2023: Simplify With the Suite

When business problems arise, smart leaders take action quickly.

Sales teams not tracking customer interactions closely enough? Implement a customer relationship management system. If tracking stock becomes a problem, pursue an inventory management solution. Today it might be project management, tomorrow ecommerce, but the problem-solving process is often the same: Do some research. Find a few software systems that will do the job. Decide which is best, implement it, and boom. Problem solved.

Since 2020, that process has shifted into high gear. If your business is like many I talk to, you’re now using all sorts of point tools that solve exactly one problem each. And that leads to a whole new set of problems: Perhaps salespeople can’t see available stock from within your CRM. Or maybe you’re manually uploading inventory data to your ecommerce system twice a day to accurately reflect availability. Or perhaps your finance people have to chase down numbers from various departments every month, just to close the books.

To fix those problems, you might develop manual processes, or have your IT experts build a way to connect your systems, or hire contractors to get the systems working together. In any case, connecting different point solutions turns their simplicity into expensive, messy complexity.

So now, your back end is a tangle of software. Your data lives in incompatible silos. Forget the same page; there isn’t any page for all employees to get on. You won't get organizational KPIs from a hairball of point products that only know about themselves.

The applications hairball is not only limiting for your employees, it’s also expensive. You’re paying many vendors and committing to maintain IT and admin expertise for each system. IT is constantly working to make systems sync. And when you need critical data, it takes days and the right person to dig it up. Your bottom line is top priority right now, and there’s a better way to safeguard it.

Simplify and Save

I experienced the hairball myself as an entrepreneur. That’s why I founded NetSuite. In the 20+ years since, we’ve helped more than 33,000 companies implement a cloud ERP to serve as their single source of data and eliminate a tangled mess of point products.

Consolidating on one business system means you can be sure that each ERP module you add will talk to your other ones — at a lower cost, faster, with less IT hand-holding, and without another vendor to manage or one-off invoice to pay. It means getting reports that sync data from accounting, ecommerce, inventory, and beyond. And a single system means you spend less but get more value, protecting your bottom line.

For businesses that have achieved success with NetSuite ERP, this is the year to regroup. It’s time to do the work to position your company for the growth opportunities that will, inevitably, come.

We’ve built NetSuite to make it possible for the vast majority of businesses to get everything they need from one system:

Plenty of customers have told me that for any new business requirement, they default to a module in the suite. In fact, I’ve heard customers say that every time they consider a new initiative or process, they first see if NetSuite can handle it. And more often than not, it can.

Many businesses also identify existing processes that have gotten tangled up in the applications hairball, estimate the cost savings of bringing those processes into the suite, and then adopt the corresponding module. We’ve built plenty of resources to help you calculate the ROI of this kind of simplification. Here’s how to measure the ROI of CRM, for example.

The Bottom Line

I won’t try to predict what 2024 will bring, but if history is any guide — and it usually is — it’s likely to be a year of opportunity. We’ll look back at 2023 as a time when leaders had a chance to regroup, do the work, and untangle the complexity that built up over the past 30 months. Businesses that do so successfully will emerge from these “unprecedented times” on top and ready to grow.