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NetSuite Upgrade 2019 Release 2 for Retailers

Deliver Great Customer Experiences With Supply Chain Enhancements, Personalised Catalog Views and Improved Analytics

Posted by Laura Maready, Principal Product Manager AFA and Retail, Oracle NetSuite

One of the key struggles of running a business is gaining (and maintaining) supply chain visibility, and nowhere is it more apparent than retail.

In particular, retailers have difficulty obtaining visibility into their supply chain, resulting in late orders and issues with customer satisfaction, personalising customer experiences, delivering analytics to both executives and front-line staff and keeping e-commerce websites fresh and functional. NetSuite 2019 Release 2 offers a number of enhancements that address these issues and will help merchants deliver superior customer experiences.

 

End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility

Obtaining real-time visibility across all tiers in the supply chain can significantly increase speed to market, reduce capital expenditures and manage risk. NetSuite’s Supply Chain Control Tower, available in the 2019 Release 2, provides a single view of the state of the supply chain, offering:

  • Targeted alerts identifying supply chain issues that require attention.
  • Pre-configured supply chain KPIs to track overall health.
  • A Predicted Risks feature that identifies purchase orders where delivery may be in jeopardy.
  • “What If” scenarios that enable retailers to simulate the business impact of inventory changes across their global supply chain.
  • A Commitment and Allocation Engine that allows retailers the ability to match inventory to customer orders across varying customer types and timelines.

The insights provided by the Supply Chain Control Tower will provide retailers with more control over their inventory, increasing on-time delivery and optimising efficiency in the process.

 

New SuiteCommerce Extensions

NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce extension framework offers a way to easily add capabilities to your SuiteCommerce website that will give customers the experience they desire. Capabilities include:

  • Grid ordering
  • Infinite scrolling on category pages
  • Inventory display on an item’s Product Detail Page
  • Side-by-side product comparisons
  • Displaying order status on website
  • Displaying product lead time for out-of-stock items
  • Signup for email notification for out-of-stock items

 

Gaining More Efficiencies With Merchandise Hierarchy

NetSuite 2019 Release 2 continues to improve the Merchandise Hierarchy capability. It’s easy for Merchandisers and Inventory Planners to set merchandise attributes such as color, size, pattern, fabric, model number, etc. on items quickly and easily from the hierarchy manager user interface.

By enabling out-of-the-box merchandise hierarchy filters in standard sales Workbooks, retailers can quickly and easily access sales and inventory insights at a granular level via merchandise hierarchy data without manually adding merchandise hierarchy fields to the Workbook.

Lastly, the merchandise hierarchy access is being extended to other industries such as Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing by providing merchandise hierarchy support for additional item types such as Non-Inventory, Kit, Service, Assembly, Item Groups and Other Charge.

 

Sell More With SuitePromotions’ New Quantity Discounts

Promotions are the holy grail for merchants. They are a great way to attract customers and earn their business. In NetSuite 2019 Release 2, retailers using SuitePromotions have more flexibility and can specify the quantity of items that a shopper needs to purchase to qualify for a promotion or a discount, whether a discount can be repeated and where the discount should apply.

 

Personalised Catalog Views

As part of the 2019 Release 2, NetSuite introduces Personalised Catalog Views for e-commerce websites. This toolset allows merchants to segment customers and deliver personalised access to a determined set of products. If a retailer wants to show curated products only to VIP shoppers or a manufacturer who produces machine parts for certain customers, for instance, Personalised Catalog Views enables this process without the heavy cost of running and managing a variety of websites and increases customer satisfaction and conversion rates by enabling customers to primarily view and buy items related to them.

 

Robust Reports Deliver Actionable Insights 

Retailers rely on data to make informed business decisions, and NetSuite 2019 Release 2 offers increased opportunities for reporting and mining key data inputs.

With new improvements to the SuiteAnalytics Workbook solution, queries are faster and more efficient than ever, and new pivot capabilities enable users to query, analyse and visualise key metrics with greater ease.

Plus, two new SuiteAnalytics Workbook reports will provide better insights into the searches happening on your site. The “Top Searches” and “Top Searches With Zero Results” reports will help you analyse your most popular products as well as anticipate potential demand for products that aren’t already stocked.

 

NetSuite 2019 Release 2 Delivers Personalisation, Visibility for Proactive Decision-Making for Retailers

The features available in the latest version of NetSuite will give retailers the ability to proactively manage their supply chain, further improve the customer experience, personalise offerings for various types of customers and easily mine a broader range of business insights.

Be sure to check out the release notes for a full list of benefits that NetSuite’s latest release can bring to your organisation and the blog highlighting new functionality for all organisations.