Investing in a NetSuite solution is an important step towards streamlining your business processes to increase efficiency and accuracy. But it is only a step.
If your solution isn’t integrated correctly, you won’t just miss out on some of the benefits NetSuite can bring. You could end up wasting money on a solution that saves you little time or money, making it an active loss.
But to know if you’re getting the most from your NetSuite software, you need to know what a good integration looks like – so we made this the subject of our latest webinar, Built to Scale: What great integration really looks like.
Nic Dufton, our Head of Data Services, truly understands what differentiates an adequate integration from one that really delivers every benefit it can for your business. He gave this webinar to highlight the 6 traits you need to look out for in an integration so you can spot a standout integration – and improve a standard one.
Here’s our round-up of what he shared.
When talking about good NetSuite integrations, it’s important to start with why an integration is necessary.
A small business will often start out with much of its data collection and processes carried out on spreadsheets or other generic documents. But as that small business grows, it takes more orders, processes more orders and builds more systems. And, in the background, the number of spreadsheets grows too.
Data is siloed in separate places, and manual reconciliation becomes an almost impossible task.
These aren’t just theoretical situations either – research bears it out. A typical office worker does over 1,000 copy-pastes each week when working on spreadsheets, while employees can spend up to 50% of their time wrangling spreadsheet data.
All this time spent focused on reconciliation rather than analysis is wasted, and yet it’s still likely to lead to errors.
This is why a well-integrated NetSuite solution becomes essential for growing businesses. You need to reduce manual reconciliation as much as possible – the more your software can automate all these processes, draw your data from a single source of truth and work with it, the more successful your business can be.
Knowing you need a good integration is fine, but if you don’t know what that looks like, you will never know if you’re leaving easy wins on the table. We’ve helped over 1,200 businesses to integrate NetSuite solutions that achieve the most they can, and in the process, we’ve learned how to spot an acceptable integration and how to spot a great one.
Here are the traits you should look out for to identify a truly great integration.
Almost all businesses are looking to grow, and a great integration should be able to scale alongside.
Inferior integrations are built purely to solve the problems of today. They will ease issues with your current volume of customers, orders or stock, but when that doubles or even grows exponentially, then issues arise.
The integration can’t handle this volume. At 1,000 transactions a month, it worked seamlessly to streamline essential business operations, but at 10,000, it struggles. At 20,000, it collapses.
A great integration is designed with your growth in mind. It can handle any spikes in volume. It allows new systems or processes to be added without having to start over from scratch. It scales alongside you, rather than needing to be rebuilt at every milestone.
Great integrations are designed with finance needs at the forefront.
Your NetSuite solution should deliver incredible benefits for your CFO, finance leaders and finance department. If they don’t trust the data flowing through it, then nothing else really matters.
If data reconciliation is still an issue, transactions are being duplicated, or data is inconsistent, then your finance team is still wasting their time firefighting instead of analysing. The exact opposite of the benefits it is supposed to bring.
A great integration will be built with the following in mind:
They’ll make sure that when the data lands in your ERP, it does so cleanly, in a way that supports reporting instead of complicating it.
One of the biggest risks with a NetSuite integration is if it breaks and nobody notices. Data will continue to be collected or processed incorrectly for hours or even days with no one noticing. Month-end rolls round and inaccuracies appear, reconciliation becomes a mammoth task, transactions are revealed to be missing or duplicated and all your data needs revisiting and rectifying.
A great integration can’t fail silently because it has fail-safes built in.
We supported a customer with an existing integration running between their 3PL and NetSuite. It had been live for months, and in that time, the integration’s native Activity Log was capturing errors – but nobody was seeing them.
Orders were not being fulfilled because stock levels were not being updated, but with no alerts or monitoring, no one in the business realised. It took a customer complaint to make them aware.
The fix was actually simple. We configured an operation-level alert that pushed email notifications to the necessary people the moment a failure occurred and added a weekly review of the dashboard into the process.
It is impossible to prevent a system error from ever happening. But with a custom integration, checks and balances can be fully and naturally included to make sure you always have visibility across the system and spot any errors before they become unmanageable problems.
If an integration is treated as a one-off project, it is doomed to fail from the start. This is because businesses don’t stand still. Systems change, processes evolve, transactions increase and data volume grows – if your integration doesn’t evolve alongside them, it’s underperforming.
Great integrations are treated as operational infrastructure. A solution with clear ownership within the organisation. Over time, they are reviewed, maintained, updated and improved so they stay aligned with your business goals and always deliver the best they can.
They don’t sit forgotten in the background as technical support; instead, they are a genuine enabler of growth. Setting a regular integration review, such as one every quarter, means that you are always working with a system optimised for your business.
This gives you time to check whether any other processes or systems have changed that might be having a knock-on impact, and to assess whether your volumes are still within expected parameters. It even allows you to consider likely future trends and plan ahead, keeping your solution aligned at all times.
The data that your NetSuite integration works with is incredibly important. It’s used for reporting, decision making and future planning, which means it needs to be clean and complete.
If it isn’t, the weaknesses in your data can have wide-ranging impacts. Old spreadsheets get dusted off, manual reconciliation re-enters processes, and reporting times creep back up as people need to manually validate everything. Finance will start seeing conflicting information and, eventually, confidence in your data will erode.
Great integrations actively protect the integrity of your data by validating it before transferring it, ensuring mapping is consistent and making sure that transactions tell the same story.
Poor integrations are built to support a ‘standard’ business process, supporting the goal of simply sending data from system A to system B. If the data arrives correctly, then it is considered a success.
And, technically, that is a success. However, this has such a limited scope of benefits compared to what a great integration could achieve.
Business processes do not always operate in the most obvious or even intended ways. Extra steps or parallel processes are needed, and a great integration will account for them and even improve or support them.
For example, we helped a customer whose product range included knives to add an extra layer of logic to enable age verification. As a retailer, they had a legal obligation to verify the age of their customers before selling a blade to them, but this wasn’t a standard part of any Shopify to NetSuite integration.
With their integration, we designed their solution to intercept before it landed in NetSuite and allow for age verification. From here, it was either passed through to fulfilment or held and routed for human review. This stopped NetSuite from ever seeing an unverified order in a fulfilment-ready state, and meant that no unverified (and thus law-breaking) orders were fulfilled.
A great integration should be tailored to your business. It should account for the specific needs of your industry, business size or set-up and make these flow better too.
You can also download the slides here:
Of course, when it comes to a great NetSuite integration, the most important trait is that it is tailored to your business specifically. Here at NoBlue2, we’ve helped over 375 customers to integrate NetSuite solutions that streamline their operations and increase the efficiency of their processes.
If you’re looking for an integrated solution that goes beyond good to deliver the best it can, talk to our team today.
