NetSuite Sidebar:
Customization Is Key
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Courtesy NetSuite
NetSuite Inc. (N) has always made a real effort to be responsive to the individual needs of its customers, says President and CEO Zach Nelson. Today, even though the company has thousands of clients in dozens of industries, it still attempts to customize its software as much as possible, Nelson says. One way NetSuite solicits feedback is via its Website, where customers can vote on which features thought up by NetSuite developers they’d most like to see in future products.
The company built a platform called SuiteCloud, which allows customers to adapt NetSuite in ways they find necessary. “That customization architecture was a very important piece of solving the needs of customers,” Nelson recalls, “because we could solve 80 percent to 90 percent of their business process needs but there was always 10 percent that was very specific to their business. So now, third-party developers can build on top of NetSuite to solve customer problems. The platform as a service concept is sort of the next wave of our capabilities.”
Recently, NetSuite has introduced a way for nondevelopers to do customization, says Chairman and CTO Evan Goldberg, a co-founder of the company. He notes that the product, called SuiteFlow, allows people who can’t write a line of code to tailor the way NetSuite works. “For the first time, we are seeing people configure a complex business process without writing code,” he says. “Now NetSuite is going to be easily tailored by business analyst people who don’t necessarily have to go through a programmer.” With SuiteFlow, the company says, users will be able to quickly point and click to create and alter custom work flows to support the way businesses need to work in real time — “whether the goal is to implement a more efficient automated collections process, create a rules-based lead nurturing process or overhaul receivables management.
One way to ensure that the company is sufficiently nimble and adapting to what customers need, adds COO Jim McGeever, is simply to be attentive to how they’re using NetSuite. This is possible, he says, because NetSuite hosts all of its customers’ data. “We don’t ship a disk and then they use it and we don’t know how,” he says. “In our model, we see which features are used and how customers are using them. We see in real time how the products are being used, which allows us to make decisions on where to invest in developing new features to make our customers’ lives easier.”
