The women of AST gathered together on Friday, March 8, in honor of International Women’s Day, for an inspirational discussion and luncheon in our Lisle headquarters.
We heard stories of strength and perseverance from women across our organization, and shared our visions for the future of equality and women in the workplace.
Thanks to everyone who organized this great event and all those strong women who joined us!
Join AST on March 12-14 at Oracle Headquarters in Redwood Shores, CA for the 2019 Analytics and Data Summit (formerly BIWA Summit). AST is a Gold Sponsor of the event and our experts will be on site to share the latest trends in data and analytics.
The Analytics and Data Summit is organized and managed by the Oracle BI, Data Warehouse, and Analytics user community. It also includes the annual Oracle Spatial and Graph Summit. The 3-day event attracts top talent in Oracle BI, Data Warehouse, Advanced Analytics, Big Data, and Spatial and Graph, and includes:
We would love the opportunity to chat with you about your data and analytics needs, and how AST’s Assessment and QuickLaunch offerings accelerate implementation and deliver greater ROI.
The Analytics and Data Summit 2019: All Analytics. All Data. No Nonsense. Register today!
When was the last time you upgraded your ERP system? Not just patched, fixed or tinkered with it—but implemented a substantive upgrade that enabled real business innovation, generated excitement and unleashed a wave of ideas and productivity from your users? You know—the same kinds of enthusiasm that greets web or iPhone apps like Instagram, Spotify, Netflix, etc.?
If you’re like your peers, then the answer is “not in recent memory.” In fact, according to Forrester, “approximately half of
ERP customers are on releases that are two versions behind the current release, which may be four years old or more.” In today’s fast-moving environment, that may as well be in the Stone Age. More than likely, your ERP was designed in an era where fax machines were still relevant, channels were slowly grown over time, and going global meant owning expensive global infrastructure to support growth.
The fact is that the world is innovating faster than ever, but ERP installations seem to stay frozen in time. It’s hard to believe that an outdated, five-year-old ERP system can be relevant to a business in a hyperactive world.
Technology has transformed the broader world of business software and consumer applications. Workers now interact through mobile devices and social media, and applications are increasingly connected together over the Web. But many ERP deployments have remained oblivious to these tectonic changes—it’s as if the iPhone was never invented, social media was a futuristic concept and connecting ERP to web channels was a kooky concept for the dabbling few.
It’s no wonder, according to a survey published in CIO magazine some time ago, that only 4 percent of IT leaders believe their ERP systems create competitive advantage. The competitive advantage vanished long ago.
On-premise ERP systems like Sage, Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) and SAP have locked businesses onto a treadmill with annual maintenance fees of more than 20% for the right to make a support call and download the latest software—but what good is it if you can’t upgrade your ERP deployment to take advantage of change and keep your business running efficiently?
The sad reality is that for almost every business, “version-lock” is the Achilles heel of their on-premise ERP. Customizations to an ERP that seemed so innocuous at the beginning of an implementation years ago have built up over time like silicon plaque. Gradually, your ERP becomes hardened to change because an upgrade to on-premise technology means re-implementing and testing those custom schema changes, integrations, workflows and reports.
Faced with outsized risk, cost and resource requirements for what may seem like an incremental upgrade, your company can be effectively forced into “version-lock,” with an aging ERP system that’s increasingly out of alignment with the needs of the business. Your users begin working around your system with unproductive manual processes and spreadsheets to fill in the functional gaps that have grown over time.
With businesses already spending an average of 5 percent of their revenue on IT operating and capital budgets, there’s little appetite to further erode margin by growing the IT budget without delivering sustained transformational value and real competitive advantage.
Does running an aging, out-of-date ERP really damage your business? Does it matter if your ERP is “version-locked?” After all, isn’t it simply automating the same old accounting processes that haven’t changed in decades? The reality is that the damage is real, and while your ERP has your business stuck in quicksand, your competitors are not standing still. Your business needs ERP that supports real transformation, and that outdated ERP system you’re running simply isn’t aligned with the business environment in which you and your competitors operate.
Back in the early 1990s, change happened less rapidly. Product cycles were slower, communication occurred mostly by telephone and fax, and email was still a novelty. If you wanted to boost sales, you hired more sales personnel. Let’s just say you could afford to move “a little slower.”
But over the last few years, the pace of business and innovation has accelerated dramatically. Today’s speed of change places stresses on business process. Worker expectations have changed on how they want to engage with your business systems. And your customers have changed the way they want to engage with you. Businesses can now go global in an instant, ecommerce has opened up new sales and customer service channels and the last decade has seen the birth of several hyper-growth companies.
Owning an ERP system that can only be upgraded every four or five years (at best) is simply not enough to maintain competitiveness with your peers. Business and technology are now moving so quickly that even if you do invest six months and $1 million in an ERP upgrade, the end result will be out of date by the time it’s completed. Worse still, old ERP is fundamentally incompatible with the way companies need to be structured for success.
It’s time to explore the eight ways that your aging ERP system is holding back your business.
The key to knowing how aligned your ERP systems are with your business imperatives is measuring how much of the IT budget is devoted to innovation rather than maintenance.
How much of IT’s time can you devote to addressing new business requirements, rather than day-to-day operations such as patches, fixes, support calls and otherwise managing your infrastructure? Take a hard look at the aging, version-locked ERP system you are running right now, and do the math.
Analysts from Forrester to Gartner measure this allocation closely, and find that maintenance spend can range from
50 percent to more than 90 percent of a typical IT budget. Only a fraction is left over for meeting business needs. It’s no wonder, considering the average cost of SAP deployment can be between $12 million and $17 million, according to CIO magazine. Subsequent recurring maintenance fees, infrastructure upgrades, integrations and ongoing IT maintenance can quickly consume the IT budget.
Simply changing the equation and reallocating the IT budget from maintenance to innovation is almost impossible with old ERP, because every costly old on-premise ERP upgrade, patch and fix is “opportunity cost”—money and time that isn’t spent on tailoring ERP to meet the needs of the business. Worse still, businesses have little left over for managing core areas such as security and reliability. For example, does your business have budget left over to manage a second data center?
Does your IT budget allocation look like this? Blame your outdated on-premise ERP.
But your competitors are already changing their budget allocation—and cloud computing is the tool that enables them to do it, by cutting IT costs by 50 percent or more.
They’re able to reduce spend on maintenance, and increase spend on such value-added activities as creating new cross-functional workflows and reporting processes, adding sales channels, entering new markets and improving connectedness between internal and external systems. That adds up to a decided competitive advantage, while the company gains enterprise security, redundancy and data recovery that would be cost-prohibitive as internal company initiatives.
In 2013, Shaw Carpets, a $4.5 billion subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway and manufacturer of flooring and turf products for commercial, residential and institutional markets was looking to expand its manufacturing facilities into China and needed a new ERP solution to support China and subsequent subsidiaries that would be created in the APAC region. Faced with the reality of an aging on-premise ERP solution and the associated pain of maintaining the customizations, the company was faced with the problem of version lock. Shaw Carpets had to choose between retooling the customizations with every upgrade of the core ERP system (and burning their IT resources in the process) or staying on outdated releases. While staying on older releases was ‘safer’ it prevented the company from taking advantage of the latest and greatest functionality from their on-premise ERP vendor.
We were spending 3 percent of our revenue on SAP. By switching to NetSuite, we reduced that cost to 0.1 percent of revenue. – Asahi Kasei, Spandex America
One of the company’s key requirements was a platform that guaranteed that their customizations would work with newer releases of products, without killing their IT resources in the process. Shaw Carpets ended up choosing NetSuite and is now enjoying the benefits of zero upfront capital expenditure, rapid deployment across 11 subsidiaries and counting. Most importantly, Shaw is taking advantage of the latest functionality that NetSuite offers every six months WITHOUT worrying about any customizations.
The accounting and regulatory environment is in constant flux as governments tighten fiscal policy through sales and corporate tax changes, or accounting bodies implement more stringent requirements such as FASB’s ASC 605-25 rules governing revenue recognition for “multi-element” products and services. These kinds of changes place enormous pressure on finance organizations. An out-of-date ERP is simply not designed with change in mind. How could your SAP R/3 install circa 2005 ever have known about revenue recognition changes that would be hitting in 2014?
The gulf between your ERP and your current business operating environment is filled with spreadsheets and headcount. This is the “putty” that fills the gap that your ERP was meant to automate. Revenue recognition schedules suddenly migrate to spreadsheets, local geo tax reports get massaged through CSV exports and manual entry, and sales tax calculations suddenly start becoming error-prone affairs.
The fact is that your on-premise ERP will never track with change—because on the rare occasion you upgrade it, the operating environment will already have changed, and spreadsheets and personnel once again rush to fill the gap.
Has your operating environment changed but your ERP stayed the same? Welcome to spreadsheet hell.
The web enables business to go global instantly—reaching many millions of customers in a year or two, whereas it used to take a decade or more to make that type of progress.
Some of today’s fast growing publicly traded companies are growing because they are not shackled to their on-premise ERP systems. Had these companies relied on an upgrade to the installation of their on-premise ERP system to take advantage of innovation, who knows where they’d be today?
Your ability to compete is diminished if you’re running an aging install of Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Epicor that was designed for when businesses grew incrementally—country by country, market by market, over years and decades. The old way of doing business meant deploying multiple ERP instances and databases for each market. It meant hiring IT in each location, setting up offices, procuring software and hardware, and enduring onerous setup processes. IT budget, resources and time were the constraining factors for business growth.
Cloud applications like NetSuite provide the engine to drive growth, enabling businesses to lay down an applications footprint for each country and subsidiary in weeks—not months or years. Cloud ERP spares businesses from having to worry about scaling up expensive IT resources and large capital expenditures on IT infrastructure. The result is velocity that creates true competitive advantage.
The millennial generation entering the workforce demand easy-to-use systems that mirror social tools or online shopping and increasingly blur the lines between work and home life. At the end of the day, putting the right person in the right place with the right tools remains the best way for a company of any size to stay competitive. According to Gartner, worldwide devices (the combined shipments of PCs, tablets and mobile phones) are on pace to reaching more than 2.9 billion units in 2017. But your ERP system was designed for when work was done in the office cube, and consumer computing and business computing were clearly separated. Using outdated ERP means either completely giving up on accessing your information from anywhere outside of your office, struggling for access over sloth-like Citrix connections or enduring painfully slow client-server experiences over virtual private networks (VPNs)—not to mention the associated IT and maintenance costs. It also means having no visibility into business operations when on the road, or having to drive into the office to approve a sales order. The result is your employees are simply less productive than they could be and you make decisions more slowly based on outdated information.
NetSuite requires as little as 10% of the implementation effort normally associated with an ERP deployment. – Nucleus Research
Old ERP was never designed for the post-PC era of the anytime, anywhere workforce, but cloud applications are. In fact, no matter how much you upgrade your old PC-era ERP system, it will never be easy to access over mobile devices because it was not initially architected with the web in mind and, in some cases, was engineered before the Internet was invented. On the other hand, web-based cloud ERP applications are optimized for bringing the world of mobile computing together with ERP, enabling your employees to monitor and manage the business from anywhere on any device. For example, without any IT setup work, NetSuite cloud ERP can be accessed from anytime, anywhere via any web browser, whether IE, Chrome, Safari or Firefox, and any mobile device, whether iPads, iPhone, Androids or whichever device hits the market next.
It’s not just workers that are becoming mobile. Businesses as a whole are becoming more distributed.
To compete, businesses are looking to achieve agility and fluidity in their business structure. In a globalized world, businesses need to be able to choose where work takes place based on cost, timeliness and the ability to maintain and adapt an elastic workforce.
Today’s businesses are running operations in multiple locations and maximizing efficiency with offshoring and remote workers. But last generation’s ERP was never designed with this in mind, requiring hefty Windows clients and heavyweight software in each location. Old ERP forces you into an expensive centralized structure, unless you can afford to dispatch IT teams to every corner of the globe. It means maintaining desktops at multiple locations, upgrading clients and dealing with information fragmentation across local desktops. Businesses want to decentralize while maintaining visibility and control, but old ERP holds them back from achieving those goals.
A good example of how a business can compete in this newly globalized environment is Sundia Corporation, a multimillion-dollar fresh produce brand based in Oakland, California. With customer support in the Philippines, accounting in India and the executive team in California, Sundia needed to get operations up quickly while maintaining an efficient ongoing cost structure. Cloud ERP is the foundation for Sundia’s modern, global and decentralized operations, enabling its personnel across the globe to access, manage and even innovate the ERP system in real-time.
It’s an organizational structure that would have been untenable with old centralized ERP. Brad Oberwager, Founder, Chairman and CEO, observed that Sundia “simply wouldn’t be in business with the old way.” Sundia is able to leverage the power of cloud to drive innovation further, with remote application development and customization based in Asia taking place in real-time on the cloud platform.
Cloud computing enables the distributed “elastic” business—enabling the extended workforce to access applications from anywhere across the globe, offshore as it makes sense, and scale up and down easily whenever needed. They can easily operate on a true “follow-the-sun” model and not be limited by the constraints of centralized ERP or be dependent on local IT resources.
If you’re running legacy ERP like Sage MAS or Microsoft Dynamics GP, you know the drill. Your business is running on spreadsheets, and management reporting is an onerous and error-prone exercise. You’ve got employees dedicated to the job of simply reporting, or reporting consumes the lion’s share of their day.
More often than not, it takes days to assemble bookings, billings and backlogs reports, or complete the periodic budgeting and forecasting process. You’re constantly struggling to unlock data that’s buried in the ERP (or other disconnected systems and spreadsheets). Amazingly, while businesses can today measure ad performance, marketing campaign responses, and the number of unique visitors to their website in real-time, core financial management reporting remains measured in weeks and business days.
According to a survey by Forrester research titled Key Prevailing Trends in ERP, more companies are interested in adopting the following trends and Analytics is one of the top three priorities.
And for good reason—there’s a gulf between what financial managers need and what their ERP is delivering. Custom ABAP reporting in an SAP ERP system, static Crystal Reports or out-of-date spreadsheets emailed among managers just aren’t enough. Your ERP is starving your business of information, forcing you to make strategic and tactical decisions based on out-of-date, incomplete or simply erroneous data.
To compete, businesses need modern ERP designed for today’s needs, not the needs of yesteryear. BI and analytics should be part and parcel of the ERP experience. BI has to empower every employee with personalized key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time, enable them to get down to the invoice behind that days sales outstanding (DSO) threshold metric, gain visibility across the complete business and create and share their own reports with self- service tools.
Combining the mobility and distributed access enabled by the cloud with real-time analytics puts your company firmly on the path to true competitive advantage—enabling workers across the extended business to collaborate and achieve alignment, no matter where their location and without days of delay. Modern cloud ERP like NetSuite eliminates the gap between the demand for analytics, your business processes and the decisions you need to make based on both of those items.
Everything has become connected through the cloud. Your customers are no longer content to wait on the phone to check an order; they want to browse your website to get their order status right now. Your suppliers stand ready to drop-ship your orders in real-time rather than forcing you to tie up capital in inventory.
Channels like Amazon are ripe to drive additional sales. Your website is increasingly your principal storefront, and customers judge your business by the level of service it provides. Your operations have to be interconnected with customers, suppliers and partners, enabling real-time information exchange on demand.
But your out-of-date SAP R/3 or Microsoft Dynamics AX deployment was never designed for such an interconnected world—forcing you to deploy expensive adapters, third-party applications and CSV exports. In short, Stone Age ERP was never designed to be connected across so many touchpoints and with so many external stakeholders—they’re simply not service-oriented systems.
As the Web increasingly becomes the medium for information exchange, your on-premise ERP is increasingly an anathema, a silo—disconnected and out of sync. The impact is multi-faceted. Your customers are frustrated if they can’t easily view pricing and inventory information on your website, or check the status of orders or returns. You’re frustrated if you can’t switch suppliers on demand, because the effort requires yet more expensive integrations.
In contrast, cloud ERP applications were designed to connect with other platforms and web applications within your enterprise and beyond. Designed from the ground up to be service-oriented and always-on, cloud ERP makes it easy to synchronize your back- and front-office with your website in real-time and connect to the extended enterprise. Your customers see their orders and returns in real-time. Your suppliers are able to fulfill your customers’ orders as they process in your ERP. Your stock levels are always up to date, providing visibility for your sales and service reps as well as customers browsing through channels like eBay and Amazon.
Are you part of a self-service business? Can your employees enter time and expenses themselves into the ERP, or does someone need to rekey it for them? Can an accounting manager quickly implement a new purchase order process, or do you need to wait weeks for IT to do it? Can your finance team easily change the invoice template, or add another field to a customer record themselves? If none of this rings true, don’t blame your co-workers—blame your ERP.
Stone Age ERP was designed when businesses were top- heavy in general administration—when it was standard practice to have someone assigned to rekeying purchase orders or time and expense entries. Back then, a manager could offload his reporting to the finance staff, and you could hire another IT guy to make an ERP process change.
Cloud ERP is designed for lean businesses and uses the power of the web to drive employee self-service, just as the Web has securely transformed online banking and customer self-service systems. As banks have known for years, empowering customers with self-service through the Web increases profitability and reduces waste that goes straight to the bottom line. Employees who use the cloud gain self- service efficiencies that aren’t possible to achieve with old ERP. They can submit time and expense reports or purchase orders, even enter receipts directly into the ERP anywhere from a web page or mobile device. Once these transactions are submitted, it’s just a matter of online approval. Managing change is also self-service, with graphical workflows, forms and schema changes that require no delay or IT involvement. Even reporting—a function long offloaded to “reporting analysts”—can be performed by managers themselves.
Cloud ERP frees businesses from the brittle, inflexible and change resistant ERP of the past. With the cloud, businesses can run on ERP that is “version-less.” It means that businesses get the latest innovations automatically, from new features to support for the latest regulations. No more waiting, no more costly upgrades, no more upgrade risk. No more outdated ERP.
“Version-less” cloud ERP enables enterprises to experience ERP innovation as fast as consumers experience innovation in the enhanced web applications they use every day. It continuously aligns your ERP with your business operating environment.
Better still, enterprises no longer have to live in fear of customizations acting like “silicon concrete,” hardening their ERP to change and slowing their business to a crawl. They can finally customize their ERP with confidence, because with cloud ERP, customizations migrate automatically with every new release. Customization no longer becomes a barrier to innovation.
A recent Forrester Research Forrsights survey found that the top four reasons that businesses move to the cloud are improved business agility, speed of implementation and deployment, faster delivery of new features and functions and to support business innovation with new capabilities. At NetSuite, we couldn’t agree more—we’ve seen the 30,000+ companies and subsidiaries that run on the NetSuite cloud, experience the same benefits.
Why make the move now? Consider the alternative. Remaining on Stone Age “version-locked” systems means high ongoingcost, distraction from focusing on what matters and a continuing drag on business agility. And ultimately that means falling behind your competition.
NetSuite is the most successful ERP suite SaaS provider operating in terms of active customers, international presence and functionality offered across the product. – Gartner
Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle, pioneered the Cloud Computing revolution in 1998, establishing the world’s first company dedicated to delivering business applications over the Internet. Today, Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit provides a suite of cloud-based financials/Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and omnichannel commerce software that runs the business of companies in more than 100 countries. For more information, please visit www.netsuite.com.
This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.
Join us TODAY, February 27, at 10 AM Pacific Time for a free webinar all about using Oracle Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) to secure your Oracle Cloud Applications.
Oracle Senior Product Manager, Subbu Iyer and AST Security Architect, Abhay Kumar will illustrate how Oracle IDCS and CASB can be deployed as a platform to secure and continuously monitor Oracle ERP Cloud, including:
Register here to learn how to protect your cloud investment with AST and Oracle.
We’ve remodeled our home on the web!
Have you visited our company website lately? If you’ve done so today, you probably noticed a few major changes…like a completely redesigned, modern, and streamlined site to deliver the information you need faster!
As an organization that delivers true digital transformation solutions to our clients, our website reflects that mission now, more than ever. Visitors can find detailed information about our services and solutions for Oracle and Salesforce cloud applications, cloud platform and technology services, and managed cloud services, as well as industry-specific solutions and service delivery, and a knowledge base FULL of valuable information like case studies, webinars, and solutions to meet your specific needs.
Visit AST’s new website today and let us help you on your digital transformation journey.
Today, cloud computing is at the forefront of the shift to the digital business and enabling companies to adapt to these changing models, both strategically and operationally.
Companies with a cloud-first strategy have learned that the cloud’s real value comes with being able to delegate the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of an entire solution, from infrastructure to application, instead of components. It is also widely recognized that integrated suites reduce complexity, increase reliability and cost less—it’s just that now, with cloud, the suite includes hardware, security and operations. Most agree that the cloud paradigm has cost and convenience benefits: availability, speed, agility and TCO, enabling faster development processes and providing higher reliability and lower risk. Companies that take an ad hoc approach miss out on many of cloud’s benefits and experience a variety of pitfalls. In the current state of the market, not all cloud providers can step up to the challenge of providing an integrated offering, and that forces companies to manage more than they want to.
As a leading Cloud ERP company, NetSuite has championed the cause to deliver not only a true cloud platform but also strived continuously to develop a truly integrated suite for our growing global customer base of more than 40,000.
Further, the SuiteSuccess customer engagement model is already helping hundreds of new customers deploy the platform faster and leverage leading business process practices to both create and realize value within their organization much sooner than traditional approaches.
Enterprises run the risk of getting nasty shocks when the thing they thought they were buying turns out to be something altogether
different. Hosting and application management are not synonymous with SaaS – Gartner
In this document we hope to provide you our perspective on the components and scorecard to use to not only evaluate a true cloud solution, but also analyze for yourself how our various platform offerings help you to meet your organization objectives today, adapt to the industry disruptions of tomorrow and realize savings of more than 20%-50% in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) alone1 or incur $64k-$242k annually in hidden or unexpected costs2.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
NetSuite is offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The applications are accessible via a web browser or mobile app.
Unlike on-premise software, NetSuite customers do not have to be involved with managing the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage and application upgrades.
Multi-Tenant Architecture
NetSuite has a single instance of the application. Each tenant can make customizations and configurations that are rendered to the views they see and/or invoked when using the application.
Most customers share a common database instance with other customers. In situations where customers need higher performance, NetSuite offers Premium Performance Tiers with dedicated database instances. Some customers start on the shared database and migrate at a later point to their own dedicated database.
This last situation (a shared database) would be considered as the highest degree of multi-tenancy. Virtualization would, by definition, then offer the lowest degree of multi-tenancy.
Despite what fake cloud vendors will tell you, multi-tenancy matters. For example, with a true cloud provider, all customers typically access the same solution from the same cloud. This gives customers continuous and instantaneous access to the latest product upgrades.
Preserving Your IT Investments
Public Cloud
NetSuite is offered as a public cloud deployment and has a single instance of the
application. This is aligned with our strategy to offer SaaS and a multi-tenant architecture that allows both our enterprise as well as small business customers to be on the same
version of the application globally, allowing them to reap benefits from economies of scale, less capacity planning, increased agility, scalability and IT costs.
Two-Tier ERP Strategy
Two-tier ERP is a business and technology strategy that enables organizations to keep their investment in existing ERP systems, i.e. SAP or Oracle, while deploying cloud-based ERP, i.e. NetSuite, at newer subsidiaries.
As large enterprise’s expand and restructure through mergers and acquisitions into larger companies, one of the strategies to preserve their existing ERP investments is to adopt a so-called hub and spoke approach to ERP.
There are three hub and spoke models:
NetSuite OneWorld has the flexibility to let us build financial controls over the way we do business instead of trying to mold our
processes to inflexible software – Bankrate
An Integrated Business Application Suite
Integrated Suite
Companies in virtually every industry are using sophisticated business software to fuel their growth but many are still struggling to keep up with their growth and manage costs effectively because of a hodgepodge of disconnected functional systems causing process bottlenecks and employee productivity issues.
Integrated business software suites are transforming how companies run, and enabling them to transcend growing pains that previously were holding them back from taking their business to the next level of profitable growth.
In an ROI study by independent analyst firm Nucleus Research, customers using NetSuite’s integrated cloud business suite accelerated their financial close times by up to 50%, increase sales productivity by 12.5% and increase inventory turns by 50%, amongst other efficiencies.
NetSuite is our single source of truth. Our people are very happy with NetSuite and are always looking for different ways to optimize the solution. – Dent Wizard
Large enterprises, SMBs and mid-market enterprises alike need business solutions that help them manage day-to-day operations and processes more efficiently. At the same time, they want insight and intelligence to successfully adapt to a fluid business environment, and
ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. It is then no surprise that some of the strategic business leaders that we engage with evaluate their cloud computing platforms not only on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) criteria alone, but also engage their line of business operational leads to actively participate in the selection process to determine the true return on their investment that is aligned with their business strategy and objectives.
In this section, we present both a typical business need evaluation scorecard and a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) scorecard that can assist, at least at a high level, in aligning business and IT requirements, eliminate siloed platforms and solutions that create spaghetti environments and justify the needs for an integrated platform that is aligned to your business objectives, can drive business process improvements and thus preserve your company valuations.
The ROI of cloud ERP can be achieved relatively quickly and this delivery model brings IT cost reductions and increased employee productivity to the broad range of the companies using it. SMBs can also achieve other important benefits from ERP in the cloud, such as increased inventory accuracy, better customer satisfaction and increased sales. – Nucleus Research
Enabling Business Agility and Scalability
Scalability
$25,000 – $50,000
Increase gross margins from 35% to 36%-37%.
Grow your business and revenues without the limitations of an on-premise ERP capacity
planning holding you back.
Enabling Business Flexibility and Eliminating Version Lock
Business Flexibility
$12,000 – $18,000
Reduction in time to add new capabilities. 160 hours per capability at $75/hour.
Enable your business strategy to expand into new markets and channels.
Zero Lock Versioning
$48,000
320 hours at $75/hour per upgrade. 2 upgrades/year done by NetSuite.
NetSuite’s patented “phased release” process ensures that 100% of our customers are on the same version. Typically, NetSuite plans for two major upgrades per year and ongoing minor upgrades throughout the year. A release preview environment is also provided to the customers. Certified customizations carry forward and customer use cases are incorporated in QA testing.
Configure and Customize and Carry Them Forward
SuiteSolutions
$37,500 – $50,000
1 IT FTE reduction, effort shift to business user.
In addition to offering a host of configurable forms, reports and process flows that are
configurable by the business users, NetSuite SuiteSolutions offers a library of ready-tolaunch solutions to address common business requirements across market verticals. SuiteSolutions facilitate accelerated timeto-market and reduce development costs—enabling customers to achieve business agility with fewer resources.
SuiteCloud
$24,000 – $36,000
160 hours at $75/hour per customization. Faster execution and elimination on customizations.
With SuiteCloud you get the best of both worlds—centralization in a suite for core business function, data and analytics to avoid unnecessary hairballs plus the most flexible system for customization, extension, integration and development in cloud ERP—making “smart integrations” easy and putting the business processes that give you competitive advantage right in your system of record.
Built-In Security and Redundancy
Security
$25,000 – $50,000
Analysis assumes 1% customer churn due to security issues (500 customers & $20k revenue/customer).
NetSuite employs stringent round-the-clock monitoring tools, controls and policies and a dedicated tenured security team to ensure that it provides the strongest security (Application, Network and Data) for its customers.
This results in benefits to our customers by getting stringent security certifications for their business applications and lets them enjoy security controls such as fully guarded premises and physical access management that are economically unachievable with typical in-house, on-premise deployments.
Availability
$0
Benefit analysis assumes that customer evaluates this SLA for all platforms it may be considering.
NetSuite maximizes application availability by operating multiple geographically separated data centers. Its data center redundancy includes data mirroring, disaster recovery and failover. NetSuite has achieved a historical uptime track record of 99.96% over more than the past five years and guaranteed uptime of 99.5% backed by transparent Service Level Commitment. To add to its commitment, NetSuite’s SLC is backed by a service credit if availability commitment isn’t met. System status is displayed at all times at http://status.netsuite.com.
Performance
$0
Benefit analysis assumes that customer evaluates this SLA for all platforms it may be considering.
Application performance is key to NetSuite and our customers. NetSuite’s built-in performance monitoring tools provide deep insights into the application’s behavior and exposes granular details about performance metrics.
We can do twice as many transactions in the same amount of time. – Ed McMahon, CEO, EPEC Engineered Technologies
SuiteSuccess – Time to Value
NetSuite packages the experience gained from tens of thousands of deployments worldwide amassed over two decades into a set of leading practices. These practices pave a clear pathway to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. Intelligent, staged implementation begins at sales contact and spans the entire customer life cycle so that there is seamless continuity from sales to services to support.
Most ERP vendors have tried to solve the industry solution problem with templates, rapid implementation methodologies, and custom code. NetSuite took a holistic approach to the problem and productized domain knowledge, leading practices, KPIs and an agile approach to product adoption. The benefits of this are faster time to value, increased business efficiency, flexibility and greater customer success.
Within each industry offering, NetSuite has built unique micro-vertical solutions to address specific market needs. SuiteSuccess has over 300 customers and is available now, expanding globally into more industries and to current NetSuite customers over the course of this year.
Our team at NetSuite has been nothing short of spectacular. They provided us with a smooth, on-time and rock solid delivery of our new ERP.— Dave Ullmann, Director of Ecommerce, Lindemann Chimney
Path towards a strategic partnership
NetSuite is aligned and committed to your transformation initiatives. As a strategic partner we will take this responsibility extremely seriously and are ready to bring our expertise and cloud solutions delivery experience to your organization.
Proposed Next Steps:
This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.
Join us in Las Vegas on March 19-21, 2019 for Oracle’s Modern Customer Experience (#ModernCX) event! Click here to save $500 on your registration with AST’s exclusive code: CXASTCorp (That’s more than 25% off the onsite rate!)
Modern Customer Experience is the only place to connect with legends in marketing, service, sales, and commerce. Join your peers to carve the path forward in standout CX.
Spend 3 days networking with experts in Customer Experience, learning from more than 50 (!) Keynote and Featured Speakers, such as Earvin “Magic” Johnson, NBA Legend, Hall of Famer, Entrepreneur, and Philanthropist; Ann Handley, WSJ Best-Selling Author and Digital Marketing Pioneer; Mark Hurd, CEO at Oracle; and so many more, and enjoy unique networking and entertainment events, such as the Appreciation Event, Markie Awards, and Mindfulness Workshop.
You are at the center at Modern Customer Experience 2019. Your career. Your accomplishments. Your future success. You’ll be surrounded by CX luminaries, technology experts, partners, and peers who will share their knowledge and help you achieve legendary results for your company and your customers.
As a featured sponsor of this exciting event, AST is offering you an exclusive opportunity to register for the event for the lowest price of the season!
Act fast – this opportunity to save big doesn’t last long!
This Tuesday, February 5, AST will sponsor Oracle Cloud Day at the Marriott Marquis in Chicago!
We will be exhibiting all day in the Innovative Lounge. Representatives from our Cloud Platform, Enterprise Security, Middleware, Managed Services, and Business Analytics teams will be on hand to field questions and talk all things Cloud.
Whether your race to the cloud is a marathon or a sprint, Oracle Cloud Day can help. This exciting event features a curated series of talks, hands-on experiences, and networking opportunities that will help you explore new cloud technologies, best practices, and successful use cases.
Stop by the Innovative Lounge to discuss how AST is helping clients flexibly, securely, and reliably move to and maintain their Cloud infrastructure in a variety of scenarios, from assessment to implementation. Anyone who stops by our kiosk will also be entered into a drawing for a pair of Apple AirPods.
Exciting things are happening at AST, from a new headquarters in Lisle to awards for cloud innovation recognized at Oracle OpenWorld. We also have a wealth of new thought leadership from AST’s team of experts on Secure Digital Transformation, Automated Testing, and Streamlining Finance Operations.
If you’d like to schedule some time to meet with us, contact Mike Milner, Midwest Manager of Business Development, at mmilner@astcorporation.com.
Register for the event here – we hope to see you Tuesday!
Source: NetSuite Blogs
Kelly Scott from NetSuite recently sat down with Chris Benner, Senior Industry Principal of Retail to discuss the major trends and keys to success in the industry in 2019.
Kelly Scott: What do you see as the top three areas that retail companies should be paying attention to in 2019?
Chris Benner: The top three trends I see impacting retailers this year are:
The concept of: “Thinking big, acting small”
The continuing evolution of brick & mortar retail space
The growth of small/medium size retailers
The reason I listed “thinking big, acting small” first is because acting small implies that you are trying to be agile and responsive to market and consumer demands. We see this in the news on a nearly daily basis. This is why companies like Toys R Us and other big box retailers are struggling and sometimes going out of business. With competition from companies like Amazon, and consumers empowered by modern technology and devices, retailers have to be agile in this environment if they want to succeed.
The evolution of brick & mortar retail space is very interesting these days. I see more and more “experiential” retail developments popping up. This is where developers create a space where retail stores co-exist with restaurants, entertainment venues, apartments complexes, hotels, etc. It really becomes a destination for consumers to visit, shop, eat and maybe see a movie, all in the same area. It’s all about adding value to that shopping experience.
The last of these three trends is the growth of small and medium-sized retailers. One specific example of the success of small retailers is independent bookstores in the United States. Back in 1995, Amazon.com sold its first book. That was the beginning of major disruption for bookstores across the country and was a factor in the failure of some large bookstore chains, like Borders. Over the past 10 years, though, there has been a resurgence for small independent bookstores. To fill the demand for brick & mortar bookstores, the number of these small bookstores has increased by 50 percent in the past 10 years. This is a trend that will continue to impact many types of retail companies. As larger, big box retailers fail and go out of business, we will see smaller – more agile – retailers popping up to fill that void of demand.
Scott: To follow that up, any big surprises? Things that everyone thought was going to be a big deal in 2018, but ended up not having much of an impact?
Benner: I wouldn’t call it a huge surprise, but I think augmented reality hasn’t had the impact many people thought it would over the past year or two. There was a lot of hype around the idea of using augmented reality in retail, especially in the furniture industry. I certainly don’t think augmented reality is dead by any means. I just think it’s one of those strategic initiatives for retailers that can be difficult to implement properly. Amazon is one of the leaders with augmented reality. As they continue to invest and improve the experience, I think other retailers will be forced to follow suit.
Scott: Any big shifts in the retail industry? New things that arose in 2018 that ended up being a big deal – new legislation, etc.
Benner: We’ve all heard a lot of talk over the past year about global tariffs. Depending on how things go over the coming months and years, the implementation of tariffs with countries like China could have a major impact on the retail industry, and consumers in general. The National Retail Federation has been very vocal about the potential negative impact of tariffs on retail companies and consumers. This is something we need to keep a close eye on in 2019, as it could have a significant impact on consumer spending and the retail industry.
This post was originally published by CTR. CTR was acquired by AST in January 2023.
AST has officially moved! On Monday, December 10, AST officially opened the doors of its new global headquarters in Lisle, Illinois. Employees packed up their offices in Naperville and settled into our new home at 4343 Commerce Court in Lisle, which includes upgraded workspaces, more collaborative conference rooms, a host of technology upgrades, and a beautiful view of the Lisle/Naperville area, to name a few.
On Friday, December 14, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held at the new office to commemorate this milestone event in AST’s history, celebrate the growth and success or our organization, and give current and former employees an opportunity to view the new space and mingle with colleagues.
Breakfast and lunch were both served to attendees, which bookended the ceremonial ribbon-cutting at the entry to AST’s offices on the 7th floor. CEO Pravin Kumar gave a heartfelt speech about growth, success, and the value of a good team before he and President Shaji Zechariah officially cut the ribbon to open AST World Headquarters – Lisle, IL.
Thank you to everyone who attended this event, and a special thanks to everyone who has been involved in this process for the last year.
