanted to touch on is your use of NetSuite. So how have you used NetSuite Planning and Budgeting to model the impact of tariff changes? Yeah I mean that tool honestly it'sbeen instrumental in in all of the analysis that we're doing from a from a financial perspective on tariffs. 00:05:48:13 - 00:06:17:00 Unknown You know, it just allows you to build forecasts in a relatively short amount of time. So like if you go through and if you do all the legwork to set up your items and your systems and your sales forecasts and your everything, you know, if you put all the data in and if you go through a little bit of pain of doing the work to get the info into NSPB like it allows you to really quickly throw together a forecast. 00:06:17:00 - 00:06:40:22 Unknown And so, you know, we really recently just finished our go live with NSPB. And so there was when the tariffs hit us, right when we were like going through our user training and that sort of thing. And so a lot of my job was I had to get the system up and going. So there was a lot of, you know, prep work and groundwork of getting all of the inputs correct. 00:06:40:22 - 00:06:59:00 Unknown But then as soon as all those tariffs started to hit, it was so easy for us to just plug in different scenarios. You know, on the tariff side, it mostly just impacts your product costs. And so we could input all of the different product costs for each of our collections that we're planning on selling throughout the year. 00:06:59:02 - 00:07:22:10 Unknown We can change what we think is going to happen to the demand. So the number of units that we sell, and it'sjust so high because such a high-powered system that you can plug in those numbers, refresh, and in a matter of minutes, you have, like, different versions of a forecast. You know, it's something that I think, like as a finance professional, I'm very Excel heavy a lot of times. 00:07:22:12 - 00:07:45:13 Unknown And it's something that I could totally build in Excel, but it would have taken me so long and so many, different Excel crashes. And because it's just it's a lot of data and it's just crushing through and trying to crunch everything and Excel just can't handle it. And NSPB just takes an amazing format that you could build in Excel, and it just makes it seamless. 00:07:45:13 - 00:08:06:13 Unknown Why it was so fast and easy honestly, like it's been it's been a game changer for me. Like if I ever go to if I were to ever go to another company to implement NetSuite, like I would probably just bring in NSPB to start. Like to me it's, it's that it's been that great for me. I mean, it's just saved me so much time in so many different areas. 00:08:06:14 - 00:08:32:10 Unknown And not just on the forecasting side, like on the report building side. I mean, I love NetSuite. It's the best system that I've used by far. And in NSPB, you can set it up where honestly all you do is you just refresh, in your Excel smart view, and it populates all of your reports that you have that you put in whatever your, you know, like your, board decks and all that sort of thing. 00:08:32:12 - 00:08:53:12 Unknown And it's taken my prep time for those sorts of things and just cut it in half, if not more, you know, like it's just been a huge time saver for me. And really, like I would say, even for the company, it's probably allowed us to keep running lean. I don't think we'll I think it will prevent us from having to hire more people too quickly. 00:08:53:14 - 00:09:25:04 Unknown You know, like we have we do have a small team and we are all working hard and just having the right tools in my mind is way better than over hiring to have people just do manual processes, you know? So it's to me, it'sjust been a great investment and way cheaper than hiring more people. And it allows me as like the person who knows what's going on financially in every aspect of the business, like it just allows me to pivot really quickly and provide reporting and data that people need and want. 00:09:25:06 - 00:09:50:01 Unknown That's a great testimonial. Well, my job is done here. It's actually, I mean, yeah, I'm not good at these kinds of things, honestly. But it was it is true. Like, I just, it's been awesome for me. So I could be, I'm definitely, an advocate, I guess you could say, of NSPB. NetSuite by Oracle. 00:09:50:01 - 00:10:16:06 Unknown The number one cloud financial system is everything you need to grow all in one place. Financials, inventory, HR, and more. Make better decisions faster so you can do more and spend less. See how atNetSuite.com/pod. Well what are Bomb Party's plans for navigating potential future changes in trade policies? And how are you using NetSuite to prepare for those scenarios? 00:10:16:08 - 00:10:40:04 Unknown Yeah, I mean, it's all moving. We don't know exactly. We're looking at everything that we can. And you know, our teams that are over that sort of thing. Like they're working really hard and talking with as many people as they can to try to figure out the best solution. There are a lot of options on the table, but it just depends. 00:10:40:05 - 00:11:01:22 Unknown You know some things that are out of our control. If tariffs were to go away we would probably just keep all ofour production in China and then try to slowly diversify in case of, you know, further tariffs or anything like that. But there are things on the table like we're that we're exploring should we manufacture in the US, should we move countries in Southeast Asia? 00:11:01:22 - 00:11:24:18 Unknown Should we or should we try to source some raw materials in the United States, ship them to China and then have them ship us the finished goods like there's, you know, there's so many options that we're trying to work through and with, with industry experts, customs industry experts, I should say that that are advising us and we're just trying to work through those things. 00:11:24:18 - 00:11:46:10 Unknown But from a financial standpoint and putting our forecast together of how that impacts the company, impactsthem financially and like, can we handle it? Do we have enough cash? Do we can we do all of these things? I mean, NetSuite is core to that and specifically NSPB, I mean, like I said, we have there is the data. 00:11:46:12 - 00:12:16:00 Unknown The data lives in NeSuite ERP, of course. But to do what NSPB does, it would take so much longer to do it manually like in Excel and that sort of thing. So I mean, it is definitely core to our discussions and in any sort of forecasting. Well, you kind of touched on this but have NetSuite’s reporting capabilities provided insights that maybe will help influence decisions like possible supplier selection or product pricing? 00:12:16:00 - 00:12:37:11 Unknown How are you using those reports to kind of inform that view, if you will? Yeah, I would say, I like on the supplier selection, not so much. That, you know, it's kind of specialized industry and jewelry and that sort of thing. Solike, I don't know if any reporting is ever going to tell us what supplier to use. 00:12:37:13 - 00:13:04:23 Unknown But as far as pricing decisions and forecasting decisions, it's been great. You know, our product development people have a target margin that they've been trying to shoot for, for the entire life of the company. And they really have never had any data to back it up on if that was, if they were actually hitting that target and, you know, you just if you don't have the data, you can't see. 00:13:04:23 - 00:13:36:20 Unknown And so when we first implemented NetSuite back at the beginning of 2024, that was one of our first initiatives,was to see if we're actually profitable and if are we hitting these target margins. And so the reporting in NetSuite that allows us to see what our margins are, both as like a product category or group, you know, we'reusing classes to categorize those or on a single item level, like we can see the margins and it's made. 00:13:36:22 - 00:14:02:11 Unknown Just having that view has helped the company make several different decisions around pricing. Yeah. So it'sbeen I mean, I can't overstate it. It's been instrumental in all of that. What do you think is a key benefit of having a tool like NetSuite Planning and Budgeting in a rapidly changing trade landscape for people out there that might be looking for something to help them handle it? 00:14:02:13 - 00:14:33:15 Unknown Yeah, I would say it's the speed. You know, for a finance professional most people know how to look at it, you know, but it just takes them a long time. It's hard to, to crunch data and to format it in Excel and to get it when you're dealing with large volumes of data. It's hard. And the fact that NSPB has all of that and it can calculateand it can run all of those scenarios for you, you know, you could run however many different scenarios you want and then compare them against each other. 00:14:33:15 - 00:14:54:08 Unknown I mean, it's just it really is the speed and the reliability of it. You don't have to worry about broken Excel formulas. You don't have to worry. You know, it's all just in a platform that you can trust works, and it doesn'treally break down or stop working. And it can just crunch a massive amount of data in a short amount of time. 00:14:54:08 - 00:15:19:03 Unknown And so that's what that would be my major selling point honestly, is that you can do it just allows you to be more nimble and quick with analyses and forecasting. Now, what about people who like working and broken down Excel, but do it now? I'm just kidding. But you're never going to get to those people. You know their stuff well. 00:15:19:05 - 00:15:44:15 Unknown Do you anticipate? It's hard to tell right now as we have. So we talked about because things are changing. Do you anticipate future changes around Bomb Party’s sourcing, manufacturing, or decisions to expand into new markets because of tariffs? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I touched on a little bit earlier, but that's exactly what our product development group is doing right now. 00:15:44:15 - 00:16:06:10 Unknown We have a dedicated person that is working to try to find the best solution. So is it going to change for us? Yeah, it's absolutely going to change. And having the data to be able to see that is going to help drive those decisions on what we think will be best for Bomb Party and, you know, for our future success and growth and that sort of thing. 00:16:06:12 - 00:16:31:07 Unknown But yeah, I mean, something will change. No, no question. Getting a little more granular. What data or reporting do you rely on in NetSuite to understand global trade-related costs and risks? Yeah, for us it's, you know, maybe we're taking maybe it's too simplified. But for us, at least right now, we're really just looking at the cost side. 00:16:31:09 - 00:16:51:09 Unknown So in NetSuite ERP, like we are, we're constantly looking at COGS and the reporting that there is around that to look at margins and that sort of thing. But then, you know, we do use the landed cost function to make sure that we're actually including all of our costs. So, you know, everything is a landed loaded cost. 00:16:51:09 - 00:17:13:08 Unknown Instead of trying to piece everything together outside the system in Excel or something like that. And so we rely really heavily on that. You know, I would also say that NSPB is probably a better place to analyze and see what those margins are. Now, I would also put a plug in for is probably a good place to see that, but that'swhere most of our analysis is coming in. 00:17:13:08 - 00:17:34:09 Unknown And that's the data that we're looking at around tariffs is it's all right now. It's all on the COGS side. And duties of course which are the tariffs and then freight you know. So all of those landed costs were allocating or they're all considered in this. What advice would you give to other business leaders that are trying to navigate global trade variability? 00:17:34:11 - 00:17:57:14 Unknown It's a great question. And I don't know if... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/36733225

NetSuite Change Management: Listen and Learn 04/14/2025

NetSuite Change Management: Listen and Learn Learn more about NetSuite Customer Success: In this episode of the NetSuite Podcast, cohost Megan O’Brien is joined by NetSuite’s own Alexandra Wright, senior education and user adoption consultant, and Jessica Jennings, senior program manager, to discuss change management. They start by giving an overview of the change management topic [5:37] and how those implementing or expanding their NetSuite instance can incorporate it. Jessica and Alexandra then delve into NetSuite’s specific methodology for change management [11:35]. They discuss the role of learning in change management [29:04] and conclude the episode with advice on where listeners can learn more [33:03]. NetSuite Change Management Vlogs: Free Learning and Change Management Content: Follow Us Here: Alexandra Wright: Jessica Jennings: Contact NetSuite Sales - Learn More about NetSuite ERP - Learn More about NetSuite HCM - Learn More about NetSuite Analytics & Reporting - NetSuite Customer Success Stories - Follow us here: LinkedIn: X (Twitter): Instagram: Facebook: #NetSuite #NetSuiteLCS #ChangeManagement #NetSuiteERP #ErpImplementation #SoftwareImplementation --------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:36:14 Unknown Hey Suite listeners. Welcome to the NetSuite podcast. I'm Megan O'Brien, a co-host of the podcast, and today I'm excited to continue our Listen and Learn series. We started this podcast series with the goal of giving customers useful tips and tricks that will help them get more out of NetSuite. For part three of this series, we'retalking change management and how you can use it as a strategic lever to maximize your ERP software and create a more agile, responsive organization. 00:00:36:16 - 00:01:00:17 Unknown So today we have two guests joining us, Alexandra Wright, who is a senior education and user adoption consultant, and Jessica Jennings, a senior education program manager, both from NetSuite. You actually might remember Jessica from a network podcast episode about a year and a half ago. We're so excited that she came back on the show in this episode. 00:01:00:18 - 00:01:34:10 Unknown These two change gurus highlight the critical role of change management and aligning people and processes with new systems, ensuring sustained user adoption. They cover key factors like communication strategies, leadership engagement, and structured methodologies to drive success. So stay tuned. We're jumping into all this and more next. You are listening to the NetSuite Podcast, where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. 00:01:34:12 - 00:02:02:06 Unknown We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. And welcome Alexandra and Jessica. We're so excited to have you on today to talk about something we hear a lot about in the software world, change management. 00:02:02:08 - 00:02:25:16 Unknown We're excited to be here. So where are the two of you joining us from today? So I am joining you again from Austin, Texas. I had been on the podcast once before and loved it, so I'm glad to be back. But I'm still here in good old Austin, Texas. Yeah, and I'm joining from San Diego, California. Wow, look at you both in sunny, warm places. 00:02:25:17 - 00:02:54:12 Unknown That sounds great. It really is. It is. I can't complain. Well, to start out, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and your role in that suite? Yeah, I'd be happy to jump in here. My name is Alexandra. As mentioned, I have been with NetSuite for going on four years. And my background is actually in organization psychology, which is a super niche area of psychology. 00:02:54:13 - 00:03:25:10 Unknown That's actually one of the fastest growing spaces in business, which is imaginable as we're in a point in time where it feels like everything is changing as rapidly as possible. So my job here at NetSuite is an education and user adoption consultant. And like I mentioned, I started here going on four years ago. And the business has evolved a lot and so has my role. 00:03:25:10 - 00:03:54:07 Unknown And so a lot of the work that I do now is really focused on change management, helping our customers succeed with their not suite implementations, as well as working on some internal work. And, I'll follow up with that. And, that's great. I didn't I don't even think I have, as many fun things to share, but, I did have to pull up my calculator because I was like, shoot, I don't know how many years I've been with NetSuite at this point, but it's almost eight. 00:03:54:07 - 00:04:14:05 Unknown I started at Oracle Customer Success and then moved into working at NetSuite. I actually supported a lot of our customers directly as a consultant and change management for quite a long time. But now I serve the team more in developing our change management content services, the program all around that. 00:04:14:07 - 00:04:34:15 Unknown And it's such a passion area for me. So it's just a super fun area of work for me to come in and do every day. And I guess it keeps me loving my job, because now it's been almost eight years. So you're a part of NetSuite Education Services and Learning Cloud Support or LCS. Could you remind our listeners what your team does? 00:04:34:17 - 00:05:06:00 Unknown Yes. So we’re in LCS or Learning Cloud Support is a lot of times what you'll hear. So we are a part of the NetSuite Customer Success ecosystem. And our role is really serving NetSuite customers throughout their journey with learning and change management services, tools, content, you name it. To really just help them unlock more value out of their software and using NetSuite in their extended kind of, expansions and add ons, and also foster long-term adoption for their users long term. 00:05:06:02 - 00:05:33:23 Unknown Now, for those who don't know, this marks another episode in our series of Listen and Learn with LCS. This is actually our third episode. I believe the other topics were NetSuite dashboards with IB, which I'm sure was a super fun session and reporting capabilities with Mark. So two phenomenal knowledge sources. Your listeners should definitely add that to your listening queue if they haven't already. 00:05:34:04 - 00:06:01:17 Unknown Well, I can't wait to dive in a bit more. Can you tell us more about our topic of change management today? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I always like to start with when we're going through a digital transformation. It's so easy and, good to have a strong focus on the technology side of things. But in reality, we also, when going through a digital transformation, have this people side that's impacted too. 00:06:01:22 - 00:06:28:07 Unknown And that's just as, if not more important than focusing on the technology change. If we don't have balance between managing the tech side and managing the people side through a change, having successful user adoption is honestly likely impossible. And it is just easy because your eyes just kind of turn to it to focus on the tech side. When you're maybe implementing something new or adding on additional modules to a software. 00:06:28:12 - 00:06:47:21 Unknown But since that's what we are actively making decisions for, we want to remind, the listeners of this podcast that there are so many things that you could do to support the people side of your business during this time to and when you're including change management in your software initiatives, a big impact that we can make is risk mitigation. 00:06:47:23 - 00:07:13:20 Unknown And because so much of the risk with digital transformations is really not actually the software working technically or not working in its technical state, but more that the software is not being adopted by the people.And I think, there is a crazy stat that I read the other day that said something like around 80 something percent of individual users are reluctant to buy in and accept a new software system, and that's a lot. 00:07:13:21 - 00:07:34:17 Unknown So by taking the time to actually focus on that as well, and put as much energy and effort into setting our people up for success alongside our technology, up for success, that's really why, we want to be here to talk about that today. Who do you think we'll find the most benefit from today's topic? I mean, I would say everyone. 00:07:34:17 - 00:08:03:06 Unknown Right? But specifically, our project leaders are managers and change drivers. The people who are really supporting the folks who are going to make or break the success of the change initiative. That makes a lot of sense. So if I am a customer considering NetSuite, implementing the system, or adding on to my existing NetSuite solution, what can I do now to consider change management? 00:08:03:11 - 00:08:37:04 Unknown So that's a great question. And what I really want to start off by thinking about, especially if you are in those intro moments of implementing NetSuite, maybe you're in your initial conversations, or maybe you're adding on a new module with NetSuite where you're really great at the beginning. I think that a really important place to start off and to think about is that this is going to be a challenge, right? 00:08:37:04 - 00:09:10:05 Unknown We're asking or our folks or our team members to not only do their day-to day-work, but also add on this other component of bringing in a new add on or even, you know, completely implementing NetSuite. And so having that moment of understanding that this is going to be a challenge is our first moment where we can really sit with the idea that we are managing change, not just managing a system transformation or a digital transformation. 00:09:10:09 - 00:09:35:00 Unknown One of the things that I love to talk about when I'm talking to people about change management really is this concept of the valley of despair. And so it is, to make a title Valley. Yeah, I know it sounds it sounds scary and it is. No, but it's it is a really good, concept to think about. 00:09:35:00 - 00:09:52:20 Unknown And so, like to try and create the visual in your head of what this valley of despair is. It's like a bell curve, but upside down. And so it starts off with your NetSuite implementation like at that mid level. And then it drops down. It's like this really really harsh curve down. And then it's our upward trajectory up. 00:09:52:20 - 00:10:15:20 Unknown I'm literally drawing it with my fingers in front of me right now. And so this concept is that as you are going through a change specifically like let's talk about implementing NetSuite or a new module. There's this period of time where you're very excited. Everybody is like riding a high of like, okay, we're going to have this new thing, and then that curve drops down, right? 00:10:15:20 - 00:10:41:21 Unknown And that is that valley of despair where you're not yet seeing the the results and the benefits of this change, where really it just feels hard. And and this is where and scary. Yes. And like this is where we take that moment of having empathy for everyone involved, but also being able to find the ways to continue to support the people to the upward trajectory. 00:10:41:21 - 00:11:08:23 Unknown Right. So going from like we are in the pit of misery, we're like, our worst stage possible, but there is the upward trajectory where we're reaching success, where we're seeing those benefits. But we have to get through this period of time where it is a struggle and we are, you know, we're we're being challenged in new ways and we're seeing new ways of of doing our job and showing up to work every day. 00:11:08:23 - 00:11:29:18 Unknown But also, like there is that upward trajectory and where we're going to see the benefits. And so this is the first thing I love to talk to people about because I'm like, you're not alone. Especially if you're in the midst of the valley of despair. I'm like, you're not alone. Like every every single customer feels this at some point or another. 00:11:29:20 - 00:11:53:20 Unknown But it's that upward trajectory that we're working towards. Oh man, I feel like so many people can relate to this on a lot of different levels, actually. So can you tell us more about. NetSuite's methodology that can help address this? Yeah. So the Valley of Despair don't be despaired. Well, we can help get you out of it. 00:11:53:21 - 00:12:18:08 Unknown But. Okay, so thinking back to Alexandria, drawing that upside down ball with with her finger, that upward trajectory we have a methodology that we use here at Night Suite for Change Management that follows five key focus areas that really help drive or define the actions and activities that you can take over that course of the change to really get to that place and that sweet spot. 00:12:18:08 - 00:12:40:18 Unknown And then just kind of, I don't know, after the after the curve, just kind of keep going forward. And have that long term adoption and success. So I mentioned there were five key focus areas. So we'll talk more about those today. The first one that we're going to focus on is awareness. So when we are approaching a new change, the first thing we want to focus on is driving awareness about the coming change. 00:12:40:20 - 00:13:02:23 Unknown What do we know now and what can we expect during this time or this project? This is the important time to have introductory information or introductory content that we can really drive to focus on awareness for any impacted, parties or people in regards to the change. The second one, so that's one. There's five. The second one is focusing on desire. 00:13:03:00 - 00:13:21:06 Unknown We really want to answer the question at this point of and this is in kind of quotations. What's in it for me for both the target audience and our business as a whole. And this gives us the opportunity to tap into what'smeaningful to users, but also instill a sense of desire for the change overall across people individually. 00:13:21:11 - 00:13:55:02 Unknown And third, we focus on understanding. So first we're focusing on awareness, then we're focusing on desire. And now we can focus on understanding. So how can we grant the impacted stakeholders not just the whybehind the transition, but start talking about the how. So we've given them what we know now, what they can expect, what's coming. We've answered the question of what's in it for them as an individual tool, by caring about the change and being attentive to helping during this project. 00:13:55:04 - 00:14:24:06 Unknown Then when we get to understanding, this is where we can find more things like enablement or training or tool, or begin developing tools to give people what they need for success. And that brings me to empower, which is our fourth one. So awareness, desire, understanding and empower or empowerment. And this is the point where we want to equip our people with the tools and materials knowledge, SMEs or subject matter experts and support to be set up for success. 00:14:24:06 - 00:14:48:14 Unknown And this really comes from analyzing what's our current state today. So before not tweet or before we're adding on, NSA to our system, what is our state today? And then also identifying what that future state is going to be like. So once we've started doing a lot of our design and we have more of a picture of what we are developing, then let's compare the two. 00:14:48:14 - 00:15:14:08 Unknown So current versus future state that helps us identify key impacts. It also helps us identify, things that we can start communicating to whoever the impacted audience is. A lot of times those things can be benefits, but also it can be kind of going back to our awareness, thoughts of letting people know, like, hey, this is what you'reused to doing today in Nazi reporting capabilities with NSA. 00:15:14:09 - 00:15:35:18 Unknown We're going to have X, Y, Z available in the reports, or the time to receive your information is X many times faster. Whatever it would be, and begin to communicate that out. Also doing this during the empower phase, it gives us a chance to just ensure that we're not missing any gaps before we get to our final step, which is ownership. 00:15:35:20 - 00:15:59:00 Unknown So we've talked about awareness, desire, understanding, empowerment and then ownership. So we want to foster a sense of ownership among our team. And when individuals feel that they are ready to make it their own and best for themselves, we this is where we've really achieve strong adoption. And really, I mean, our businesses and our teams and our NetSuite system can really only look to grow and expand from here. 00:15:59:02 - 00:16:25:07 Unknown The only final thing I'll say, I know that was five, but, everything that I talked about before, it's also encompassed by plugging in reward and recognition, throughout. So that just is really important to make sure we are proactively generating a positive culture around the change. And, I think a key word is kind of reinforcing, we're reinforcing the behaviors and the attitudes that we want to see for the change. 00:16:25:12 - 00:16:55:02 Unknown So one last time we've got awareness, desire, understanding, empowerment and ownership. NetSuite by Oracle. The number one cloud financial system is everything you need to grow all in one place: financials,inventory, HR and more. Make better decisions faster. So you can do more and spend less. See how at NetSuite.com/pod. What is one of the biggest mistakes you see when it comes to change management for a technology transition? 00:16:55:04 - 00:17:18:06 Unknown Oh, this one's easy. I don't have to consider this one too much at all. It is. The biggest mistake I see is just completely looking past focusing on the people side of change, and just being reactive to our change impacts versus proactively. Now, what are ways listeners can begin to apply those proactive change management strategies to their business? 00:17:18:08 - 00:17:44:08 Unknown So to be proactive with applying change management, I would really say that the key is to starting early. Even just thinking about the people and the way they are being impacted by the change. If you're looking at your project plan on day one, let's start looking at our change management and plan on... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/36102520

The CFO Agenda: Raw Sugar Living’s Jonathan Weiss 03/10/2025

The CFO Agenda: Raw Sugar Living’s Jonathan Weiss Learn more about NetSuite for health and beauty companies: Tune in for the next installment of The CFO Agenda series featuring Jonathan Weiss, CFO of Raw Sugar Living, a health and beauty brand selling hair and body products with natural ingredients. Jonathan and cohost Megan O’Brien kick off the podcast episode by discussing Jonathan’s background and what brought him to the CFO role at Raw Sugar [1:39]. They then delve into Raw Sugar’s use of NetSuite and why having a strong tech stack is so important for the company [21:21]. Jonathan and Megan conclude the episode by discussing CFO priorities for 2025 [42:00]. Like what you learned? Subscribe Now! Follow Us Here: Jonathan Weiss: Raw Sugar: ------------------------------------------------------------------ Episode Transcript: The CFO Agenda: Raw Sugar Living’s Jonathan Weiss 00;00;05;07 - 00;00;37;18 Unknown Hello NetSuite listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in to the network podcast. I'm Megan O'Brien, a co-host of the podcast. Today we're continuing our CFO agenda series with Jonathan Weiss, CFO of Raw Sugar, a health and beauty brand selling premium hair and body products made of natural ingredients. You've probably seen their shampoos, conditioners and other products in their signature white bottles with bamboo tops around Target, Walmart, CVS, etc. 00;00;37;21 - 00;00;58;26 Unknown We discuss Jonathan's path to the role of the CFO. Hint as not necessarily what you would expect. His perspective on the future of the finance function, the company's tech stack, and some of Raw Sugar's goals over the next year. So stay tuned. You're not going to want to miss this episode. 00;00;58;28 - 00;01;25;15 Unknown You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast, where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company, and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;01;25;18 - 00;01;59;04 Unknown Hi, how are you doing today? Afternoon. This is such a treat. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on. I mean, let's go ahead and just jump right into the questions. So could you talk a bit about your past roles and your path to where you are now? Sure. Well, it's been a long road, but it started with UCLA, undergrad and had this awesome liberal arts education and yet was also able to take about 8 to 10 accounting classes. 00;01;59;04 - 00;02;25;08 Unknown And from that, I started out at KPMG in New York, working in the audit side, luckily got assigned into the manufacturing retail space, liked it, but didn't love it to be honest, and started kind of my journey to where I am now because, I jumped over to the consulting side and started kind of hoping different partners answer different problems for large corporations. 00;02;25;11 - 00;02;54;28 Unknown Went off to business school back at UCLA because I wanted to be back in the LA market and then had a great, lucky opportunity when I was about 30, where two founders who had created a fashionable scrubs business long before that was the thing. And I came on kind of as a consultant and would eventually became their partner, and for seven years grew this into a business that really I loved and enjoyed. 00;02;55;01 - 00;03;21;03 Unknown And for the last 20 years, I've pretty much been doing the same role of CFO CEOs. Sometimes it's been for founders, sometimes it's been for public companies like LVMH. And then for the last eight years it's been with different private equity firms, a liberal arts degree taking accounting classes. You don't hear that very often now, but, it's something I advise all the people I work with because, you know, we'll talk about this. 00;03;21;03 - 00;03;43;27 Unknown What is the role of finance and accounting now, and especially with outsourcing and big data? You know, at the end of the day, it's a value add. Understand what the information is telling you. And I don't think that's much different than reading a great novel or seeing a movie and trying to understand what it's trying to tell you who communication is. 00;03;43;28 - 00;04;06;20 Unknown Major me likes that. Okay, so you ended up joining Ross Sugar close to five years ago. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what Ross Sugar does? Yeah, sure. Ross Sugar has been around for about ten years. It's usually a white bottle with a bamboo top, but it was created ten years ago by two founders, Ronnie and Donna. 00;04;06;23 - 00;04;31;08 Unknown And they had a really unique idea, which was they thought there should be clean products in the main aisle.Now, that doesn't sound like a big idea, but back in 2014, it was, and then they wanted it to look good on your shelf and your counter and your bathroom and your kitchen. And they wanted also to be something that you were proud of and a brand that you were proud of and uniquely. 00;04;31;08 - 00;05;03;01 Unknown And we could talk about this a little later. They created a business model, not out of digitally native, but out of brick and mortar, and that made them really unique. And I think was really instrumental to their success. What is RawSugar's mission? I think it's evolved basically at scale. When I think about it. But the mission has always been the same, which is it's a kind of a belief that everyone deserves clean products, that there's a range just like the food we eat and the clothes we buy and the emissions we put out. 00;05;03;01 - 00;05;29;01 Unknown We want to put better products into the market with better ingredients, but that people can afford. And our competitors are not the high-priced prestige brands. They're really Dove and Dial. And now native and love, Beauty Planet and all these other mass players that have come into the market that believe customers, consumers deserve a choice with better ingredients. 00;05;29;04 - 00;05;53;22 Unknown Yeah, I feel like you guys were such trendsetters in that because it has become a huge movement. But I remember seeing your products around before, kind of all those other players came into it. Yeah, no. And you know, I think what's very great, what I love about our story is that's what drove the founders. And so they started out in liquid hand soap and some lotions and scrubs. 00;05;53;24 - 00;06;21;00 Unknown Then they saw an opportunity in body wash. Then they saw an opportunity in hair. Then they saw an opportunity in kids. Then they saw an opportunity in Doe. And even this summer we launched a pet care because if we had a kids line, we thought, animals deserve, good ingredients too. So it's that's kind of where the ethos of the company comes from is this idea that there are these categories that need changing. 00;06;21;03 - 00;06;45;06 Unknown Well, it's funny because now that I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking close to five years ago. So you kind of started at a very Covid time or start of a Covid you time. How did that how did that go? Yeah. You know, exactly. Covid. So made 2020. And sometimes I talk about RawSugar 1.00. Sugar 2.0. 00;06;45;06 - 00;07;18;04 Unknown And today we're in the third, I think version of it, 1.0 is the Ronnie and Don, the story of creating and founding the brand and making an impact, especially at target. So 2.0, I like to think it was when I came in, I was the 11th employee and the business was doubling because of Covid. One reason because people needed soap too, is we had a very domestic based manufacturing model and we were sourcing some components from Asia, mainly Topps and Ronnie and Don. 00;07;18;04 - 00;07;42;09 Unknown They realized that Covid was going to be something massive, and they invested in componentry. And so we were on shelf and got a lot of trial by a lot of people when our competitors were out of stock. And I came along because of that dramatic increase in the first 45 days of Covid, and I've been in the LA area for a long time, and this is kind of what I, I don't want to say specialize in. 00;07;42;09 - 00;08;10;27 Unknown But really this journey of professionalizing a business, of allowing founders to do what they do and to create structure around that. But financial structure but also supply chain structure and channel structure and strategy. And so I kind of came in to help them scale this business. And so I was employee number 11. And today we're 40. So just to give you a sense of the scale of how much the business has changed since I'vecome along, that's amazing. 00;08;10;27 - 00;08;34;23 Unknown Yeah, they probably were like, we need help ready to scale because everyone wants soap nowadays. Yeah. And just from a finance and accounting perspective, you know, I look back, the first thing I feel like I learned in business school. I love analogies. And our teams will laugh because I use them all the time. But like I think about backpacking and to be successful you need a great dashboard. 00;08;34;23 - 00;08;57;20 Unknown You need to know where you're pointed and orient yourself. You need to know how fast you're moving. You know, you need to know the resources you require to get to where you want to go. And so I've always looked at this role that I play with the partner in the founders is to help them understand that because success creates a lot of challenges on a cash level. 00;08;57;20 - 00;09;17;05 Unknown Surprisingly on an inventory level, on a channel, conflict level on a supply chain, capacity level. So there's a lot of things you have to manage through success. And a lot of actual constraints. And so that's kind of how I'vealways looked at the finance and accounting role. But I've also always looked at how I look at my relationship with the founders. 00;09;17;05 - 00;09;38;25 Unknown I've gotten to work with. Yeah. And I think we kind of like we talk about this sometimes, but probably not enough sometimes. I think, you know, you think of success and growth and everything as, oh, we get there and it's smooth sailing and it's like, well, no, it brings its own set of challenges. Oh, no. Look, at the end of the day, people make things happen for brands. 00;09;38;25 - 00;10;05;01 Unknown The technology platforms that you use realize, that talent and give us the information that we are and where to go. But when you hit a certain scale as the business hit in that spring of 2020, tying it into exactly what you're saying is, I remember the first thing Ronnie said to me is like, I have no idea how much money, we need, to communicate to the bank. 00;10;05;03 - 00;10;37;00 Unknown I don't know how much more componentry we need, how many more ingredients and componentry we requireto meet the demand we're seeing. And so all of those things, and we were working at that time off of QuickBooks and getting our head around that and trying to create that narrative of what it was going to take us to continue to be successful is kind of what the role accounting and finances play then, and kind of place today. 00;10;37;03 - 00;11;01;12 Unknown And this is probably a tough one to answer. I'm sure it changes, but if you had to kind of summarize it, what does a typical day in your shoes look like? You know, so it's changed a lot. You know, the bigger the organization gets, the more competency and capacities you have. So when I started out, it was Ronnie and Donna's humility to understand they need someone like myself. 00;11;01;15 - 00;11;29;16 Unknown And then almost immediately, my I started hiring people in the areas that weren't my strength, supply chain and planning systems. And it, and eventually an accounting manager in some other areas. So today, to answer that question, my day is so different than it was 4 or 5 years ago. My day now is really working down, you know, with my team, making sure they have their priorities set. 00;11;29;16 - 00;11;54;01 Unknown They understand where the rest of the organization's going, what deadlines are approaching, what questions we're trying to answer. But a lot of the work is across. So I like to think that my favorite part of being a CFO is all the stakeholders. I kind of have the privilege of getting to work with and be in conversation with. So that'sthe VP of marketing, that's the VP of ops. 00;11;54;03 - 00;12;16;00 Unknown But it's also our private equity firm, our lender, and sometimes our brokers who work directly with our channel partners. So it varies so much and it's kind of, you know, makes that's what I love about what I do. And now I have a team underneath me that I can really work with and know that they're going to execute. 00;12;16;00 - 00;12;46;11 Unknown And so I spend a lot more of my time outside the finance and accounting function than inside it. You participated in a keynote this year at SuiteWorld with Sam Levy, who's the SVP of Growth and Operations at NetSuite. So what was that experience like? Oh it's fantastic. I mean, I giggle about it. I went to UCLA Business School 25 years ago and people take different paths and mine is always been under the radar. 00;12;46;17 - 00;13;08;15 Unknown And so to kind of go in front of a large room and get to talk about raw sugar, which to me is like encapsulatesall the work that came before. It was just such a thrill and really fun. And then on top of it, it's and not to push the product, but I really feel like that suite is like always it's the product they always wished for. 00;13;08;19 - 00;13;26;21 Unknown And so our road and our growth and, Raw Sugar, it's kind of let us leverage that. So it was really fun chatting with Sam and I like I have to clarify for people, I mean, this was not just a large room. I mean, this was a keynote tent in Vegas. Thousands of people type thing. I mean, huge. 00;13;26;23 - 00;13;50;11 Unknown So that's like a big jump. Yeah. No. And people joke with me like they're like, did you, you know, see me that big? Did you, do you, have you done a big room before? And I was like, no, no, no. Just kind of think what you get over a hundred. It all feels the same. Yeah, I guess I get that point, you know, you can't quite see that far back, so maybe it just feels the same. 00;13;50;11 - 00;14;13;10 Unknown It's public speaking at a point. Yeah. And I think the other side and again you hear me if I refer to Ronnie and Don to like Don is still very engaged in our business. And so one of the reasons why both of us continue to be engaged is we're trying to make this brand a forever brand. We talk about it and, you know, you there are financial goals for our investors. 00;14;13;12 - 00;14;33;12 Unknown We all participate in our success. But like at the core, we could be doing a lot of different things. And what we really want is more people to be aware of Raw Sugar. And, and frankly, for me, I'll say for people to be proud and aware of our team that's just done an amazing job and in a very unique environment. 00;14;33;15 - 00;14;52;18 Unknown It's funny because it is just in a way, it's a very indirect promotion and all of that in a way, because I've seen products at NetSuite’s SuiteWorld and all of a sudden said, yeah, I'm going to start buying that. So interviewed the CFO of Johnny Pops, which was, popsicle brand a couple of years back at SuiteWorld. 00;14;52;20 - 00;15;17;04 Unknown I now buy their popsicles. I like all of a sudden saw Raw Sugar at Target, and I was like, yeah, okay. Like, as soon as I see a customer name, I'm like, yeah, I kind of want to buy it now. Oh, well, that makes it even more worthwhile. And you kind of alluded to this, earlier, but in the keynote you broke down Raw Sugar’s growth journey into three phases: 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. 00;15;17;07 - 00;15;40;14 Unknown Can you kind of explain those phases to our listeners? Not sure. I mean, I referenced that earlier and did it in the context I think of the team. You know, a 1.0 was a founder driven model, 2.0 is that transition of scaling and bringing in talent, and three is this journey we've been on for a couple of years now. 00;15;40;14 - 00;16;03;21 Unknown We call it clean for all I is, but it's once we had some private equity investment. The second quality of it is we had, we've really built a leadership team. I mentioned the VP of supply chain and VP of marketing and a CEO, Mike Maki, who were lucky enough to come over from Johnson and Johnson and OG, a brand that also plays in the clean space. 00;16;03;23 - 00;16;26;29 Unknown So those characteristics. But most of all, we went for the all, which is the brand was really built out of Target and then Walgreens and then Kroger. So brick and mortar players and Ronnie and Donna would always pick one player who they felt it was the right place to start. So that when you create that level of partnership and work with the consumer. 00;16;26;29 - 00;16;49;21 Unknown So this next this 3.0 post-Covid, now we're in Walmart. We're on Amazon, we have a DTC site. We are also in CVS. We're also in Kroger as well as Albertsons. We're in Mexico as well as in Canada. So like we're really now trying to take our mission and find as many customers we can wherever we can be impactful. 00;16;49;27 - 00;17;17;15 Unknown Going from brick and mortar to e-commerce, it's kind of the opposite of what we usually see. What was the thought behind that? Yeah, no, I, I early on told Ronnie and that would be the Harvard business case. If we go all the way, because in 2014, people really wanted to own their customer. People believe that the margin they were able to gather and the email list, they could be that was the way to build the business. 00;17;17;15 - 00;17;47;15 Unknown And Ronnie and Donna came from a different place, Ronnie, and worked, working with, importing and bringing in things from Asia and really understood manufacturing. Grew up in that family that had a soap business and Don that worked in the brokerage side and worked with major retailers like Target and Walmart and CVS. And so when they came together to create the brand, they really understood that there was an opportunity for buyers. 00;17;47;21 - 00;18;23;12 Unknown And when I mean buyers meeting at target, especially to help shape a brand that they would then get the traffic for. And when they said that, they said, and we're now going to make this a digital brand, we're going to nurture it in the brick-and-mortar... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/35564620

NetSuite 2025.1: New GenAI, System Connectors, and Procurement Features 02/10/2025

NetSuite 2025.1: New GenAI, System Connectors, and Procurement Features Learn more about NetSuite 2025 Release 1: Cohost Megan O’Brien dives into NetSuite 2025 Release 1, with several guests joining to cover the latest and greatest features included. To start off, Lisa Schwarz, senior director of product marketing at NetSuite, gives an overview of the first release of 2025 [1:31]. She covers some of the most exciting updates in 2025.1 and what customers can expect. Erik Klein, outbound product manager at NetSuite, joins next to give a breakdown of new AI capabilities [8:30]. Andrew Klockers, a principal industry product manager for healthcare at NetSuite, covers HIPAA compliance in NetSuite, as well as enhancements to Compliance 360 [21:41]. Lastly, Eyal Amir, senior director of product management at NetSuite, goes over three new NetSuite Connectors [32:55]. Follow Us Here: NetSuite 2025.1 Homepage: NetSuite 2025.1 Release Notes: NetSuite 2025.1 Release Preview Test Account: Contact NetSuite Sales - Learn More about NetSuite ERP - Learn More about NetSuite HCM - Learn More about NetSuite Analytics & Reporting - NetSuite Customer Success Stories - Follow us here: LinkedIn: X (Twitter): Instagram: Facebook: #NetSuite, #NetSuiteERP, #NetSuiteConnector, #SuiteCloudPlatform, #AI, #GenAI, #HealthcareCompliance, #Compliance360 -------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;04;07 - 00;00;28;27 Unknown Hey, listeners. Welcome to the NetSuite Podcast. I'm Megan O'Brien, a co-host of the podcast, and today I'm excited to dive into our latest product release. As many of our listeners know, we do two product releases per year. So this one is our first of 2025. NetSuite 2025 one is absolutely packed with a bunch of great new features and enhancements. 00;00;28;29 - 00;00;54;04 Unknown The latest release brings new functionality across NetSuite Connector, Bill Capture, Field Service management, and the Suite Cloud platform, just to name a few. There are also great new SuiteApps and AI capabilities in there. We have four different guests breaking down the latest capabilities in detail and explaining how they benefit you. And if you're looking for more info, our sneak peak release blogs are now live on. 00;00;54;04 - 00;01;19;11 Unknown NetSuite.com. See the links in the description on the app, so to check those out. Stay tuned, because we have a lot of exciting updates that you won't want to miss. You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast, where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people in next week who are behind all the moving parts. 00;01;19;13 - 00;01;32;05 Unknown We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company, and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;01;32;07 - 00;01;56;02 Unknown Kicking us off is Lisa Schwarz, senior director of product marketing at NetSuite. Lisa will provide a quick preview of what's new in 2025 release one, including new AI-powered search capabilities and Suite Answers using NetSuite Expert. She also gives a refresher on how all our customers received the update, and what they can do to prepare for it. 00;01;56;05 - 00;02;23;23 Unknown We have a few guests joining us to dive deeper into the new functionality and the NetSuite 2025 release one, but could you give us a quick overview of what we'll be covering? I sure can. We've got a greatest hits coming up for everybody. We'll be diving into the world of connectors. There's a bunch of new connectors which will be available in this release, so that will be interesting to get that update and hear about that. 00;02;23;26 - 00;02;52;13 Unknown We'll be covering some great things around the SuiteCloud platform. That's always super interesting. And a lot of that includes some new AI developer tools and we'll also be exploring new things that are going around with necessary HIPAA compliance and some of our compliance. 360 solution. What's the one feature in this release that you're especially excited about or see as a big win for our customers? 00;02;52;15 - 00;03;26;14 Unknown Oh one I'm not sure if I could round it down to just one, but kind of my, you know, quick wins or what's getting me excited. I think I would, you know, shout out because some shout outs to, NetSuite Expert, which is a new capability that's bringing AI search powers to Suite Answers, Suite Procurement, which is, one of our, new indirect procurement solution that includes partnerships with staples, and Amazon business. 00;03;26;17 - 00;03;55;08 Unknown We've got some new specialized user roles for CRM, WMS, and view and approve. And these are particularly interesting for employees who only need access to specific records, reports, and tasks in NetSuite. So you don't have to always purchase a full user licenses. And then there's more pages becoming available in the Redwood UI. So getting some more refresh and a new look to a lot of things. 00;03;55;11 - 00;04;22;16 Unknown I wanted to quickly touch base on the logistics of the release for any new listeners. Customers who have never been through this before, or those who just need a refresher. How does NetSuite deliver these new features to our users? Absolutely. So we do two releases a year. All 41,000 plus customers receive the updates. Everybody is on the same release using the latest and greatest version of. 00;04;22;16 - 00;04;47;18 Unknown NetSuite, which is still amazing and always kind of blows my mind. This is the first release of the year. So with this release, accounts will be updated between mid-March through April. Each customer is assigned a date and a time that their NetSuite account will be updated. The date and the time of your update is published in the New Release Portlet on your. 00;04;47;18 - 00;05;06;05 Unknown NetSuite dashboard, and your NetSuite admin will also get an email with this information. If for some reason this is not a good time for the update to happen. You can go and change the date and time via the CMS tool within NetSuite. So super easy to do that when it comes to the day of your update. 00;05;06;10 - 00;05;33;06 Unknown You don't need to install or do anything. It's all automated. Accounts will go offline during the update time, which is scheduled for about a four-hour period downtime, but actually most accounts get updated in 60 minutes or less. And what can customers do to prepare for the update? We definitely encourage users to become familiar with what's in the release and try it out in a release preview account. 00;05;33;09 - 00;06;05;18 Unknown So, you know, while accounts are updated automatically and all customizations come over in the update, it's great to test out, using your own data, workflows, integrations, and customizations. So there are no surprises. I don't know about you, but I don't like surprises now. So for those who are not familiar with the release preview account, this is a specialized test account that clones your production environment and has all the new features and updates in the release. 00;06;05;21 - 00;06;27;27 Unknown So it's a great way. Also a safe way to test drive things out before you go live. It's free. You just need to have your NetSuite admin request it. Other than this podcast, how else can customers learn more about the 2025 release one. There's a bunch of ways people can learn more about what's in the release. 00;06;28;00 - 00;06;50;24 Unknown First, you can read the sneak peek blogs, which are on NetSuite.com, as well as well as the release notes if you want a really long read. Which those are. And Suite Answers. You can watch, training videos, which are usually done on a lot of key features. Also hosted in Suite Answers. Download them there. 00;06;50;26 - 00;07;11;04 Unknown I definitely encourage you to talk to your account manager on a more, you know, specific kind of basis where you can really look at, you know, what key features may be a priority for you guys. And then we've got some webinars. So watch and attend some of these webinars. We had a webinar covered all the new features. 00;07;11;04 - 00;07;36;24 Unknown So we went, you know, in-depth on the features, which is available to now watch on demand. But there's also a release readiness webinar on February 26th, which provides tips on how you can get ready for the release, like using the release preview account we talked about as well as creating a test plan. This webinar will also be available on demand after the 26. 00;07;36;26 - 00;08;07;22 Unknown And then last, we've got some SuiteConnect events, which we encourage everybody to attend. So these are one day events that are happening all over the world over the next few months. Definitely go to NetSuite.com under the events section. I'm sure you'll you can provide a link to that page as well. But check out the cities that will be coming to these events cover some of the new features in the release. 00;08;07;24 - 00;08;27;26 Unknown You'll so kind of getting down to the next level of actually being able to also see some demos and things like that. So definitely check out the website and see if we're coming to a city near you, and we'll be sure to link to that and all these other great resources in our show notes. Thanks so much for joining us, Lisa. 00;08;27;28 - 00;08;54;16 Unknown Thanks again for having me. This release brings several new AI features to NetSuite. And here to talk about that and other improvements to the platform is Outbound Product Manager Eric Klein. Eric offers a quick refresh on how the SuiteCloud platform works, and then walks through two major features in 2025.1 the SuiteScript Generative AI API, and NetSuite 00;08;54;16 - 00;09;19;16 Unknown Prompt Studio for Text Enhance. He also dives into additional enhancements that will benefit developers. All right, Eric, let's start with a quick overview of the SuiteCloud platform. How does it work and how does it help our users get the most out of their NetSuite investment? Hi. Hi. Thanks, Megan. I'd be delighted to. But, you know, as many of our listeners are probably already aware, SuiteCloud is really all about customizing a. 00;09;19;16 - 00;09;45;01 Unknown NetSuite in ways that extend the native product to support specific user tasks and ultimately achieve desired business outcomes. Which, by the way, can really help businesses with an international scope as well. But, you know, a lot of our customers really, you look at, you look at, you know, their environments, their, their sort of business needs. And those requirements are often very unique to their individual businesses. 00;09;45;04 - 00;10;13;10 Unknown Now, NetSuite is a very, you know, full-featured complex product. So most of these are addressed with out of the box functionality. And we also see almost a virtually unlimited range of use cases that require at least minor changes to native product functionality. And in many cases, this is really easy to do by, you know, taking steps to define things like custom records, fields, forms, custom transactions. 00;10;13;11 - 00;10;33;13 Unknown I mean, there's a lot of flexibility there in terms of how you can customize the product and do so without writing code. However, in some cases, those changes can be pretty big. And that's where things like, you know, custom scripting, workflows and even full applications or what we call SuiteApps in NetSuite terminology. 00;10;33;16 - 00;10;58;00 Unknown And these are often built by NetSuite. We build them as well as our team and partner community has a very rich library of, of suite apps and extensions that can be added to your NetSuite environment to deliver specific industry functionality. So think things like, you know, pane and plug ins, integration services, advanced financial solutions, those sorts of things. 00;10;58;07 - 00;11;28;15 Unknown And I might point out that a lot of these, more basic customizations, as I just mentioned, can be done by administrators using visual no code tools that don't require actual software development. But I wanted to talk a little bit about this upcoming release, NetSuite 2025 release one. And there's a number of areas where we're really working to improve the developer experience, basically setting the stage for even more improvements on the horizon. 00;11;28;17 - 00;12;00;07 Unknown And just kind of for a quick overview, we're, you know, AI as all the rage, right? So we're focusing on new ways to leverage AI and associated large language models. Which, by the way, we talked a lot about at SuiteWorld 2024. And effectively, these are enabling new ways to think about software development. What does that software development lifecycle look like in the age of AI, and making it vastly more efficient than how things have traditionally been done? 00;12;00;10 - 00;12;26;14 Unknown And really, these are solutions that, you know, benefit a wide range of user categories, certainly developers. But, you know, again, administrators can benefit from AI, lots of business users and a wide variety of NetSuite end users themselves who can take advantage of this functionality. And you know, in addition to AI, we're also adding a new range of capabilities. 00;12;26;17 - 00;13;02;07 Unknown These would include things like, you know, new hardened security features based on OAuth two. We're looking at things like specialized roles for more cost-effective access to the product. We're expanding our library of SuiteScript 2.1 code samples for software developers. We'll talk a little bit more about that on the podcast. And these capabilities really show our commitment to enhance native product functionality out of the box as much as possible but make it easier to customize and extend where necessary. 00;13;02;09 - 00;13;23;04 Unknown And at the end of the day, create a more efficient user experience across the entire suite. And again, since I was all the rage right? Lots of new AI powered features were announced this past year at SuiteWorld 2024. So, you know, there's a lot of resources available for our listeners to learn more about what we talked about there. 00;13;23;06 - 00;13;53;11 Unknown Tell me about what's new for the suite script developers in this release. Well, Megan, I get I got to tell you, this is a really exciting area for us. Lots is going on. And lots more is coming, some of which we can't really talk about today. But I think we've got some really, really, tangible features and functions that we're giving developers, which, you know, provide them with the ability to connect directly to things like AI services from custom scripts. 00;13;53;13 - 00;14;32;29 Unknown Now it sounds like a mouthful, but we have a new API called the SuiteScript Generative AI API. And in a nutshell, this provides programmatic access to LMS running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI Generative services. And another name for this way that is probably more commonly familiar with developers is a SuiteScript LLM module. And so depending on how it's use, it can be configured to work with a range of supported models so that that list of supported models is something that that is in our documentation. 00;14;33;00 - 00;15;00;23 Unknown We could, you know, provide links to that. And it really opens up a lot of use cases to extend the suite. And just kind of a quick example, you can use this a this and lm API module to develop custom functionality such as the ability to through the interface, generate reports, summarize data, manipulate text, perform natural language processing queries. 00;15;00;26 - 00;15;31;08 Unknown But really, the sky's the limit when you start to think about all of the new ways to do things that are that are perhaps, you know, part of your existing workflow, and then new ways to do new things like automate documentation, integrate chat bots. You can, for example, perform predictive analytics, anomaly detection. Right. All of these are now within reach to any customer or partner with existing product or product that's coming out at 25 dot one. 00;15;31;10 - 00;16;02;02 Unknown We've even seen some really sophisticated partner applications that consume and exchange information from LMS to power very complex applications. That at the end of the day, drive great user experiences that were previously very, very hard to achieve. So again, super exciting, super exciting area for us. What else is new when it comes to AI capabilities? And NetSuite 2025 release one. 00;16;02;05 - 00;16;34;08 Unknown Sure. So, you know, there's a lot out there across sort of the landscape of NetSuite. And you know, just to provide a few concrete examples here. Many listeners may be familiar with NetSuite text enhance when working with all sorts of textual content across the product. And we're adding a new feature that we're calling OBS studio that is effectively an AI service that extends Text Enhance functionality. 00;16;34;10 - 00;17;13;24 Unknown And so in essence, this makes it super easy to create and format text based content throughout the suite. And developers can even use Prompt Studio to generate and craft a wide range of content types. And these include, again reports, email templates, table based representations of data, web pages, generate quotes, and a whole lot more. So prompt studio also gives us an ability to generate any external facing document, and to do so with a really highly polished and consistently branded appearance. 00;17;13;25 - 00;17;34;24 Unknown So, so this is this is a pretty exciting area for us as well. As we start to wrap up what's been happening recently with code samples for Suite Scripting helpers. Yeah, I mean, this this is really interesting, right? Because, you know, developers work a lot with code samples, especially, especially as they're onboarding to the product or they're working with new areas of the product. 00;17;34;27 - 00;18;01;05 Unknown And, and, you know, are writing scripts, and you want to be able to access source code based documentation. And we provide these, you know, in the doc, in the help docs, in the forms, formats like snippets and examples, even full applications. And so now we're kind of building up that library of, of source code samples and making these available out on the GitHub repository. 00;18;01;07 - 00;18;30;07 Unknown Really, at the end of the day, they're an invaluable resource for software developers because it shortens the learning curve when coming up to speed with things like SuiteScript and some of our APIs. And it illustrates how best to implement new or extended file capabilities and do so more efficiently. Now, in the past, we've provided literally hundreds of these types of assets in our help center, which, by the way, is also available on docs.oracle.com. 00;18;30;07 - 00;19;02;18 Unknown So... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/35199880

The CFO Agenda: Packer Fastener’s Brian Hogeland 01/21/2025

The CFO Agenda: Packer Fastener’s Brian Hogeland Learn more about NetSuite Analytics Warehouse: Tune in for the next installment of The CFO Agenda series featuring Brian Hogeland, CFO of Packer Fastener, a distributor of fasteners and industrial supplies. Brian and cohost Ian McCue kicks off the podcast episode by discussing Brian’s background and what brought him to the CFO role [2:06]. They then delve into the biggest challenges Packer Fastener has faced as it has grown [11:07] and its use of NetSuite [16:09]. They discuss talent and the workforce and how automation is playing a role in the future of finance and accounting [23:40]. Brian and Ian conclude the episode by discussing CFO priorities for 2025, including incorporating AI [30:47]. --------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;04;10 - 00;00;34;10 Unknown Hey, listeners. Welcome to the NetSuite podcast. I'm Megan O'Brien, co-host of the podcast. And today we're continuing our CFO agenda series with Brian Hogland. Brian is the CFO of Packer Fastener, a rapidly growing distributor of nuts, bolts and other industrial supplies. Brian sits down with NetSuite Podcast co-host Ian McCue and walks him through his background and how roles across finance and technology prepared him for the C-suite. 00;00;34;13 - 00;01;01;01 Unknown He then explains how Packer Fastener has grown beyond its roots as a regional distributor, despite supply chain and inflationary challenges, as well as the specific framework its use to drive the business forward. The CFO explains how NetSuite helped the company manage its growing operations, which includes actively sourcing 30,000 items and specifically the value it's gained from NetSuite Analytics Warehouse. 00;01;01;04 - 00;01;32;08 Unknown With new technologies demonstrating potential to reshape the work of the finance team. Brian shares what skills he thinks will remain critical for finance professionals. He also offers perspective on what he looks for when he's hiring and how leaders can attract top finance talent. Brian then sheds light on Packer Fasteners’ ambitious plans for 2025. He walks through potential challenges, technology initiatives, and how he's preparing his team to leverage new AI tools. 00;01;32;11 - 00;01;39;29 Unknown Stay tuned, because all of that and more is coming momentarily. 00;01;40;02 - 00;02;06;19 Unknown You're listening to the NetSuite podcast, where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people in next week who are behind all the moving parts. We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company, and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;02;06;21 - 00;02;27;16 Unknown So, Brian, let's start with a bit about your background and who you are. Was your plan always kind of to work in finance and hopefully become a CFO one day? It was. I graduated from college in the mid 90s, and the internet was this really cool thing that had just popped at the time. So I was graduating, graduating with a degree in accounting. 00;02;27;19 - 00;02;48;11 Unknown Really had been talking to a lot of CPA firms to come in and join them, but was really intrigued by this whole World Wide Web concept. I went into my library my last semester of college and actually bought tickets for the Grateful Dead. Actually sent in, like a money order back in the day. But, so it was this whole new, exciting environment. 00;02;48;14 - 00;03;11;02 Unknown And, so while I had the, obviously the discipline and the skills to understand finance was really intrigued by this technology part. So a couple of years after I started my career with Arthur Andersen, I moved over into a technology consulting role and really just really had a lot of fun with that, embraced it. And spent probably the next ten years of my career doing technology. 00;03;11;03 - 00;03;32;00 Unknown So it kind of went from being, you know, aspiring to maybe be a be like a CPA partner doing audits and tax work to maybe really hands on technology roles and, probably around 2010, I moved back into like a, typical finance role. So that's where I kind of started to do more of the progression, the typical financial leadership roles. 00;03;32;02 - 00;03;52;08 Unknown And I guess why? Why did you decide to go back into kind of the traditional finance accounting side after being more on the technology side for a while? Yeah. You know, the sort of there's an analytical aspect of all the financials. Right. So, that was intriguing. The company I had worked for at the time had just onboarded a significant, Oracle, actually, ERP solution. 00;03;52;11 - 00;04;09;29 Unknown And they were looking for somebody with a finance and technology background to kind of help stabilize that, then implementation. And it was a chance for me to really get back into the finance world, but still not have to stretch too far. Same company. Obviously, you know, the solution, the technology solution. So the kind of trading hats within the same company. 00;04;09;29 - 00;04;33;13 Unknown And I'd be lying if I said, you know, getting the pager calls at 3:00 in the morning because somebody couldn't log in. I might have had a factor in that switch too. But yeah, I definitely, I liked the stability and the analytical nature of the finance teams. And as you kind of reflect on some of those, those past roles and your progression through your career, were there any particular positions that you feel like really helped you prepare to where you are today? 00;04;33;13 - 00;04;54;00 Unknown Running, running a finance department for a really fast growing company. So I worked for a large transportation company, for 16 years. And as I moved back into that financial role that I mentioned earlier, there's certain stops along the way there that, there was a corporate accounting role focused really on an month and closed process. And, it's a large, large company. 00;04;54;00 - 00;05;19;02 Unknown So you have to really gather a lot of different teams together and make sure that executing on a financial close, there's are very specific tasks that have to happen in certain orders. So kind of that monthly closed discipline and moved from there into an internal audit leader role. So focusing on, you know, the audit and compliance and risk management working with our board of directors at the time. 00;05;19;04 - 00;05;47;29 Unknown We went through an initial public offering during my time with that, and I'd been through several IPOs in the past, but it was really you know, working with bankers and lawyers and, auditors through that process. And then again, a next evolution. That same company was into a more, like a segment controller role where you're focusing a lot on here's how a business financial person looks at, you know, things, who's partnering with some of the, the, or business leaders. 00;05;48;02 - 00;06;09;10 Unknown How are they analyzing a problem? How can I help support that? Giving some insight into, you know, budgeting and, you know, tracking how you're doing against some of the metrics and the goals, doing financial modeling for specific scenarios. Those all were progressively, important, I think, in getting me to the spot where I'm at today. It sounds like you kind of added like more and more strategic targets, right? 00;06;09;10 - 00;06;26;07 Unknown When you're talking about things like IPOs and modeling. So you start to move beyond. Well, first it was accounting. Then you started moving into tech. And then you kind of pair them together and started taking these more strategic type, I guess, roles and responsibilities that that kind of fair to say. Yeah. And some of it was, opportunistic. 00;06;26;07 - 00;06;44;22 Unknown Some of it was intentional. You know, there's a point where you're looking at, for example, as we became a public company, having to manage the Sarbanes-Oxley function as a, as a public company, not something I was super interested in. Anybody that's listening to this that's been through a Sarbanes-Oxley environment knows that it's not exactly the most efficient use of our time. 00;06;44;24 - 00;07;05;06 Unknown And so really trying to move into more of a how can I how can I learn more, how can I help grow a profitable business? That was a very intentional move. Awesome. And moving into your current role at Packer Fastener. First off, can you just share with our listeners what Packer Fastener does? Sure. So, Packer Fastener is one of eight different entities within our umbrella. 00;07;05;08 - 00;07;26;26 Unknown The specific business buys and sells nuts and bolts. Kind of a very simply stated, we, we have a warehouse full of threaded fasteners. And we, sometimes move into safety equipment or paint and, types of, of solutions are we have banding or we will, drop vending machines at our customers and fill those vending machines. 00;07;26;26 - 00;07;54;03 Unknown We have vendor manage inventory, customer manage inventory, some consignment. But it's really out there, trying to support electrical contractors, HVAC contractors, manufacturers, a lot of construction. So as we've seen, a lot of increase in construction spend, in particular the last couple of years, we've been able to, help our customers grow in that space as well. So it's really focused on, again, sort of low tech nuts and bolts and, you know, really growing environment. 00;07;54;06 - 00;08;16;04 Unknown And Packer Fastener has been around since 1998. So you guys have, you know, pretty fairly lengthy history at this point. But the business, it sounds like, is really focused on expanding in the past decade. Could you just talk a little bit about how the company has grown and how it's evolved and in more recent years? Sure. You know, long before I started with the company, there was a real focus around 2014, a very strategic focus. 00;08;16;04 - 00;08;42;18 Unknown Instead of kind of being a, you know, sort of a small Green Bay, maybe northeast Wisconsin distributor really focused on how can we grow. Our CEO really came with a lot of perspective on trying to provide opportunities for those around him, really focusing on how can we intentionally set bags and what's our big hairy audacious goals? How can we let's sit down and define who we are, you know, what are the markets we intend to serve? 00;08;42;21 - 00;09;01;18 Unknown We have this concept of flywheel where it's, you know, how can we take different parts of our business day in and day out and feed the rest of it and essentially get this kind of like a flywheel concept? Take that and keep it growing and spinning and making the business faster and better. So it was a very intentional focus around that time in 2014 and over the years. 00;09;01;24 - 00;09;22;29 Unknown I joined the company in 2021. So focusing on growing the business significantly. So it's a pretty, pretty lofty goals each year and revenue and volume growth. We meet with a strategic coach four times a year. He helps us get realigned on our we call them rock sets. We kind of subscribe to the whole traction iOS, enterprise operating system model. 00;09;23;01 - 00;09;49;11 Unknown So we focus on our rocks. Each quarter we set new rocks, we check in. How are we doing on those rocks? And all of that really feels that's this, this strategic growth. So there's be hangs that you said, you know, years ago sort of just happened. You know, it isn't really a surprise when you set through your goals and look back and say, gosh, we ticked off, you know, 95% of those three year goals that we said, so it's a really intentional, disciplined focus that's I think has really helped our organization grow. 00;09;49;13 - 00;10;05;08 Unknown And what does that look like for the business? Like you said, Packer fasteners just kind of one arm, maybe the biggest arm, but it's one arm of the business. So what does that how is, you know, how does big goals, and that kind of strategic thinking manifested in terms of what the business is now versus what it was five, ten years ago? 00;10;05;10 - 00;10;23;08 Unknown Yeah, I would say it's when you put yourself in a position where you're setting goals to grow and then holding yourself accountable and your intention, people on that growth, people start to think differently about it, right? So you wake up and, you know, every day you come to work and maybe you're focused on, I have this goal and everything gets reset at zero on January 1st. 00;10;23;08 - 00;10;43;24 Unknown And so how am I going to grow and meet that, that annual goal? How am I going to meet these monthly goals and breaking those really big goals down into smaller, more manageable pieces for each department? So this whole traction iOS model has this, this notion of setting strategic goals up here, but then you sort of cascade down to the different teams, ultimately all of them supporting that larger goal. 00;10;43;27 - 00;11;01;22 Unknown And that's really it's taken time. But it was very methodical rollout. Now all the different departments we have our weekly all times we call them and people that are familiar with this model, they get the all time concept group. So we have weekly all ten meetings where you focus on, hey, what are my rocks for the quarter? What are the company rocks? 00;11;01;22 - 00;11;22;27 Unknown How am I supporting all of that? It's, very intentional, very, very methodical. I like that, yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting. What have been some of the biggest challenges for, for the business as you've grown quickly and expanded and, and kind of thought differently about what the business could be? Certainly people. People as our biggest challenge, we believe strongly I mentioned the flywheel earlier. 00;11;22;29 - 00;11;47;19 Unknown That starts and ends with people. So we want to hire we want to retain a really good people. We have a very strong culture, really focused on 12 different specific, pieces that we call swagger. And we want people that are really subscribe to that, that buy into that. And so finding people out there that match that, that's that swagger and then finding enough of them to continue growing the business. 00;11;47;19 - 00;12;07;23 Unknown Right. So all of our growth is geographic growth. It's on landing new customers. It's supporting more vendor manage inventories. A lot of that requires people to do that. And so really finding the right people that match our skill sets, our culture is probably one of the biggest challenges. And then the flip side of that is we have really good retention. 00;12;07;23 - 00;12;26;00 Unknown So we have a, kind of a running joke here that it's harder to get into our company than it is to get into Harvard. Number of job postings that we have, where the applications we have for a particular job posting, there's fewer people that are accepted or hired when you compare it to Harvard's acceptance rate. So we take a lot of pride in that. 00;12;26;00 - 00;12;46;09 Unknown We have a lot of really good people, and we really try to nurture that. But in order to keep the company growing, we have to keep feeding that funnel, right? So that's a significant challenge for us. A lot of the other challenges we've had, supply chain issues that were really prevalent during Covid and all the inflation that came with, those are pretty significant items we had to navigate through. 00;12;46;12 - 00;13;04;12 Unknown And even just on the horizon year was a lot of talk about tariffs and, you know, sort of globalization. We're, you know, anticipating some of those things that are going to continue to be challenges for us. So like a lot of companies, we had to sort of dust off the playbook and figure out, you know, inflation really hasn't been an issue for 40 years, but we got to hear how to deal with it. 00;13;04;12 - 00;13;18;21 Unknown How are we going to manage that? How are we going to make sure we're still profitable. So you have to pass along some of those price increases to your customers. Those aren't always fun conversations. And how do you so those have been really, really important goals for us to make sure that we continue on and continue to expand. 00;13;18;24 - 00;13;38;00 Unknown What do you think was key to continuing to grow through that, to grow through especially some of the supply chain and inflationary challenges? Like, what approach do you think worked for you guys? Yeah. So a lot of it was, we have good relationships with our vendors. We, several key vendors that supply us a good chunk of our inventory that we, that we buy and sell to our customers. 00;13;38;03 - 00;14;03;17 Unknown And so maintaining those positive relationships, being really open and candid with, with our vendors and vice versa, them really having these strong relationships where there's really honest feedback that's been really, really helpful, navigating, keeping, you know, consistent partners and sort of flipping around back and forth. Maybe you'll find the lowest price here, but in the end, you maybe not necessarily getting the same delivery, the same timelines, pricing can fluctuate all over the place. 00;14;03;17 - 00;14;20;00 Unknown If you when we focus on those strong relationships on the vendor side and also on our customers, we want to make sure that we have that open dialog with the customers. We want to go in and explain to customers that, hey, this is you know, this is the nature of the world right now. We can't get the inventory that you're looking for. 00;14;20;03 - 00;14;41;12 Unknown Without increasing the cost of that. And, you know, thankfully, it was a pretty prevalent topic during the Covid timelines. A lot of customers understood that that wasn't something that we liked having to do, but it was important and everybody was dealing with it. Yeah. No, I think those are our great tips and great general advice for getting through something like that. 00;14;41;15 - 00;15;04;12 Unknown And last question that's kind of focused on you, I guess. But what is your typical day look like? What's kind of consistent on a day and day basis. And what maybe is less predictable or changes by the day? Yes. So in my role as CFO, it generally varies, as you would expect, day by day, even, you know, obviously with a month in focus, we the first couple days of the month tend to be focused on trying to wrap up the prior month. 00;15;04;12 - 00;15;25;05 Unknown But, we have a pretty strong focus on not scheduling a whole lot of meetings on Mondays and Fridays. That allows us to focus on sort of digging in and getting work done. We have a a GSD and get stuff done, you know, type of culture. And you can't just spend your entire week in meetings. You have to have time to, to get in and, and drill into the details and figure out what's going on. 00;15;25;05 -... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/34900935

NetSuite SuiteAnalytics: Listen and Learn 12/09/2024

NetSuite SuiteAnalytics: Listen and Learn Find out more about NetSuite LCS and check out a list of upcoming events and available courses: NetSuite Principal Education Consultant Mark Gildea from the Learning Cloud Support (LCS) team goes deep on how NetSuite analytics and reporting work and how customers can get the most out of them for the second episode in our Listen & Learn series. Mark touches on who will benefit from a greater understanding of NetSuite SuiteAnalytics [3:34] before breaking down the different ways to query data in NetSuite [5:12], including saved searches, reports, and workbooks [7:08]. If you’re a beginner, Mark provides a few suggestions on how you can up your skills when it comes to NetSuite reporting [9:59]. He then shares SuiteAnalytics use cases where he’s seen customers find success [15:21] and how these insights can be valuable to employees across the business [18:25]. From there, the NetSuite expert shares more about live classes from LCS [19:29] and additional training sessions that come with the LCS Company Pass [25:38]. Like what you learned? Subscribe Now! Follow Us Here: Mark Gildea: Oracle NetSuite LinkedIn: Facebook: Instagram: Twitter: #NetSuiteAnalytics #SuiteAnalytics #NetSuiteReports #NetSuite #NetSuiteERP -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;04;07 - 00;00;21;17 Hey, SuiteListeners, welcome to The NetSuite Podcast. I'm Ian McCue, a cohost of this podcast, and today I'm excited to continue our Listen and Learn series. We kicked off this podcast series earlier this year with the goal of giving customers useful tips and tricks that will help them get more out of NetSuite, For part two of the series, 00;00;21;18 - 00;00;43;05 we're talking NetSuite Analytics with Mark Gildea, a principal education consultant on NetSuite’s Learning Cloud Support or LCS team. Mark describes the differences between NetSuite reports, saved searches, workbooks, and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse and the role each plays in giving stakeholders across your business the insights they need. He shares useful background information for beginners on how these tools work, 00;00;43;07 - 00;01;03;04 then dives into how you can identify the right tool for the job and specific use cases that have driven eye-opening takeaways for customers he's worked with. Mark also walks through the resources available for NetSuite users to deepen their expertise. That spans self-service training through MyLearn, a number of live events, and personalized training sessions with education consultants such as Mark. 00;01;03;06 - 00;01;26;29 If you're a NetSuite customer looking to take advantage of all the reporting analytics capabilities in NetSuite, this is the episode for you, and it's coming up next. You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. 00;01;27;02 - 00;01;40;27 We’ll also feature customer growth stories, discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;01;41;00 - 00;02;08;08 So to start out, Mark, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at NetSuite? Absolutely. As you said, my name is Mark Gildea, and I'm based here in Miami, Florida. I've been at NetSuite for three years now, and I'm a senior education consultant. And in addition to that, I lead a team of some analytics experts who deliver live event webinars. 00;02;08;08 - 00;02;31;01 And then I also participate in what we call Learning Labs that we deliver at various cities around the country. And so you're part of NetSuite Education Services and the Learning Cloud Support or LCS team. Could you remind our listeners about what your team does? Absolutely. First, probably want to know what LCS is—it's Learning Cloud Support 00;02;31;03 - 00;03;02;24 and what we do is we support what's called the LCS company Pass. And there are two, there's the standard and the premium. And then we also have what we call LCS live events or webinars. We support event packs, we also create videos, student guides, we do quick reference guides. And then also we have some advising sessions that we deliver that support the online training and what we call MyLearn. 00;03;02;26 - 00;03;40;20 And can you share a bit more about what topic you're going to be covering today on the podcast? Absolutely. Analytics, without question. It's my favorite thing that I deliver and analytics does incorporate different topics. So there are reports, there are saved searches, workbooks, and then this brand new edition called NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, also known as NSAW. And who do you think will kind of benefit the most from today's topic and from this conversation about analytics? 00;03;40;23 - 00;04;10;24 I would say the ultimate goal for our customers is to gain insights into their business. So I'd say, for example, a sales manager, obviously they want to know how well their sales reps are performing, maybe even where they're performing the best. You know, you got your project managers who are interested in how much did we sell the most of, the least of, what are the most profitable items. You can imagine 00;04;10;27 - 00;04;38;14 a warehouse manager needs analytics to understand how they’re processing their incoming, you know, their purchase orders or what's going out, those sales orders. Maybe have a production manager who needs to know how well your processes are running. And obviously the C-suite, because you need to know where you are, right, in order to make a plan of where you want to arrive, sort of that first step. 00;04;38;17 - 00;05;08;19 So I would say anybody in any company that relies on data to make informed decisions, and I don't think it means just managers. There are certainly sales reps that want to know what they're doing best so they can find out what they can exploit to do even better. Yeah, absolutely. It makes a lot of sense as we, you know, talk about data-driven decisions and people, you know, using data to kind of guide these key decisions, 00;05;08;19 - 00;05;32;06 so definitely see how it could be useful for really anyone in the company. How would you describe Mark kind of the differences among the different ways you can query data in NetSuite? And when might someone use one of those options over another? Great question, and absolutely a question that I hear from my clients. So let's kind of break it up into different products. 00;05;32;06 - 00;06;00;14 First, let's talk about so searches and reports. Now, those two modalities--and both of those are they're creating SQL for us, they’re interfaces that create SQL for us--and it's important to understand that they are accessing different datasets. But what they do is they give us real-time data that we can use to create these in-depth financial statements. 00;06;00;14 - 00;06;25;05 Our reports are really good at creating those statements, like income statement and balance sheet. They can also be set up to send alerts, for example, with saved searches. If you get a brand new customer in your sales queue, you can get an email. You can also set up a schedule to send out any of the financial reports quarterly, maybe to the CEO. 00;06;25;12 - 00;06;50;10 However, they can only--there's a little drawback--we can say that they can only join data by one level. So what does that mean? What that means is you can imagine you're doing a query on the customer record and the customer record happens to be attached to the transaction record. So I could query, let's say, the sales orders of the customer. 00;06;50;12 - 00;07;20;24 And then you've got that sales order that has a link to the item record and you can get that data for the item name, let's say, or the purchase price. Now in saved searches and reports, you can't make that double job to go from customer to transaction to item. And that's where SuiteAnalytics Workbooks comes into play. This particular modality has the benefit of what we call an infinite join. 00;07;20;27 - 00;07;56;20 So if you know databases, it's just that there to join datasets, so you can skip and you can combine data from disparate sources. Also with workbooks, you have the option of creating pivot tables and you can put those pivot tables on your dashboard, and that's a visualization that isn't available in either searches or reports. Now, reports can expand by levels, but it doesn't necessarily have that pivot and it also offers you different types of charts. 00;07;56;22 - 00;08;22;23 Now, that's where this new product comes into play. So we've had connectors for a long time, where you can connect from outside data sources to NetSuite. But then we have this NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, this is another separate product. The other three I mentioned come with everybody’s instance, everybody has access to reports, searches, and workbooks. NSAW is separate. 00;08;22;24 - 00;08;47;20 Now this is sort of workbooks on steroids because the visualizations that you can get from this product are things I've never even heard of. So you can imagine, you've got things called scatter plots, maps--of course I know what maps are--and sunburst charts. And not only does it connect it to other data sources, but many more than just a connector. 00;08;47;22 - 00;09;15;05 And it does one additional thing. It can maintain historical data. So you can imagine, you have companies buying other companies and changing the name. Typically, you would lose that continuity, but with NSAW, it will maintain that continuity all in one visualization and one, let's say canvas. Now, that comes to gosh Mark, that's a lot of information and a lot of querying methods. 00;09;15;05 - 00;09;44;00 Well, how do I know which one I should choose? That's one of the things that I get asked quite often. So the way that I would answer that question is to say if it's visualization and you're looking to do a stacked column or a stacked bar or area chart, then a workbook is what you're going to use. You can do with reports, but only those that can be made into snapshots, 00;09;44;07 - 00;10;05;01 and then you're limited to only an area, a line, a bar, a column, and a pie chart. And you can't stack any of that. And saved searches have the fewest visualizations, meaning it just has one--a column chart. So Mark, analytics can seem a little bit intimidating to a lot of people that maybe aren't as well-versed in this stuff. 00;10;05;03 - 00;10;31;12 What do you suggest we kind of start to, as we start to figure out, you know, how can we learn about these topics and how they apply to NetSuite? Great question. So those LCS Company Pass subscribers, they can access a variety of different training from MyLearn. And in MyLearn we have Learning Paths, and those are typically 4 to 11 hours. 00;10;31;12 - 00;11;01;19 Then we have courses, which are in chunks of about maybe an hour, hour and a half. And the same thing goes for a series that we call “How Do I?” So it's easy to access when you're on your home page in MyLearn, there's a big tile there or a big section there that has listing of those “How Do I? Courses, and those start from 5 minutes to I think an hour and 10 minutes. 00;11;01;22 - 00;11;30;18 So little chunks of knowledge. Then you also, right through MyLearn, and there's a tile that says “Live events.” You click on there and you've got access to all of these webinars that we deliver. Every single week, every day of the week, there's some live event webinar going on. Now specifically for saved searches, we do have well saved searches and workbooks, 00;11;30;18 - 00;12;06;00 that's every Wednesday. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, that's brand new and that is every other Monday. And then reports we have a live webinar every Tuesday and those are delivered by education consultants such as myself. And you also will learn things that you wouldn't even find in SuiteAnswers or Help or not even in Google. We also do these Learning Labs that have workshops and those are all over the country, and then event packs. 00;12;06;02 - 00;12;27;27 Awesome. Well, lots of great options there for people to learn more and kind of build these skills. As we think about analytics, what are some of the challenges beginners face in basically getting the analytics or the information they need from NetSuite? Well, one of them we went over earlier and that's when we were talking about, you know, how do I know which modality to use? 00;12;28;00 - 00;13;08;27 So that brings me to a really important point. And the biggest challenge for new analytics users is understanding their data, their records, and how those records are linked together. Understanding how they can find the label of the field, because that's going to be their biggest challenge. And then, if they know and they go to my live events, as they learn all of those little tips and tricks on how to locate the field and display that information. 00;13;09;00 - 00;13;31;11 And the next thing to consider, we were talking about which modality to use, here's a big one to consider now that we're talking about understanding your data and how it links up. So, for example, you could go to a customer record in NetSuite and you can go to the financials subtab and you could see the AR aging. 00;13;31;11 - 00;14;06;05 It's going to tell you how many times the customer was late 0 to 30 days, 31 to 60, etc. and you'll see that each one has a label, but then when you go to do a saved search, you get this message that says "error, field not found.” So we all know, or maybe you don't know, but there are standard AR aging reports that we have available, and those all pull in using the reports modality, all of that AR information. 00;14;06;05 - 00;14;29;20 If we wanted to do that in a saved search, we would have to create a formula to do it. It could be done, but it's not as easy as just selecting a field. So, what does that mean Mark? It means that if you can't--because we mentioned earlier that reports have a data source that's separate from saved searches, that again is separate for workbooks-- 00;14;29;22 - 00;14;53;27 so just because the record, and in this case the customer record, has the field, doesn't mean that each modality can pull that data in. That is a major consideration is which one can pull in the data. So sometimes it's, “Well I can only pull it in using a report,” so you've got your answer: it would be a report. Yeah 00;14;53;27 - 00;15;18;15 that's great background to kind of know before you or as you maybe kind of dig into some of this stuff. NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud financial system, is everything you need to grow all in one place: financials, inventory, HR and more. Make better decisions faster so you can do more and spend less. See how at NetSuite.com/pod. 00;15;18;17 - 00;15;41;29 What are some of the other reports, searches, and workbooks in that with that you've found clients to find useful? Well, let's break it down. Let's start first with reports. So in reports we have a lot of great out-of-the-box reports, but all of them are customizable. So it's easy to just use those as, let's say, a template. 00;15;42;01 - 00;16;03;22 And one of the cool things that you could do with reports is, we’re all interested in comparing ourselves over time. We want to know not just what we did maybe by week, month, quarter, and year--all of that is preprogramed in reports, by the way. We can customize it, so we can say, you know what, I want to know sales today, 00;16;03;29 - 00;16;28;25 I want to know yesterday, I want to know this week and last week, and I want it relative to today. Well you can do that in reports and you can also do it our fixed, for example, relative to the date that you have the report filtered for. So you have the two options, relative to today or relative to a report date. You can do the same thing with matrix saved searches. 00;16;28;27 - 00;17;00;15 So those are also easily set up to make comparisons relative to today or in specific time periods. So you can imagine, you know, you could do sales. So a list of your, let's say your sales reps and how many sales orders they had last week, how many sales orders they had this week, how many they had 30 days ago, 60 days, 90 days. Or it could be fixed time, it could be quarter one, quarter two, quarter three quarter four. Or months, 00;17;00;15 - 00;17;31;01 right? You can even figure out, what day of the week are they selling the most. So you can even do it by day of the week. So you can get a lot of information using that matrix feature. And the same thing goes with workbooks. Now you got the ability to do a pivot table so, you know, reports you can expand level by level and the saved search, you can have that summary view and a detailed view. For workbooks, you get the pivot table, 00;17;31;05 - 00;18;07;02 so you got those little collapsible fields. So just imagine you got classification for the industry type and sales rep. So you could take all of that, you could pivot on the industry type, and you can expand and collapse that, and then you could put a subtotal and you don't have that ability to do in the matrix saved searches. And you can subdivide your columns, just like I mentioned for reports and matrix searches, but you can't choose relative time. 00;18;07;04 - 00;18;28;07 So it would be this quarter, last quarter, this month, last month, you get the picture. Yeah, that's great. It sounds like you can kind of be as big picture and as broad or as narrow as you want and really just get exactly the information you're looking for depending on what that is. Precisely. So it's easy to imagine, right, how customers could benefit from NetSuite Analytics, 00;18;28;07 - 00;18;56;12 but how have you seen all these customers that you work with benefit from all these awesome capabilities that you've been describing? Well, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, it's incredibly important to anybody who needs data to drive their decision-making. So your C-level is obviously going to benefit from understanding, you know, trends because we just mentioned, you know, comparing sales over time, for example. 00;18;56;12 - 00;19;24;08 So you can see if the trend is your friend. You could see where or what items are selling the most and where they're selling the most. So sales managers, of course, they're interested in knowing how well they're selling, am I making my goal, and certainly their direct reports are looking for that information as well. And then you've got, you know, production, not only the production manager, but those people who are being evaluated, 00;19;24;08 - 00;19;45;04 they want to understand how well they're doing. And I wanted to dig in a little bit to some of the other ways that our customers can learn about the analytics functionality in NetSuite. So you mentioned earlier that during the live events that LCS does, you teach things that aren't available through MyLearn or SuiteAnswers? Could you elaborate on that a little bit? 00;19;45;06 - 00;20;09;27 I'd be happy to. Every year we have we have our regular cadence as I mentioned earlier, for the saved searches every Wednesday and we deliver a different topic. Well, the fourth Wednesday of every month we deliver something new in saved searches. So let me give you two examples of two live events that I delivered earlier this year. 00;20;10;02 - 00;20;34;28 In fact, I delivered one of them just... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/34348355

The CFO Agenda: Vytalize Health's Jess Wijesekera 11/05/2024

The CFO Agenda: Vytalize Health's Jess Wijesekera Learn more about NetSuite Planning and Budgeting: In this special episode of the NetSuite Podcast focusing on the CFO’s agenda for 2025, cohost Megan O'Brien sits down with Jess Wijesekera, SVP of Global Accounting at Vytalize Health, a leading value-based care platform. They start the episode by discussing Jess’ background and what brought her to her current role [1:55]. Jess then delves into Vytalize Health and its exponential growth over the last several years [6:26]. Megan and Jess discuss technology and talent issues [15:49]. They end the podcast episode by covering Vytalize Health’s priorities for 2025 [31:52]. Follow Us Here: Vytalize Health: Jess Wijesekera LinkedIn: Oracle NetSuite LinkedIn: X (Twitter): Instagram: Facebook: #NetSuite #CFOAgenda, #Accounting -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;04;21 - 00;00;28;20 Hello, all you Suite listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in to the NetSuite podcast. I'm Megan O'Brien, a co-host of the podcast. Now you all are in luck because today's episode marks the start of a mini series we are doing called The CFO Agenda. As we approach the end of 2024, we wanted to gauge what's on the docket for finance and accounting leaders. 00;00;28;23 - 00;00;50;23 In the first installment of the series, we have Jess Wijesekera, SVP of Global Accounting for Vytalize Health, a leading value based care platform. If you attended SuiteWorld or if you tuned into NetSuite OnAir to watch the main keynote, you would have seen her make an appearance with NetSuite Founder and EVP Evan Goldberg. 00;00;50;25 - 00;01;19;08 Vytalize Health has grown by a casual 90,778% over the last three years, so this episode is a great pulse check on what high-growth companies are prioritizing this coming year. We talk all about Jess’ background and her current role of Vytalize Health, the company's exponential growth, and her plans for 2025. With that, let's go ahead and dive in. 00;01;19;11 - 00;01;45;23 You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast, where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;01;45;25 - 00;02;03;26 Hi, Jess. How are you today? Hey, Megan. Good. Really great to be here. Good. We're so happy to have you. Yeah. Thank you. All right, well, we're going to dive right in because we have so much to cover. We want to hear, first of all, about your background. Did you always know that you wanted to get into accounting? 00;02;03;29 - 00;02;26;29 I did not. But I was always very good at organizing people and organizing projects. And I think that organization has always really been a part of who I am. It's going to sound silly, but in kindergarten I used to and tell them where and how to jump rope, and they always just happily listened to what I had to say. 00;02;26;29 - 00;02;57;23 And I felt really like a natural leader and I knew I wanted to do something that captured my personality. So, for me, accounting is just a really nice because it's taking project management and organization and unpacking a puzzle takes a lot of patience, which I'm learning to have a lot of patience, but it takes a lot of kindness for interacting with other departments and some tenacity with dealing with service providers. 00;02;57;23 - 00;03;31;23 So, I didn't know I always wanted to do it, but it is feeling like a really good fit. I couldn't help but stalk you a little bit on LinkedIn. You majored in accounting at Villanova, which is where I went. Yeah, Wildcats, you know, so I know I just had a great experience there and I chose it really because they had a very solid business school and I had this accounting professor who taught financial accounting, and he told me that accounting was the hardest major in the business school. 00;03;31;26 - 00;03;58;08 And if I could do accounting, that I could do anything, I could do finance, I could do management, I could do marketing. And he was really right. And I followed my accounting degree up with a master's in finance at Boston College. And it's really worked well, I think, to have this understanding of everything that’s accounting is past and everything that's finance is future and we meet in the present. 00;03;58;12 - 00;04;28;26 So it's kind of helped shape my career and where it's gone. That is such a cool perspective on it. And, and speaking of your career, could you talk a little bit about your past roles and your path to where you are now? Yeah, so like many accounting majors, I started at the Big Four, so I was at EY and I stayed longer than most. I was there about 15 years and I did a grand tour of about four offices. 00;04;28;29 - 00;04;55;29 So, I started in Palo Alto, and then did Boston, San Francisco, and I also did a three year secondment in the London office. And every time I felt I was going to leave public accounting, I stayed because I got a new opportunity or worked on a new client or with a new team. And it was this feeling that I could really add value, but also learn something completely new, which added to my skill set. 00;04;56;02 - 00;05;20;15 And I can't even tell you the number of times that I've cried in an audit room. I do think about those experiences and really how it shaped me. I got to work on Warner Brothers and Hawaiian Airlines, and towards the end of my career there, I was a national instructor for 606 when that Rev Rec standard was completely new and nobody knew what to do. 00;05;20;15 - 00;05;48;11 So that helped me with my foundation for where I am now. But after 15 years I decided to go into industry, so I started as an assistant controller. I was at a bottling company and my very first day on the job I realized I've never booked a journal entry in my whole life and a few roles since I have taken on kind of new areas of responsibility and kept growing my own skillset. 00;05;48;13 - 00;06;14;09 And I'm actually really lucky now to have brought on a couple of people I've worked with in the past, you know, kind of through EY and other companies because we just really enjoy working together. So that all of that brought me to my life. Well, I mean, I don't think you've really worked for a Big Four unless you've cried somewhere in an office, so you, you sent that experience home. Probably an office without windows. 00;06;14;11 - 00;06;40;07 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did my crying in a phone booth, so. Yeah, yeah, No windows. We're all here now. We're all here. And better for it. So speaking of Vytalize, you ended up joining Vytalize Health about two years ago? Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what Vytalize Health does? Yeah, so Vytalize is a value-based care company. 00;06;40;09 - 00;07;10;11 Value-based care is a collection of doctors and service providers and payers that work collectively to have better outcomes for patients. And coincidentally, that's usually at a reduced cost. So, what we do is sit between the primary care physician and CMS, which is the Center for Medicare Services. So we help our physicians strengthen the relationship that they have with their patients. 00;07;10;13 - 00;07;41;13 And if we succeed in that and meet certain quality metrics and achieve these better health outcomes, then CMS as the payer, they give us a share of that. So, I'll use a fancy terminology, but it's really aligning incentives, right? So, we're all incentivized for providing better, higher quality care, not necessarily more care. And it's really working because we're giving these doctors more time to spend with their patients. 00;07;41;13 - 00;08;18;00 So, we provide services like care coordination and virtual home care, in-home care. And it's particularly important for the Medicare population. You know, if you think about 65 plus and then people that are, you know, often not able to get to the doctor, in-home care is so critical. And really, we see ourselves as an extension of the physician so that we operate as part of their practice and really preventing hospitalizations and improving the quality of life and, you know, for an accounting major, that's certainly something I can get behind. 00;08;18;00 - 00;08;42;02 And, you know, the mission and kind of what we're doing, it feels really good. What does a typical day in your shoes look like? So like many companies in the pandemic, we went remote. So I have a little office that I use in a coworking space and I bring my puppy with me and we have a lot of meetings. 00;08;42;02 - 00;09;07;10 So back-to back-video meetings, I do a lot of meetings direct with one on ones, with my direct reports. We are constantly meeting with our EY tax team, Connor Group accounting specialists, so treasury and tax report through me. And then I just took on the FP&A function as well. So, this week was a lot of meeting with department heads to try and craft our budget. 00;09;07;12 - 00;09;34;04 But I find my typical day is really helping my team make good decisions and collaborative points of view and just making sure that we're prioritizing the right thing at the right time. Because like so many companies growing as quickly as we are, you know, you're this can be really long and kind of helping decide what comes first and what can come when, as you know, is a really big part of my job when I also have the puppy. 00;09;34;04 - 00;09;57;04 So she's as cute as can be. And we try and get out of some walks in between all of the meetings. Yeah. So for our frequent listeners, the puppies she's referring to is actually the guide dog puppy that attended SuiteWorld that we talked about in our SuiteWorld. recap. We are obsessed with Mayberry. I think she might be the new NetSuite mascot she's so sweet. 00;09;57;04 - 00;10;19;10 So she's training to become a guide dog for the blind. And I'll have her through next June. And she's part of the Walnut Creek Club here in the San Francisco Bay Area. And she's just a little delight. So her having her experience SuiteWorld in Vegas, I think opened her eyes. I mean, she's doing really great. 00;10;19;12 - 00;10;53;13 She did so good. She was all scared of the casino. Yeah, we all are. So Vytalize Health has this crazy growth trajectory. So the company ranked number one on the Inc. 5000 across all industries after achieving $1.5 billion in revenue for 2023 and a three-year revenue growth rate of 90,778%. Can you delve into the Vytalize Health's growth story and how that all came about? 00;10;53;15 - 00;11;22;19 Yeah. So Megan, work with me here on some math backwards. So to get to 1.5 billion, that means we started as a single health care practice. So we had one practice. It was in Rockland, Maryland, and it still exists, but we've grown from about one medical practice to over 200, I'm sorry, 2600 primary care physicians. We found that we were very good at these additional services. 00;11;22;19 - 00;11;49;15 Right. The care coordination and helping the physicians make better decisions. And instead of growing our own practices, the business went through kind of the modeling approach that we would instead partner with physicians and they would join our value based care program, which is it's called Accountable Care Organizations. So those practices joined our ACO and we taught them value-based care. 00;11;49;18 - 00;12;18;21 And through that we shared a part of our savings with them. And in that model, we were really able to grow quickly. So we went from, you know, just a few thousand Medicare beneficiaries to now over 260,000 patients. And that's a staggering number because we're probably taking care of someone that, you know, and it's part of Medicare's goal to have every Medicare patient in an ACO by 2030. 00;12;18;24 - 00;12;41;04 So for people who don't know what value-based care is, all of the sudden they must participate in value-based care by 2030, in six years we'll be there. And Vytalize is really helping with that transition. And it's working. It's working really well. We're seeing a lot improved outcomes for patients and decreased hospital hospitalizations. And yeah, it's going really well. 00;12;41;10 - 00;13;06;23 Yeah, clearly, clearly clear. So were there any challenges that came with this rapid growth? And if so, how did Vytalize help tackle them? Do you remember Facebook? They used to have this tagline and slogan and it said, ‘Move fast and break things,’ right? And I was googling it recently and I was like, I think they have abandoned that tagline. 00;13;06;25 - 00;13;35;10 Yeah, maybe with the move to Meta, they're like, Yeah, maybe not and break things. Yes. So that's the hardest part, right? Is because you can move too quickly and break things and sometimes that's an okay thing. But a lot of the times we should really be adding a lot more thought, a lot more time and a lot more considerations to some of the larger decisions that are going on. 00;13;35;10 - 00;14;02;29 So really, to me, the biggest challenge with this rapid growth is taking the time and the thought process to really think through decisions and not move as quickly as you can. So one of the other things that we've done to kind of circumvent that is adding a policy and procedures committee and a policy and procedures role in our organization. 00;14;02;29 - 00;14;37;20 And I'm not going to take any credit for that because it was already in existence and it was already working really well. But we were able to then write some policies pretty early on that helped our controls and helped our vendor contracts who could engage if vendor who could approve a payment. And a lot of those early policies and we're still writing them, but a lot of those early policies helped us, you know, be able to go to the rest of the business and say, ‘Hey, you know, you can't X, Y, Z because of this policy’ or ‘You can, but you must do it in this way.’ 00;14;37;24 - 00;15;07;28 And kind of making that consistent across the organization was really helpful for me. Well, that kind of leads into a good question for our listeners here. Any best practices for companies that might be looking to grow or any pitfalls to avoid? I think growth in general is having good technology to scale, right? So how do we make something a repeatable process and how do we put it in a system to be able to make it repeatable? 00;15;08;01 - 00;15;39;14 My app director, Lisa Kemper, and I joke all the time that life is full of one-offs, right? Like this is all a one off and if you're tackling something over here and over there, you would need 300 people in your accounting department to be able to support all of the one-offs. So, we very much we do use this Policy and Procedures Committee, but we're also standing up a lot of our tech products and using NetSuite to be able to get, you know, some standardization. 00;15;39;14 - 00;16;07;11 But also I'll call it kill the one offs, right? We can't be doing an exception. Everything has to fit into a process and become part of the rule. And how has Vytalize Health been using NetSuite? Oh my gosh. We're big, you know, signing some new statements of work all the time. So, yes, I love it. I know the one we just signed was the budgeting and planning tool right now. 00;16;07;11 - 00;16;33;05 So we started with the financials and budgeting and planning. But I would say we're really starting to use a lot of the subledgers in the way that they were intended to be used, and that has been really helpful for us. So, our biggest NetSuite, and I spoke about this at SuiteWorld, is our bank reconciliations. We have, you know, 47 bank accounts and transactions galore. 00;16;33;11 - 00;16;58;00 Right? And sort of as we talk about standardization and automation and killing, the one offs, what we're doing is making sure that we can put something in a process and make it repeatable. And the bank reconciliation module has started to learn the way that we're matching off our bank recs and the way that we're matching off transactions. And it will start to do that for us. 00;16;58;00 - 00;17;21;05 So every time we make a bill payment debit this account credit that account it learns it and then it'll just do it in the background and then we approve it. So this used to take three people their whole full-time job. Not to mention there are a lot of errors in this process. And now that we actually turned on the bank rec module, it's kind of all working for us in the background. 00;17;21;05 - 00;17;47;26 And I was even talking with my accounting manager, Kelly Allen, and I said yesterday I was like, Kelly, how's the bank matching going? And she's like, ‘You know, I don't even hear about it.’ It's really working for us. And, and it's been helpful to start to automate these things so we don't have to think about it. And it previously it just felt like we were playing catch up, you know, 45 days. 00;17;47;29 - 00;18;06;14 It would take us to close the books. And, you know, 45 days ago was the end of August or August is long gone by now. Right? We're making business decisions all the time. Do we need more? You know, funding from investors? We want to take a loan, whereas, you know, where are these larger payments coming from? We're going to we can't wait 45 days for anything. 00;18;06;14 - 00;18;32;25 So it's helped us, you know, make some real-time decisions. Well, why is having a strong tech stack so important for Vytalize Health specifically and how did it perhaps help facilitate some of the massive growth that you mentioned previously? We had a previous controller at Vytalize and every time we needed financials, he would say, okay, like I need three days. 00;18;32;27 - 00;19;02;08 He would take, you know, we had QuickBooks and, you know, it was the right size and shape for us when we started. So, we're using QuickBooks and he would take three days to prepare a consolidation and then to do the elimination journal entries. And that was a very manual effort. And three days of those financials and, you know, the manual errors that could exist. 00;19;02;08 - 00;19;23;13 And, you know, it was almost like, well, I don't need it anymore that I asked for that three days ago. We've moved on. That wasn't at least, you know, last week. So finally I looked at him and I was like, we have to get this in NetSuite and we have to do like journal entries and post them on the system. 00;19;23;13 - 00;19;43;21 And, you know, we're going to need elimination entries and we're going to need to have this reporting in a moment's notice. And, you know, when we ask for the report, I need it in 20 minutes, not three days. So we moved it all into NetSuite We've also gotten a tool called Workiva and Workiva connects to NetSuite. 00;19;43;21 - 00;20;09;08 And I'll give a shout out to Ryan Mueller, who's our senior manager of tech accounting and NetSuite syncs with Workiva so we can produce financial statements and reports at a moment's notice. And I can say, you know, I want the Q2 report to investors and I want that Q2 report to include these entities and Workiva pulls the information from NetSuite. 00;20;09;08 - 00;20;32;08 And then we can have it ready for an investor immediately. And that has really been a game changer for us. We do a lot of reporting. We have board members and boards of each of our ACOs, so there's about six of those. We need frequent reporting for about six... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/33808002

Tips from Venture Capitalists on Fundraising Right Now 10/07/2024

Tips from Venture Capitalists on Fundraising Right Now Learn more about NetSuite’s Business Grows Here event series: In this episode of the NetSuite Podcast, cohost Megan O’Brien sits down with JD Weinstein, Global Director of Oracle’s Venture Capital Practice. He discusses the findings from a panel he moderated at NetSuite’s Business Grows Here event stop in St. Louis [2:01]. They then play excerpts of the panel featuring Dan Conner, general partner at Ascend Venture Capital, and Craig Herron, managing principal at iSelect [8:50]. They discuss the advice they have for early-stage founders, including tripling the amount of investors they reach out to and tripling the amount of time spent fundraising [15:46]. Dan and Craig cover the status of dry powder since its 2021 highs [27:37]. They conclude by sharing their top takeaways for founders [36:25] Follow Us Here: Business Grows Here: JD Weinstein LinkedIn: Dan Conner LinkedIn: Craig Herron LinkedIn: Oracle NetSuite LinkedIn: X (Twitter): Instagram: Facebook: #NetSuite #VentureCapital #Fundraising --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;04;04 - 00;00;40;00 Hello everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in to the NetSuite Podcast. I'm Megan O'Brien, a co-host of the podcast. We have quite a unique episode in store for you all today. Recently, NetSuite has been hosting events in various different cities across the US called Business Growth Here. This tour is geared towards helping local entrepreneurs and business leaders discover strategies and tools essential for business expansion, as well as valuable insights on effectively managing all aspects of a growing business from cash flow to overall operations. 00;00;40;02 - 00;01;10;11 The events are tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities of each city and feature local leaders and visionaries. In the Saint Louis tour stop, one of the sessions that really stood out to me was a panel on the current venture capital landscape. It was moderated by JD Weinstein, global director of Oracle's venture capital practice, and featured Dan Conner, general partner at Ascend Venture Capital, and Craig Herron, managing principal at iSelect. 00;01;10;13 - 00;01;35;22 There's a lot of great insight in there around the market build back, what venture capitalists are looking for right now in companies, and how founders can increase their chances of getting funding. After hearing that, I knew I wanted to share the valuable insights with all of you, our wonderful listeners. With that, let's jump in, because you're not going to want to miss out on this episode. 00;01;35;24 - 00;02;02;02 You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast, where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;02;02;05 - 00;02;22;01 To kick us off, we have JD Weinstein, the global director of Oracle's venture capital practice, who moderated the panel. He joined us for a quick interview just to give an overview of the session and some of his key takeaways. Could you begin by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do for Oracle? Sure thing. 00;02;22;03 - 00;02;56;26 My name is JD Weinstein. I joined Oracle just over six years ago and now lead our global venture practice. I've previously worked for various early stage accelerator programs and strategic or corporate venture funds to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses with special advantages. At Oracle, we work alongside VCs globally to help early stage portfolio companies scale with our cloud technology solutions, global customer network, and rich enterprise ecosystem. 00;02;56;28 - 00;03;22;25 So that starts with NetSuite and Oracle Cloud infrastructure, but extends to database to Java and our rich application suite. We also make strategic equity investments alongside our M&A function under our corporate development line of business. You were the moderator for a session at the St Louis Business Grows Here event called Raising Capital to Fuel Growth in an AI-Driven Era. 00;03;22;27 - 00;04;00;10 Could you give us an overview of the panel for all our listeners? Sure. We covered a good bit of ground here, starting with the state of the economy and what it means for venture and founders growing their businesses in this era. I had the pleasure to interview Craig Herron, the managing principal of iSelect, a venture fund focused on the agrifood supply chain and health care, and Dan Connor, a general partner at Ascend Venture Capital, who leads an early stage thematic VC specializing in data-centric companies. 00;04;00;12 - 00;04;30;13 We talked about the state of the economy and what it means, from rising interest rates, fewer public listings, valuation correction to other complex macro headwinds, and how it really translates to start up business building. And then how that has changed fundraising in this climate overall too. We spoke to what makes a great business venture backable. So what the general partners on stage look for in exceptional entrepreneurs. 00;04;30;16 - 00;04;57;20 And then we also talked to tactical advice on just a general approach to fundraising and how to run a successful process. Hint: exactly like you would a sophisticated enterprise sales strategy. And then, of course, we concluded with the surge of AI capabilities and how we're going to be more productive with less. How that's impacted our industry. Why do you think this session was so important to include in our St Louis Business 00;04;57;20 - 00;05;23;27 Grows Here event? I mean, what is it about today's landscape that made it especially timely? Yeah, I think it's so important that we highlight the investment in commercial activity that's booming in the Midwest and specifically in Saint Louis and broader Missouri for this Business Grows Here event. Oftentimes we get this false perception of only venture activity buzzing on the coasts. 00;05;24;00 - 00;05;50;24 And while the majority of megarounds do happen there, at the earliest stages, we're seeing more and more data show the spread of entrepreneurial ecosystems emerging across this entire mid-continent. Steve Case and The Rise of the Rest phenomena, right? And so, with connectivity everywhere in the world, everybody has access now to build a great company. What was the highlight of the venture capital panel in Saint Louis for you? 00;05;50;25 - 00;06;24;24 Any particularly interesting thoughts you heard? You know, I can recall, I loved a quote that Dan pointed out in the panel, which was really just a description for founders to go back to the fundamentals that I see so many startups miss. Your customers are the most important stakeholders, period. Full stop. Without them, there is no business. So he describes a funny metaphor for saying they look for mission-critical businesses to invest in. 00;06;24;28 - 00;06;49;03 And so, if a customer, you know, the example he gave was somebody's hair is on fire and you may be selling sandwiches, which could be the best in the world or best in town, but someone's hair is on fire, that they're probably not going to want to sandwich. A much better business would be, you know, leasing fire extinguishers or something else that drives mission criticality. 00;06;49;05 - 00;07;19;13 What are your thoughts on the venture capital landscape as a result of the panel? What did you leave with? I'm really bullish on the venture landscape as I've always been and believe that entrepreneurs have the chance to shape the world for the better while advancing humanity. In this particular time, especially when we look at, you know, other hard times in the economy, an astounding number of companies were created from the last ‘08 Recession. 00;07;19;15 - 00;07;48;29 WhatsApp, Venmo, Pinterest, Slack, Uber, Airbnb, list goes on. Same thing happened after '01. And just less than half of Fortune 500 companies can actually trace back to being created in a crisis. And so why is that? People look for security, behaviors shift immensely, fear plays in. So the world becomes a pretty giant opportunity for entrepreneurs to take advantage of in these times. 00;07;49;02 - 00;08;14;17 That's such a great description. Kind of uplifting, and I love it. So, to end it, are there any best practices that you have for any listeners here that might be seeking funding right now or in the near future? You know, there's one insight that's one insight that's always stuck with me profoundly, which is this: Investors invest in lines, not dots 00;08;14;17 - 00;08;40;25 metaphor. What that means is rarely investors will wire you funds after your very first meeting, which is a dot or a data point. More often than not, they're evaluating your execution, your communication, trust building over time. And so each meeting that you have with an investor is a dot or a potential data point. And what investors are really looking for is to connect those dots. They're investing 00;08;40;25 - 00;09;19;24 in that connection, that's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us, JD. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Megan. Enjoyed it. NetSuite by Oracle. The number one cloud financial system is everything you need to grow all in one place. Financials, inventory and more. Make better decisions faster so you can do more and spend less. See how at NetSuite.com/pod. With that, let's jump into the panel recording with JD, Dan Connor, general partner at Ascend Venture Capital, and Craig Herron, managing principal at iSelect. 00;09;19;27 - 00;09;47;13 So, you know, today's climate in venture it's been an interesting couple of years to say the least. So investors are dealing with, you know, the uncertainty of rising interest rates, fewer public listings and exits, valuation corrections, and a bunch of other complex macro trends. And so hopefully Dan and Craig will just distill this information, maybe give us some insights as to how to raise money in this climate. 00;09;47;15 - 00;10;15;20 I still strongly believe that there is a ton of upside to growing a business in today's world. And so a brief introduction. Maybe we can start with Craig Herron, who is the managing principal of iSelect and then we'll move on to Dan, who is the general partner at Ascend Venture Capital. I'd love for all just to give us brief introductions of who you are and your fund’s focus and maybe your core thesis. 00;10;15;22 - 00;10;42;13 So iSelect Fund, we've deployed about $200 million over the last several years. We've invested in 78 companies. 65 of those are still active. Others, the others have exited. We invest in three areas: the agrifood supply chain, health and wellness with a focus on cardio, metabolic disease, and then food is health. How do we use nutrition to change the health care system? 00;10;42;15 - 00;11;07;14 Right. First, I'd like to say this is a great event, awesome job to everybody, the production team and all the staff. This is awesome. So I'm Dan Connor. I'm the founder and general partner of Ascend Venture Capital. We're a thematic VC, which means we're focused on a specific theme. Currently, the theme that we're investing under is this data-centric transformation that's happening across every industry. 00;11;07;16 - 00;11;30;00 The expectation that every decision should be made based on data. For instance, 15 years ago, when you used to land on a plane, there's sometimes I would go on the air and say, ‘This plane was just landed on autopilot’ and it used to freak people out. But now if you got on the plane and the pilot said, ‘I'm just gonna do this one by feel,’ people would be terrified. 00;11;30;00 - 00;11;55;08 So that just signifies how much that shift has taken place. We're investing out of our third fund right now, and just making trouble in the venture capital industry. Awesome, we love trouble. So before we go on with a couple of questions, I love just a quick show of hands just to see who we've got in the room, who are entrepreneurs or growing small kind of or early stage startups. 00;11;55;09 - 00;12;22;12 Can I get a show of hands? Traditional SMBs if you identify maybe over there? Great. Investors in the crowd? Okay. And then large enterprises, corporates? Okay. How about Cardinals fans? Okay. You guys aren't sleeping yet. Good. Great. So as you know, as we all know, many businesses hit an inflection point and need capital to fuel their growth. 00;12;22;12 - 00;12;44;14 But raising venture funding isn't always the most strategic decision. And so I'd love to hear from each of you what actually makes a great business venture backable? And then maybe what are some qualities of exceptional entrepreneurs? Dan, if you'd like to kick us off. Yeah. So initially in our search, we're looking for three things. Number one, does it solve mission critical problem? 00;12;44;17 - 00;13;08;22 Is the problem solving a problem? That is, is it a product solving a problem that ranks among the top three strategic priorities for the customer base? The example that the algorithm I give is if your hair is on fire, I could try and make a case that our sandwiches are the best in town. You're probably going to need a sandwich is some point in the future, but it's much better to be in the business of leasing fire extinguisher services at that point. 00;13;08;24 - 00;13;35;23 So mission criticality. Second is the business transformative? If it works, does it change the whole face of an industry? We’re not looking for a slightly better or slightly more socially conscious Uber, we're just we're looking for something that changes the way that things are done in an entire industry. And thirdly, is it a unique value proposition? Are they solving a problem that is completely different from how things are done today? 00;13;35;25 - 00;13;56;24 And are they the only one that's taken that approach? Those three things to me make a venture backable business. So I agree with everything Dan just said. I'd throw in two more in there. So first of all, size of market, right? If you're going after $100 million market, there's really just not enough room to scale there. 00;13;57;01 - 00;14;26;23 We're looking for markets that are, you know, potentially billions of dollars. So if you get a decent market share that there's a big opportunity for the company to scale and grow. And then second is team. You got to have a venture backable team at that point in time. So those are you know, typically we're looking for people that have come out of leading research institutions or, you know, have been entrepreneurs already once or. 00;14;26;25 - 00;14;57;10 You know, if they're in the AG business, they there's been a career of Monsanto in a specific area or have been at Danforth or, you know, some of the other kind of major centers in that given industry. And there's a really great metaphor that we like to share with a number of entrepreneurs that we work with, which is that as you go out to market and raise funding, investors, often they invest in lines, not dots. 00;14;57;12 - 00;15;31;03 And so what this means is that you may meet an investor on day one and you may walk out with a $10 million blank checks. That typically doesn't happen. 99 percent of the time. But what does happen is typically investors are looking to invest in each of these data points. Every time that you meet an investor and you show growth in your company or you communicate what's going on, you are overcoming challenges, it's the progression of how you go through business is often what, you know, we look for in early stage companies. 00;15;31;10 - 00;15;46;03 And so if you think of that strategy, then you can line up, you know, as you go to market, ‘I want to get as many of these lines in as possible.’ And so start these relationships as early as you can and demonstrate growth over time. 00;15;46;05 - 00;16;06;19 So like to that theme I'd love to hear from each of you, maybe more a little bit about like real tactical advice that you have for early stage founders. So often, like we get caught up with, you know, there's a lot of glitz and glamor of venture capital and they raise these $100 million rounds and how did you do it? 00;16;06;19 - 00;16;39;04 And $100 million rounds. Yeah, exclamation point. But what if you're just going for like an early call it seed or series A stage raise and you're kind of early to this practice, what best practices can you recommend? I'll jump in. So there are a lot there tend to be a lot of incubators and accelerators out there that are specifically focused on a given industry or segment. 00;16;39;04 - 00;17;12;03 And, you know, often if you've not been a successful entrepreneur previously, they provide a lot of great education. They have networks to introduce you to early adopter customers. And, you know, and they can also introduce you to VCs and typically have VCs or angels that are interested in investing. I guess secondly, you know, it's great if you're coming with a customer in hand, right? 00;17;12;03 - 00;17;39;18 Because every VC wants to see some sort of traction that you've there's actually been proof point that this actually is going to work in the marketplace. And I guess I'd leave it at those two to start with. Absolutely. Yeah. So three things I would add to that. See, seed and series A have gotten extremely squirrely right now. It's very hard to engage investors. 00;17;39;20 - 00;18;07;05 They're the number of investors who actually have capital to invest, has gone down, since 2021, when actually a lot of folks raised funds and then were immediately unsuccessful at investing them. The best way to lose a small fortune is to start with a big one, and that's what's happened in venture capital recently. So a lot of people have gotten tighter with their funds to invest in new companies at all versus doubling down on existing portfolio companies. 00;18;07;08 - 00;18;31;15 So seed and series A have gotten very squirrely. So the first piece of advice I would say is you got a triple the number of investors on your list that you plan to reach out to. Triple it. And then triple the time that it's going to take you to dedicate to fundraising because it's a slog and it's the number of times that you have to follow up with one investor to get a response has gotten has gotten a lot longer. 00;18;31;17 - 00;18;55;17 So that's what I would say is build the database of three times the number of investors that you're going to reach out to and reach out to every single one, one by one. It takes hard work, but I know I'm not the only troublemaker out here, so I feel like there's something that everybody is dedicated to. Secondly, as you have those calls, as you engage with those investors, you have to also be listening to what they're telling you about. 00;18;55;23 - 00;19;24;12 We invest in seed stage companies or how they define seed stage companies, or we invest in series A companies. And, you know, you're too early for us. As they say that to you, you say two things: One, okay, tell me your criteria so that you can take good notes on that call and then keep that database. And then thirdly, say if they're saying you're too early for them, say, would you mind if I put you on my investor newsletter to keep you updated in a lightweight way? 00;19;24;14 - 00;19;55;01 You'd be surprised the number of folks who do ask permission to put you on... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/33316552

SuiteWorld 2024 Recap: All Systems Grow 09/30/2024

SuiteWorld 2024 Recap: All Systems Grow Register for On Air to access recordings of SuiteWorld keynotes, sessions, product demos, and more: In this episode of the NetSuite Podcast, cohost Megan O'Brien sits down with multiple guests to recap the SuiteWorld 2024 event. She is joined first by Craig Sullivan, group vice president of product management at NetSuite, who covers new UX and AI features announced at SuiteWorld [1:31]. Next, Carly Nesson, a social impact pro bono project manager at NetSuite, discusses the Hackathon 4Good, NetSuite’s annual event at SuiteWorld where teams of “hackers” flex their technological prowess to create solutions for a nonprofit organization [11:25]. Lastly, Ranga Bodla, vice president of field engagement and marketing at NetSuite, closes out the episode by discussing learning opportunities and customer highlights from the event [16:25]. Follow Us Here: SuiteWorld homepage: NetSuite On Air registration: NetSuite Pro Bono email: probono_ww@oracle.com Carly Nesson LinkedIn: Craig Sullivan LinkedIn: Ranga Bodla LinkedIn: Oracle NetSuite LinkedIn: Facebook: Instagram: Twitter: #NetSuite #SuiteWorld #AI -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcription: 00;00;01;23 - 00;00;31;29 Hey all you Suite listeners, you just tuned in to the NetSuite Podcast. I'm your co-host, Megan O'Brien. We're coming off SuiteWorld 2024. NetSuite’s annual user conference in Las Vegas, and it was just packed with exciting updates, fascinating customer stories, and amazing learning opportunities. We wanted to bring all those insights to you, our listeners, in a SuiteWorld recap podcast episode. 00;00;32;02 - 00;00;57;21 We'll have several guests in this episode to cover the major happenings at this year's SuiteWorld, including NetSuite’s vision for the future, new product announcements, freshly launched AI and UX features, results from NetSuite’s annual hackathon event, and other great highlights. So whether you missed SuiteWorld this year or you just want a quick hit summary to supplement your SuiteWorld experience, you're in the right place. 00;00;57;23 - 00;01;31;25 With that, let's jump right in because it's time to get into everything SuiteWorld. You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. Will also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;01;31;27 - 00;02;00;17 First up, we have Craig Sullivan, group vice president of product management at NetSuite, to cover the latest product updates announced at SuiteWorld, new AI features, and NetSuite’s revamped user experience. Let's start with a fun one. What were some of your favorite moments from this year's SuiteWorld? So many. So many, Megan. I think if I was to really go right to it, participating in the product keynote is always a highlight. 00;02;00;20 - 00;02;20;09 The opportunity to share with the audience all the things that the teams have been working on is, you know, is always a proud moment. A proud moment for me and a proud moment for them. And I think the other thing is, you know, SuiteWorld is, you know, once a year it's an opportunity for catching up with customers, partners, and colleagues from around the world, too. 00;02;20;09 - 00;02;44;21 And that's always great to see folks that I haven't seen for a year or so. Yeah. Back in person again there in Las Vegas. During his keynote, NetSuite founder and executive vice president Evan Goldberg, called AI a force multiplier that can supercharge Net Suite's ability to fuel customer growth. Can you speak to some of the new AI features coming to NetSuite that will help make that a reality? 00;02;44;23 - 00;03;36;16 Absolutely, I completely agree with Evan. And, you know, firstly and we also think that Suiteness plus AI, where AI is operating across the entirety of the business dataset, can generate even deeper insights. And so things like EPM and the narrative reporting capabilities, where it's actually using generative AI to describe, you know, what the company's financials represent is an extremely interesting and time saving new set of capabilities, as well as predictive forecast explanations where, you know, the system itself will describe what it sees and provide explanation as for what's going on in the in the forecast. In NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, we have things like auto insights, the explain capability, the prebuilt 00;03;36;20 - 00;04;10;08 machine learning modules and data interactions assistant for natural language queries. These are great capabilities that allow not just the system to explain to you what's happening and what it sees in the in the data that it's looking at, but also then allowing you as a customer to interact with it, using natural language to ask questions, ask it to provide additional information in the visualizations that really helps get even more value out of the out of the system. 00;04;10;10 - 00;04;50;15 Things like Prompt Studio, which allows you to choose how the generative AI and the Text Enhance capabilities actually operate for you specific to your business. And then lastly, but certainly not least, you know, some examples from the developer side of the house, you know, whether you're an admin extending the system for your own business or you're a NetSuite cloud partner that's building SuiteScript-based add on to the system, you know, things like the generative APIs, SuiteScripts, and the code assist for SuiteScripts are actually, you know, really great tools that allow you to get even more value for your business by actually leveraging 00;04;50;15 - 00;05;26;22 the AI system underneath the Suite, so to speak, as part of the add ons and the extensions that you're making to your implementations. One of the key themes in Evan's keynote was how a strong technology foundation is crucial for organizations to conquer challenges and grow as their environment constantly changes. How do you think NetSuite’s approach to AI can further that vision? The approach that we're taking is that AI is everywhere and it's not just about providing bolt-on tools, but building intelligence into the core of the Suite and then making it available to everybody. 00;05;26;24 - 00;05;44;12 We really don't see that future customers are going to be asking for the unintelligent version of a business system. And so by making sure that it's just part of the way that we build the application and part of the way that we deliver it to them, we think that that's exactly what customers are going to be asking for in the future. 00;05;44;15 - 00;06;07;12 There were so many exciting product updates announced at SuiteWorld. Just covering those here would be pretty much the whole episode. What were some of your favorite innovations announced and how do you envision them helping our customers? Yeah, there were a lot. A couple of the ones that come to mind, and not just because they were in my part of the product keynote, but actual exception management. 00;06;07;15 - 00;06;36;11 This is really the perfect intersection of Suiteness, and AI. It identifies potential issues early so they can be solved, resolved right away, even surfacing potential issues during sales order capture so that the system can potentially flag problematic situations that could cause problems downstream. And you know, in areas like profitability and the examples that we showed in the keynote and also in the expo hall, it really just the beginning of what is possible with this this area. 00;06;36;11 - 00;07;10;06 So I'm excited about that. And, you know, based upon the reaction from our customers, it seems like they are too. The other thing I think stood out for me and which I would encourage our customers to take a look at, actually is SuiteProcurement, which was another one of the big announcements from the event. And it's not just about driving efficiency in what is a complex process for all customers, but also through the partnerships that we forged with Amazon Business and Staples, is delivering really tremendous value and cost savings to the customers also. 00;07;10;08 - 00;07;36;13 Evan also announced that NetSuite is adopting the Oracle Redwood User Experience, which is an award-winning design system used within Oracle's cloud applications. What do you mind giving our listeners an overview of the Redwood approach and how it will benefit them? Absolutely. I think I think, you know, if you look around, you, you know, the world is definitely changed over the last 25 years since NetSuite was founded. 00;07;36;15 - 00;08;02;24 Everyone now has access to applications in their everyday lives via their smartphones or iPads, tablets, whatever. And many of those applications have focused on delivering beautiful and intuitive user experiences. Our perspective is that we don't want those users coming to work and being disappointed in how their business applications look and feel, how long it takes them to learn, how difficult it is for them to do what they need to do. 00;08;02;27 - 00;08;30;03 The Redwood design system addresses decades of the business user of being an afterthought in terms of user experience and delivers a truly delightful experience from the very first interaction. And as a result, this encourages engagement and accelerates adoption so as to drive even more efficiency for the user and hence the business. Speaking of user experience, this year's SuiteWorld had the UX Lab, which allowed customers to preview and provide feedback on new designs and workflows. 00;08;30;06 - 00;08;55;06 Would you mind giving our listeners an overview of the Lab, why it's important, and how you’re planning to use some of that feedback? Yes, absolutely. And thanks for mentioning that. The UX Lab at SuiteWorld is literally our largest opportunity to engage with users directly and get their impressions and feedback both on what the NetSuite application is doing today, as well as how they feel about some of the things we're cooking up for the future of the product. 00;08;55;08 - 00;09;12;17 It's an opportunity to get their firsthand reactions to the things we showed on the big screens of the keynote and hear more from them about how they feel around those capabilities and what else they would like to see. It's a really great opportunity for users to participate in our design process and help make the product better for themselves and 00;09;12;17 - 00;09;44;14 other users like them. Across all the keynotes at SuiteWorld this year, we had the opportunity to hear from numerous NetSuite customers like Vytalize Health, PRx Performance, Packer Fastener, Trace3. The list goes on and on. What are some of the top takeaways from these conversations for you? Any stories or highlights that really stood out? Yeah, the growth of Vytalize Health has been astonishing and it's always a proud moment to hear how customers are using NetSuite as the system to support that kind of success. 00;09;44;16 - 00;10;03;24 It was great to hear how Jess delegates to her team the opportunities to explore and experiment with how ne w capabilities can help them do even more. And there were so many great stories from the other customers also, from the automations that they've been able to achieve in the office to the opportunities that it's created for them in terms of work life balance. 00;10;03;26 - 00;10;30;20 And we heard that from Packer Fastener and we heard that from Trace3 also. And so that that's really what it's all about for us is, you know, making sure that the system that we deliver provides great and tremendous benefits to the business, but also is helping hopefully our customers and our users create you know, create a better work life balance situation for themselves, too. 00;10;30;22 - 00;11;02;25 Last question. So you've been at NetSuite now for nearly 25 years. How have you seen SuiteWorld grow and evolve over the years? How could it possibly have been 25 years? It still is very it still feels very much like the beginning of what is possible. Honestly. SuiteWorld is obviously much, much bigger than the earlier incarnations and where that hits home for me, beyond the size of the keynote room, is the size of the Partner Expo Hall. 00;11;02;28 - 00;11;22;02 Whether large or small, it's not lost on me that the partners that showcase their offerings there have made a bet on NetSuite. And to see them thriving and doing great business and also having a great time at SuiteWorld is especially rewarding. Well, this was so great. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Craig. 00;11;22;04 - 00;11;55;08 My pleasure. Thanks very much. Next up, we have Carly Nesson, a social impact pro-bono project manager at NetSuite to discuss NetSuite’s annual hackathon event at SuiteWorld this year. For listeners that might not know, would you mind giving an overview of what the Hackathon4Good is? Absolutely. Hackathon4Good as a team-based competition that we offer every year at SuiteWorld where our partners and customers can come together to solve some complex problem to help out a nonprofit. 00;11;55;10 - 00;12;18;01 But every year the challenge changes. But the fun remains the same, where they're just spending a day or a few days, or this year's case, a few weeks together in this friendly competition to see what they can create. It's amazing. Now, who was the nonprofit customer our teams of hackers were helping out this year? This year we were working for American Bird Conservancy. 00;12;18;02 - 00;12;53;11 They're a nonprofit that focuses on conserving bird populations and their habitats. And they're doing incredible work across the Americas, including Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America. They really span a wide range of services across each of those areas. What issues were the American Bird Conservancy facing that our hackathon participants were looking to solve? The challenge this year focused on making sure we could help American Bird Conservancy prioritize their projects based on things like birds. 00;12;53;11 - 00;13;20;22 Most at risk, grant availability, maybe contractor prices, how many trees they were planting in a given area based on how those trees would survive and what the risk levels for each of those trees were. So there were a lot of complex factors that were going into this year's challenge to make sure that we could help American Bird Conservancy distill all of this complex information and make it actionable data about where they should focus their time and energy. 00;13;20;24 - 00;13;57;28 It's all about data nowadays. Now, who ended up winning? What did their solution look like? We had a team, actually a return hacking team. It was pretty fun to see them again this year. They came all the way from Australia and gave us a machine learning solution. Every team gave us a machine learning solution, but then once they created a machine learning model in OCI, they brought that back into NetSuite and created a customized report so they could rank these projects for American Bird Conservancy and then give them information about why the projects were the priority levels that they were. 00;13;58;01 - 00;14;27;01 So this winning team came up with not only a really strong model that gave them good scores about the complex factors involved, but they also had a really impressive interface for the customer where they could see in NetSuite exactly where they should spend their time and energy and why they should spend it there so that the customer could then re-parameterize if they needed to and give some human insight into these very mathematically informed challenges. 00;14;27;01 - 00;14;52;05 So they had a perfect balance of both of the sides that we were looking for and you could just tell they really understood the priorities of what American Bird Conservancy was trying to do, and they gave appropriate weight to each of the areas that American Bird Conservancy said they would have chosen for themselves. That's amazing. I mean, that was so many different factors that they had to take into account and create a solution for. 00;14;52;07 - 00;15;11;23 Absolutely. It was really impressive. Now, where can people go to learn more about the SuiteWorld hackathon? Well, we do this every year, so once the SuiteWorld website comes out and that SuiteWorld, of course, there's some information about each of the programs and events that participants can take advantage of. And we're always posted on the website. 00;15;11;26 - 00;15;32;17 So once the dates come out, of course they, they release different information at different times. That's always the best place to go check is that SuiteWorld website and figure out how they can sign up, how they can get involved, and learn more about that year's challenge. And for any NetSuite nonprofit customer that wants to be considered for future hackathon events, where can they go to get more information? 00;15;32;20 - 00;15;53;21 We would love to hear from them. We're always looking for creative ideas about what we can do for non-profits. The best place would be to reach out to the pro-bono team. The pro-bono team at NetSuite is the one that serves nonprofits in that skilled volunteering way, and we do have a general inbox we can be reached at pro-bono underscore WW at Oracle dot com. 00;15;53;27 - 00;16;14;10 Perfect. Well I'll be sure to put that in the show notes. Carly, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for giving us its visibility. We love the hackathon and everyone that's joined us has loved it too. So I love spreading the word about it. NetSuite by Oracle. The number one cloud financial system is everything you need to grow all in one place. 00;16;14;12 - 00;16;42;00 Financials, inventory, HR, and more. Make better decisions faster so you can do more and spend less. See how at NetSuite.com/pod. Last but certainly not least, we have Ranga Bodla, vice president of field engagement and marketing at NetSuite, who joined us to discuss his highlights from the event, especially some of the great learning opportunities as well as how it's evolved over the years. 00;16;42;02 - 00;17;04;22 Let's start with some of your highlights from SuiteWorld 2024. Any key takeaways or favorite moments that you want to share? Such a great SuiteWorld. It was another one for that for the books. I really enjoyed it. It was exhausting, but it was so worth it. You know, I'll give you a couple of things that were amazing about this year’s SuiteWorld. 00;17;04;22 - 00;17;34;19 And you know, it gets better every year. Number one, the customers. Just so many great customer stories to share whether it was the ones that were on stage in the keynotes. And we had customers in every single keynote this year, Evan's keynote and Sam's keynote and Gary's keynote. So many different sessions. There were panels, you know, it just was there were so many great customer stories and so many great, great perspectives. 00;17;34;21 - 00;18;00;07 Even selfishly, I had I had a fun panelist. There was a five month old guide dog in training who was a panelist in one of my sessions. She did not really share amongst many details about finance, but she was definitely very she was right there with us in in moral support. The other big things I'll share is the expo this year. 00;18;00;07 - 00;18;19;11 I mean, we spent a lot of time and effort on really expanding the expo, really... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/33239607

Speedmaster Trades in SAP for NetSuite to Fuel Global Growth 08/19/2024

Speedmaster Trades in SAP for NetSuite to Fuel Global Growth Find out how NetSuite can help your business balance the demands of a global supply chain: Hear the story behind auto parts manufacturer Speedmaster and why they turned to NetSuite to run their growing business in this episode with Speedmaster CEO Jason Kencevski and cohost Ian McCue. Jason starts by sharing how his father came to start the company [2:15] and key moments over the past 40 years that made the company what it is today [7:52]. The CEO explains the influence of his own interest in technology on the business [10:32], which led it to adopt SAP Business One. Jason explains where that system fell short [14:06], then highlights the benefits of a “living, breathing system” such as NetSuite [19:41] and how it supports better decision-making [26:16]. He walks through how NetSuite helps the manufacturer-distributor efficiently manage international operations [28:05], its supply chain [29:21], ecommerce [37:37], and online marketplace sales [41:30]. Jason wraps up by explaining what’s next for Speedmaster [43:52]. Follow Us Here: Jason Kencevski: Speedmaster: Oracle NetSuite LinkedIn: Facebook: Instagram: Twitter: #Speedmaster #autoparts #NetSuite #NetSuiteERP #manufacturingERP -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;30;14 Hey Suite listeners. Welcome to the NetSuite Podcast. I'm Ian McCue, a co-host of this podcast and senior content marketing manager at NetSuite. We have a great guest on today's show, Jason Kencevski from Speedmaster. Jason is the CEO of Speedmaster, a large manufacturer and seller of aftermarket auto parts for classic cars. To start, Jason shares why his dad started this business and how it turned into an industry leader over the past 45 years. 00;00;30;17 - 00;00;58;09 He explains how his own interest in technology led the company to invest in new systems that included implementing SAP Business One more than a decade ago. Jason dives into where the on-premises SAP application fell short when it came to running a global business and updating product data for 25,000 items. The CEO walks through how those frustrations led Speedmaster to replace SAP with NetSuite after a few years and how a “living, breathing system” made an enormous difference. 00;00;58;12 - 00;01;26;13 He digs into how modules including NetSuite OneWorld, NetSuite WMS, and NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced all helped the company run a smoother, more efficient operation. Jason wraps up with a few thoughts on what the future holds for vintage cars and what that means for his company. Stay tuned because all of that and more is coming up next. You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast, where we discuss what's happening with the next week, why we're doing it and where we're heading in the future. 00;01;26;15 - 00;01;45;22 We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;01;45;24 - 00;02;11;17 So to kick this off, Jason, tell us a little bit about Speedmaster. What do you manufacture and who do you sell to? Yes, So I mean, Speedmaster has been around for over 40 years. We have a slogan, you know, we just make awesome car parts. But drilling into those awesome car parts, we design, test, and manufacture over 25,000 V8 car spare parts, you know, specifically aftermarket automotive, V8 car, spare parts. 00;02;11;20 - 00;02;31;21 And this is a business that your dad started back in 1979. And I saw on your website, you know, a cool video about kind of how it started. But for people who haven't seen that video, don't know that much about Speedmaster, could you kind of share that story about how this business came to be? Sure. Sure. I mean, you know, every great entrepreneurial story always starts with solving a problem. 00;02;31;23 - 00;02;48;21 I think that problem was my dad, you know, wanted to be the coolest kid in the block and have the fastest car so he can impress all the girls. I was doing that. You know, he was racing, legally of course. And, you know, he was racing and he blew up his engine and had to find out what broke. 00;02;48;24 - 00;03;05;22 Some of the components that broke were actually, you know, weren't perfectly designed or could have been designed better. And, you know, he started with the simple, simple entrepreneurial spirit of making something better, and the rest is history, believe it or not. Is this something that was kind of always your dad's passion? And did he did he have a knack for that stuff? 00;03;05;23 - 00;03;24;06 I mean, it seems crazy to just say this broke. Okay, let me now build, you know, a replacement part for it. Yeah, it's funny you say that because, I mean, I don't know, like, cars were his passion at the age, but, you know, becoming one of the most influential brands in the world right now. I don't think he was envisioning to do that. 00;03;24;06 - 00;03;44;01 I think at the time he's like, hey, a broken something. I want to be fast. Let me just fix it and move on. And it's just I guess that's probably the best way to start. You know, you don't always have to have the answer. You don't always have to think. With the Indy mind or not, you know, I appreciate, you know, Seven Habits of Effective Leaders will tell you always think with the end in mind. 00;03;44;01 - 00;04;07;01 But sometimes the start doesn't have to be that that far fetched. So Speedmaster seems to take a lot of pride in the fact that it designs and manufactures over 25,000 car parts. Why is that kind of important to the company and maybe a source of pride for the business as well? So I guess at its core, when you get to a certain point, you know, the top end of town, this, you know, three major players, you know, which is holy, it'll work. 00;04;07;01 - 00;04;41;00 And speedmaster you try to scale, you try to be horizontal. So what happens is you try your best to start looking for companies to buy or just shortcuts in to achieve your goal of widening your, you know, your variety. So for us, we take a lot of pride in that. And that good thing is that we're still privately owned, so we take a lot of pride in making sure that everything we actually design test the manufacturing house is actually done by our specialized team and we're not looking for which is fine, but we're not looking to find growth hacks to, you know, acquire companies to grow quickly. 00;04;41;00 - 00;05;03;04 And then you're not sure the quality of the products. You may have some problems. Also, at the same time, you will you know, you could inherit some of their bad behaviors, too. So, you know, it's always been the founder's ethos, you know, to really be hands on to design tested manufacture most of those components. And it seems like it's kind of become increasingly rare for an automotive components company to design and make its own products. 00;05;03;07 - 00;05;28;21 Why is that? Is it just is it more cost effective to go other places? Typically, it's hard to do in-house. Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, touching on the scale portion, it's hard. The scale, you know, it's really difficult to produce, you know, that amount of SKUs in a short period of time to scale. I guess, you know, if you want to increase 50 or 100,000 SKUs, it's a lot it's a lot quicker and easier to just buy a brand and, you know, have their offering. 00;05;28;24 - 00;05;54;11 You know, we try to keep it in-house and push that ahead. And I guess that means in turn, you're not buying a company, you're investing in other people. They work for you or work, you know, directly for you or indirectly for you. So, you know, the industry becomes intertwined with Speedmaster a lot more as opposed to just, you know, buying and selling someone else's parts to solve to not to solve a problem, but to increase a product offering, if that makes sense. 00;05;54;13 - 00;06;12;20 And part of your mission is kind of to create products that, you know, I'm quoting your mission here, are inspired by the blend of old and new technology. How is that that idea of kind of blending old and new? How is that core to what Speedmaster is and how does that maybe help differentiate you from some of the other companies out there that make automotive parts? 00;06;12;23 - 00;06;31;12 Yeah, So exactly that, you know, the mission statement is a blend of old and new technology. So the probably the best way to explain it is we're an aftermarket automotive car component manufacturer. So we have to solve a problem. Like every good business, we have to solve a problem. Typically the problem is that people want to go faster or, you know, the engine or whatever it may be. 00;06;31;12 - 00;06;52;13 The specific component is, you know, under higher amount of stress. I mean, back in the day, engines, you would only make 25 horsepower. Now they're making 400 horsepower all the way up to a streak, you know, like a current model Mopar or, you know, like a Dodge Chrysler, Mopar Demon has almost a thousand horsepower. So those sorts of engines back in the day were racecar engines. 00;06;52;13 - 00;07;16;26 And now the cars that you buy off the shelf at your local Dodge dealer. So what happens is, you know, to solve a problem, you want to be profitable and you want to do it the quickest way possible. And typically the easiest way is just to solve the problem. And you design something that solves the problem. What we do is we actually try to solve a problem by incorporating the original view, look and feel of the item, which becomes timeless. 00;07;16;26 - 00;07;42;04 So I think Apple does it very well. If you have a look at a lot of the Apple products, if you go back in time, a lot of the look and feel, I think there was a brand, I forget what it's called, but they all you know, it's basically replicating 1960s and 70 year old products today. So they become timeless and Speedmaster’s aim on that front would be to create a timeless looking component, not one that's functional and highly profitable, if that makes sense, which makes it tough. 00;07;42;04 - 00;08;05;20 And that's what makes us different. You know, we're timeless. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. One more question kind of about your history as a as a brand. So this this company started as Peak Performance about 45 years ago, like we said, or almost 45 years ago. And it's now become a big global operation as we kind of think about how, you know, what started as a small storefront, almost 45 years ago turned into what it is today. 00;08;05;21 - 00;08;29;10 What are some kind of key moments you think, in the company's history that got it to where it is now? heaps. Heaps adversity for sure. You know, originally my dad was solving a problem of just making car components to solve small issues that he found. And, you know, he'd become a manufacturer back in the day. But one massive key turning point was, you know, my dad had created a part that just wasn't working. 00;08;29;12 - 00;08;49;27 And the typical thing of, you know, not asking for help, people these days are too scared to ask for help. My dad was completely the opposite. He went to America and was at the SEMA show in Las Vegas in November. Every year it's been around for, I think, 50 or 60 years, and he took one of his distributors, which was problematic at the time, and he couldn't get the phasing right. 00;08;49;29 - 00;09;02;20 So, you know, he took it to the show and he spoke to one of the guys there whose technician is like, Hey, I've got this problem. You know, he gave him the distributor and they later he came back and said, Hey, have solved the problem. This is all it is, the phasing out, you know, this is what it is. 00;09;02;20 - 00;09;15;23 And when the guy brought it back, it was really funny because he brought the item back and he brought this gentleman along. My dad had no idea who it was, and he started asking questions, you know, how many do you make? You know, like, how do you make them? All that stuff was very simple at the time. 00;09;15;24 - 00;09;31;04 Yeah, we make a lot. He's like, What do you mean, a lot? And he's like, we make 500 a year. It's very, very good item. We make him in Australia. We design, test and manufacture them in Australia. Very, very proud. The guy's like, okay, great. You know, would you, would you have a look to export them to America? 00;09;31;04 - 00;09;49;09 My dad was like, Yep, sure, of course, why not? So the next day the man came along and I think at the time, I mean, I forget what the company was called at the time. It was one of the largest distributors of automotive car parts at the time. He came along and said, I'd like to buy your capacity of 500 per year, if that's okay. 00;09;49;09 - 00;10;06;14 And my dad's like, wow, Yeah, of course, no problem. It is like, but I need that per month. So you know what my dad was doing in one year potentially, You know, he just got an order for 12 years or 12 months worth of orders. In one conversation. So on the back of just the most random experience of, Hey, I need help, how do I fix it? 00;10;06;17 - 00;10;24;18 People respect that and respect the fact that you're willing to make things better, willing to ask for help. And that was pretty much the start of what you now know is Speedmaster America. And how long ago was that? When did that happen? So I think it was probably close to 25 years ago. Okay, We've been here for now. 00;10;24;25 - 00;10;51;01 Again, just don't quote me on it. But around 22 years, that was almost close to 25 years ago. Yeah, believe it or not. So, Jason, you obviously have a long history of the business. You grew up around it. You today are CEO and have been for quite a while. But as you just kind of look at your personal time with the company from when you first got involved and maybe when you first kind of started to take a leadership role within the company to where it is today, how did those how do those two things compare? 00;10;51;01 - 00;11;11;17 How does the Speedmaster of today compare to the one that you remember from early adulthood, childhood, anything like that? Yeah, lots of changes. You know, definitely couple of things. Definitely keeping up with the times, as you should. And I think this one has some of my flair attached to it. I'm not saying that all the amazing things that Speedmaster have done are my doing. 00;11;11;17 - 00;11;26;16 I'm saying that a lot of things that, you know, a lot of the direction I'd like for the company of the brand to go towards, you know, heavily influenced by myself, like, for example, you know, I'm a tech geek, I think would touch on that a little bit later. I'm a tech geek. You know, I built computers when I was a kid. 00;11;26;20 - 00;11;48;02 All my life I've been breaking those code in games and trying to hack computer games and whatnot, building computers. So always have had a tech savvy background. So applying that sort of tech savviness to Speedmaster, it was definitely one of the core fundamentals at moving forward for sure. And a key part of kind of keeping up with the times, like you said as well. 00;11;48;02 - 00;12;13;04 So makes sense. Yeah. So is this a company that kind of always saw value in technology and invested in kind of new and better technology as it became available? Or would you say that there was more of a shift when, when you came into to more of a leadership position? So definitely more of a shift. The business was heavily infatuated with building amazing car parts, building awesome car parts and whatever technology was required to do. 00;12;13;04 - 00;12;40;22 So you're talking, you know, whether it be manufacturing automation, whether it be the latest a machine. So, you know, number one priority on a technology front would have always been around the product. So there's at least three pillars to Speedmaster: our people, our products, and our approach. And I think the biggest one that I've impacted is the approach and the influence through technology would have been definitely, you know, heavily influenced bymyself, for sure. 00;12;40;24 - 00;12;58;11 You know, the efficiency and the automation that Speedmaster adheres to today on a global scale is, you know, almost second to none. Back then it was, you know, just business basics. You know, you sell an item, you invoice an item, you get paid for an item. You know, it's just business basics, but it's not like that today. 00;12;58;11 - 00;13;15;22 And definitely, you know, on the back of my heavy influence, also, my brother, who was part of the business for about six years and a lot of drastic, drastic changes happened. You know, on the back of his help as well. You were on SAP Business One, a solution probably a lot of people listening to this are familiar with. 00;13;15;24 - 00;13;31;28 I guess, first off, kind of how long did you use that software for and where did you feel like it really fell short in terms of supporting the business? Yeah. So at the time we were looking at different solutions. We weren't too sure about, you know, the power or the ability of cloud computing at the time was 2012/2013. 00;13;31;28 - 00;13;50;15 I mean, cloud computing wasn't new. It was old just at the time. It all thought weird that, you know, your whole infrastructure could come to a grinding halt if you lost your Internet connection. You know, I mean, Internet is not a new thing. So shouldn't have been to two things. But it was I mean, people were people were people were skeptical of the cloud for a long time. 00;13;50;16 - 00;14;16;06 So. Yeah. And so for that reason, you know, we moved to SAP, which is an on premise solution. It was tough. I mean, that's why I'm so passionate about sharing the NetSuite/Oracle messaging, because we've had such a great, great run with that. SAP, it was daunting. It took, you know, 18 months to understand our needs to roll out the case of the Speedmaster case or project, I guess. 00;14;16;12 - 00;14;37;11 And it was I mean, we'll touch on it probably later, I'm sure, with any of the other questions. But it was a flat system. It was a local server. Every time we would increase every, you know, every year would have to increase the server, increase the hard drive. We went from one server to two servers, two, three, three servers in Sydney, three servers in L.A. It was just becoming a nightmare for sure. 00;14;37;11 - 00;15;04;18 And this was you're talking only two years into the, you know, two years into it. So we're not talking ten years. You're talking together from one server to three. You know, we had to become experts in RAID and other technologies. boy. I think that that paints a good picture. I mean, the fact that it was only a couple of years before you were running into serious problems in terms of its ability to scale with the business you know, maybe says a lot and maybe is that would you say that's part of what convinced you that maybe the cloud is the way to go? 00;15;04;18 - 00;15;22;12 Because we're going to get that that scalability that we clearly need? We move to the cloud solution because Oracle NetSuite was the solution for us and it happened to be on the cloud. If I guess if NetSuite was an on premise solution, yeah, I think we would have run into the same problems. NetSuite, just obviously have got it right. 00;15;22;12 - 00;15;40;03 So potentially that's probably why they're in the cloud. I'm not sure, but I can guarantee you while I can't guarantee that NetSuite Oracle would have got it right, but... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/32390117

NetSuite 2024.2 Brings New Supply Chain, Subscription Billing, HR Features 07/22/2024

NetSuite 2024.2 Brings New Supply Chain, Subscription Billing, HR Features Learn more about NetSuite 2024 Release 2: Cohosts Ian McCue and Megan O’Brien delve into NetSuite 2024 Release 2, with several guests joining to cover the latest and greatest features included. To start off, Lisa Schwarz, senior director of product marketing at NetSuite, gives an overview of the second release of 2024 [1:29]. She covers some of the most exciting updates in 2024.2 and what customers can expect. Tanios Boudames, product marketing manager for NetSuite SuitePeople, joins next to give a breakdown of new capabilities in NetSuite’s human resource management system [11:46]. Peter Bouyonan, an industry solution advisor at NetSuite, delves into the new supply chain and manufacturing features [24:48]. Lastly, Jessica Turnpenny, group manager of product management at NetSuite, goes over new SuiteBilling capabilities and how they will help subscription businesses [37:41]. Follow Us Here: NetSuite 2024 Release 2 Homepage: Oracle NetSuite LinkedIn: Facebook: Instagram: Twitter: #NetSuite #NetSuiteERP #NetSuiteSuitePeople -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;23;08 Hey NetSuite Podcast listeners. Thanks for tuning into this episode breaking down our newest NetSuite release. I’m Ian McCue, senior content marketing manager at NetSuite and I’m joined by NetSuite’s business and finance editor Megan O'Brien. The summer means it's our second product release of the year and that NetSuite 2024 Release 2 is packed with a bunch of awesome new features. 00;00;23;10 - 00;00;50;19 Absolutely. NetSuite 2024.2 brings new functionality across SuiteBilling, SCM mobile and Manufacturing mobile, and SuitePeople, as well as new suite apps to help businesses run their supply chains more efficiently. We have four different guests breaking down the latest capabilities in detail and explaining how they benefit you. And if you're looking for more, our sneak peek release blogs are now live on NetSuite.com. 00;00;50;22 - 00;01;16;19 See the links in the description of this episode to check this out. Stay tuned because we have a lot of exciting updates that you won't want to miss. You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. 00;01;16;21 - 00;01;41;22 Unknown We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. Kicking us off is Lisa Schwarz, senior director of product marketing at NetSuite. Lisa will provide a quick preview of what's new in 2024 Release 2, including an updated user interface that customers can now try out for the first time. 00;01;41;25 - 00;02;13;00 She also gives a refresher on how all our customers receive the update and what they can do to prepare for it. So, Lisa, we have a few guests joining us to dive deeper into the latest functionality in NetSuite 2024 Release, 2. But could you give us a quick overview of what's new? Absolutely. So we have a slew of new supply chain and manufacturing features ranging from NetSuite WMS to some of the mobile applications, as well as some hot new suite apps related to supply chain. 00;02;13;03 - 00;02;36;11 Unknown We'll be diving into the new SuiteBilling capabilities, which is our subscription management and billing solution. And finally, you'll hear about some of the new things going on with our HR solution, SuitePeople. So what's one feature in this release that you're kind of especially excited about or maybe see as a big win for our customers? Wow. That's a tough one. 00;02;36;11 - 00;03;02;06 It's like, you know, picking your favorite child or, you know, they're all special in their very own ways. From a practical point of view, it's great to see the evolution of Bill Capture, which we continue to fine tune the ML models that help increase the accuracy for matching the invoices to your NetSuite record. 00;03;02;08 - 00;03;39;13 So that's increasing productivity for our users. There's also Ship Central, our packing and shipping solution. With this release, there's some great new functionality to automatically find the best shipping rates, which is pretty cool so that’s saving users time but also money. So those are great. But I actually wanted to talk about a feature that's included in the release, but it's an early release status, so going into that a little bit. 00;03;39;15 - 00;04;05;05 What we're going to be doing with this release is to start to roll out some of the new Redwood UI elements to NetSuite. Users may have heard about this already from Oracle, which they have all their applications using this or you actually may have seen it in some of the Oracle applications that we make available to NetSuite users like Planning and Budgeting or Analytics Warehouse. 00;04;05;08 - 00;04;37;06 Those two solutions have already the Redwood UI design system applied. So what you're going to see in NetSuite are changes like fonts, icons, and colors applied to various pages. There's no functionality changes, no changes to workflows. It's strictly an aesthetic, you know, user interface change. One thing to note and to understand is that this new UI won't be turned on by default. 00;04;37;09 - 00;05;01;11 You'll need to go in and change the preference settings to do that, but your admin can usually do that. It's a great way just to start to become familiar with this. We're going to see more pages updated over the next few releases with more of the design elements applied and at some point it will become the default UI of NetSuite. 00;05;01;14 - 00;05;27;04 But it's just starting and that's what I think is really exciting. Yeah, very cool stuff. And if someone wants to learn more about Redwood UI and maybe, you know, what might be might be changing a little bit, just an appearance in NetSuite. Where could they go to learn more about that? As usual, with all the stuff in every new release we'll have details in the release notes. 00;05;27;06 - 00;06;07;16 But we're also planning to start rolling out over the next few months some added communications and tools that users can use to become familiar. So you should be seeing some blogs on this. We're actually trying to line up a speaker for the podcast at some point soon down the road. So lots more to come on this. Awesome. And I wanted to quickly touch on kind of the logistics of the NetSuite release for any new listeners, any customers who have maybe not been through this before or those that maybe just need a refresher. 00;06;07;16 - 00;06;35;18 So how does NetSuite deliver all these new features that you covered to users? Yeah, it's actually still to this day, as many times we've been doing it, it's still super cool to watch it from the other side of getting it applied. The process and everything. But to remind everybody, we do two releases a year, all of our customers, which right now we're at 38,000+ customers receive the updates. 00;06;35;21 - 00;07;13;04 Everyone is on the same release using the latest and greatest version of NetSuite. So this is our second update of the year. With the release, accounts will be updated between mid August through July. That's the span of the rolling upgrade window. Each customer is assigned a date and a time that their NetSuite account will be updated. The date and the time of your update will be published in the new release portlet on your NetSuite dashboard and your NetSuite admin will also get an email with this information. 00;07;13;07 - 00;07;48;11 If for some reason this time doesn't work for your company, you can change the date and time of the update via the CSM tool within NetSuite. Again, something pretty fast and easy that your admin can do. So on the day of the update, you do not need to install or do anything. Everything is automated. Accounts will go offline during the update time, which is scheduled for about a four-hour period, but most of the updates happen in 60 minutes or less. 00;07;48;14 - 00;08;09;02 And it sounds like there's not a whole lot for customers to do, which is obviously a good thing. But what can customers do to prepare for this update? Yeah, like I mentioned, this is all automatic, but we definitely encourage users to become familiar with what's in the release and to try it out in a release preview account. 00;08;09;04 - 00;08;43;28 So while accounts are updated automatically and all customizations that you may have done to your account come over with the update, it's great to test things out using your own data, workflows, integrations, and customizations just so there are no surprises. I know I don't like any surprises, so for those of you who are not familiar with the release preview account, this is a special test account test environment that clones your production account with the new release functionality in it. It's free. 00;08;44;05 - 00;09;12;24 Unknown You just need to have your NetSuite admin requested, but definitely encourage to, as we used to say, test drive before you go live. And other than this podcast, how else can customers learn more about 2024.2? Yeah, lots of ways to engage and learn more. So the first thing you can do is read about this sneak peek blogs. 00;09;12;28 - 00;09;37;04 You can read about the enhancements in the sneak peek blogs on NetSuite.com, as well as the release notes. The release notes go into a ton of details on each of the new features and capabilities. There's also training videos that are made available in SuiteAnswers that you can watch on selected new features and enhancements. 00;09;37;06 - 00;10;06;04 Another way, we encourage you to talk with your account manager about what's new, kind of what they're recommending you. You may want to pay a little special attention since they know your environments a little bit more. So engage in some conversations with your account manager. We've got some upcoming webinars that you could also, if you know, kind of seeing is more of your thing rather than reading. 00;10;06;07 - 00;10;37;03 So we have a new release features webinar coming up actually just a few days after this webinar—this podcast goes live so you can sign up to watch that to participate in that webinar July 24th. Or if you can't make that it's available, it will be available to watch on demand. And there's also another follow-up webinar coming up in early August about release readiness. 00;10;37;05 - 00;11;03;10 So this is a little different webinar. It's not going to go into details on the actual features, but more about giving you tips on how to get ready for the release, like using the release preview account, which I just mentioned, creating test plans. And then there's also an opportunity to learn about some of the services that we have available that you may want to look at to help with release readiness. 00;11;03;12 - 00;11;38;08 And then last but not least, you know, we've got SuiteWorld coming up. So that's happening in Las Vegas, September 9th through the 12th. We've got over 200+ sessions, seminars, hands-on learning and training that cover a lot of the new capabilities, not only from this release, 24.2, but also from the previous release, 24.1. So lots of different ways to learn about the release depending upon your, you know, how you like to learn and get up to speed on things. 00;11;38;11 - 00;12;05;13 Well, lots of cool and exciting stuff to look forward to there. So thanks for walking us through it, Lisa. Thanks again. Happy to. SuitePeople, NetSuite’s human resource management solution, saw several new features in NetSuite 2024 Release 2. Joining us to discuss how these updates will help companies better manage their workforce and associated costs is Tanios Boudames. 00;12;05;13 - 00;12;33;22 Product marketing manager for NetSuite SuitePeople. For those who are not aware of NetSuite’s HR solution SuitePeople, could you give them an overview? Yeah, of course. So SuitePeople is part of NetSuite’s DNA, right? It works seamlessly with the rest of the platform. It's NetSuite's comprehensive human resources management system. So it's designed to streamline, automate a lot of the complexities that HR 00;12;33;23 - 00;13;20;16 Teams and processes kind of face. And it offers a robust set of tools for managing core HR business processes. That's like keeping employee records, running payroll, providing benefits, understanding performance of different teams, scheduling and optimizing workforce scheduling and planning, and really by integrating with the NetSuite ecosystem and being a part of it, you can really enable your business to better manage your workforce by having real-time insights, by having real-time analytics that drive better decision making because SuitePeople is with NetSuite on the same platform and it really allows customers to better understand how they can manage their workforce and optimize it. 00;13;20;19 - 00;13;47;24 And all of this is leveraged because again it's connected to NetSuite. So we can connect to SuiteAnalytics, SuiteProjects, into all the different products that NetAuite offers. And in terms of SuitePeople itself, diving deeper in, in terms of what the modules and products are that we sell, we have US payroll, we have HR administration, we have workforce management, then we have performance management. 00;13;47;26 - 00;14;21;06 So these are really covering the key areas that HR folks are going to be looking for in terms of providing HR functionality to their business. And this helps really provide a unified solution for finance and HR. And one solution with NetSuite. Well, why is it important to have a finance and HR system that is unified? Yeah, so there's really three areas that I always think of when it's when it's having a unified solution, especially when it comes to two really key lines of business like finance and HR. 00;14;21;09 - 00;14;43;19 The first is collaboration, right? It's being able to understand when you want to make changes to your workforce, you want to either hire people or you want to maybe readjust learning or reskill employees or understand where you need make shifts in the workforce in terms of scheduling and teams is understanding how you can collaborate as a HR person with finance or vice versa. 00;14;43;25 - 00;15;29;00 Understanding the budget, understanding the costs from the finance side, and then understanding things like the goals of performance. The really HR information location, how you can readjust workforces to be optimized to improve revenue performance of the business. The second is having actionable insights. And this kind of goes on the collaboration is not just being able to talk to each other, but also as a finance person or as a HR person being able to pull up dashboards, things like headcount analysis, things like performance across teams or across individuals or across products, being able to forecast different aspects with workforce management, being able to understand, okay, I need like three people here at this at this 00;15;29;00 - 00;15;54;22 job site for this season, right? Because it's going to be very busy. We need more staff. So being able to have those actionable insights from across the business, whether it's coming from projects or whether it's coming from the HR side as a finance person is really important. And that's what SuitePeople provides with the unification of it being together, And the last having the data integrity—data integrity and data privacy. 00;15;54;22 - 00;16;17;27 So everything is in one solution. You're not having to import data sensitive data like employee data across different solutions. It's all within NetSuite, all protected. So this helps with the privacy, the security aspect, and integrity. You're not having a duplication of data, right? There's one source of truth. You go to NetSuite, you check an employee record, you check the financials, etc. All of it is within one system. 00;16;17;27 - 00;16;49;15 So that's really the power of having a unified in those three, those three elements, really. How has the product grown to support NetSuite Financial customers over the years? Yeah, so SuitePeople really started out with payroll and HR. And we've grown and added performance management and workforce management and really grown alongside with our customers. I mean, now we process 6 billion annually in payroll transactions across thousands of employees. 00;16;49;17 - 00;17;18;23 We're really very much ramping up as we'll see in this update around workforce management and around providing a more complete HR solution for our customers with things like benefits offering and benefits solution. So, it's very much improved with financials as well and NetSuite Financials to offer deeper analytics reporting features that help understand workforce costs, productivity, products for locations. 00;17;18;23 - 00;17;47;01 Right. Being able to understand where the demand is from the business and that comes from things like compensation, planning, performance management, and understanding the whole aspect of your business. And at the same time from an employee side is we've really grown to offer employees more of the self-service capabilities. So this is allowing them to get the information that they need at the time that they need it without having to go to HR. 00;17;47;03 - 00;18;11;00 Unknown Without having to bother or really distract business folks from focusing on more impactful tasks to ask for things like a payslip or to ask for things like time off or schedule around that. Right. So workforce management allows for that. We have the self-service portals in in HR to allow you to access payroll slips, etc. Right. Let's get to the good stuff. 00;18;11;02 - 00;18;43;08 What enhancements are coming to SuitePeople in 2024 Release 2? Yeah. So for workforce management, we have two really key enhancements coming and one of those is around being able to track to multiple time fields, right? So this is going to allow businesses to understand not just by, for example, a location or a team or a product, but to be able to dive even deeper into how employees are spending their time, where are the labor costs coming from? 00;18;43;10 - 00;19;26;03 For example, you are running, let's say, a coffee shop, right? Where are your employees spending the most time? Cleaning, making the coffee, talking with customers, whatever it may be. Being able to log those times across multiple time fields now allows you to understand where maybe you need more support. For example, another is like a contracting business, right? Where you have multiple people working on building a house, people who are doing the platform, the foundation, the concrete, who are building, the paint, the electrical, all the different stuff that you have within a project, being able to map across how many hours are being spent on which item, on which project, on which task is really 00;19;26;09 - 00;19;52;18 impactful for our customers now being able to use that and to map to different fields. And the second is around really enabling compliance for our customers. So being able to ensure that employees take their full break. So this is like a early break prevention enhancement where employees now will take their full break and cannot clock back in until their break is completed. 00;19;52;18 - 00;20;24;24 And this is important for a lot of states that will penalize businesses if employees don't take their full half an hour,... /episode/index/show/12aef361-1eee-4e8c-b82f-7e9d8ac5e3b9/id/32215037

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