NetSuite ERP vs. Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing

Netsuite ERP is well suited to helping facilitate a smooth procurement process, raising purchase orders and managing invoices. We use it to set up new suppliers and for global organisations with multiple cost centres, suppliers, agencies, activities etc. it is very good at managing a high volume of different suppliers and activities. It has a relatively navigable interface but could stand to be a bit more simple / modern and automated. It is quite aggressively busy on screen vs some other simplified interfaces

Incentivized

Oracle Customer Care and Billing is well suited for smaller to mid size companies. I don't believe that it is structured in a way, currently, that is easy to use for larger utilities. For smaller to mid size utilities, with less data and customers, Oracle Customer Care and Billing will perform quicker and appear less cluttered. The utility I work at serves 600k+ customers.

Incentivized

• Revenue recognition. We get information from Salesforce and we build the revenue recognition engine that I'm really pleased. We avoid a lot of manual work by doing this.
• We send out invoices electronically from the system. We use it for the fixed asset now with the new lease opinion that we just adopted in January 2022. We leveraged technology, specifically the features in NetSuite to help us account for that.

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• It is highly configurable.
• It is highly extendable and customizable.
• Its base batch programs allow you to perform most billing functions with no intervention.

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• Certain exports out of the system. There are some pages that you can export to Excel and some pages you can't, I don't know why. So it seems like it should be all functionalities there.
• Some of the bank feeds have broken quite a bit and I'm not sure why. So we have to constantly go in there and readjust that on the reconciliation tab. I know that's new and robust and it's going well. It's more of taking out GL data instead of what's remaining in that account. As far as if I'm looking at a rec for a particular asset, I know there's GL data that goes through there. What I want to know is what's the balance in that account made up of as far as what's remaining there. So that's the kind of stuff I would buy with advice.

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• As much as I believe CCB is a user-friendly interface, I also believe it has room to be even simpler and easier to use and navigate.

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NetSuite is able to cover all of our needs, spanning multiple departments and managerial levels. We use it daily for a multitude of functions, including creating promotions, estimating inventory, pulling historical reports, forecasting sales, and more. Overall, we're very satisfied with NetSuite as an ERP solution and recommend it to medium to large businesses.

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We spent a lot of time reviewing the Oracle products and we have invested a lot of time, money and resources into utilizing it. It is a good product and we are happy with how effective it has been for us. Good Choice!

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As a user, it is a steep learning curve with little to no guidance. Oracle relies pretty much only on their massive documentation library and does very little to guide users in context. As an Administrator, it's frustrating that field naming is totally different depending on your context.

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It has been very reliable. I can only think of 1-2 times in 4.5 years that we have had issues getting in, and in each case were able to get back in within 1 hour. There has not been a major downtime

Most of the time the performance is very good. Pages load in a few seconds; financial reports take less than 5 seconds; basic searches take a few seconds. But performance can be sporadic throughout the day and cause the run time to triple.

Incentivized

I would like to give 8 rating for NetSuite support and reason for that is below: Whenever we faced any technical or functional issues we tried to reach out to NEtSuite support but response was not immediate. We told them about the urgency of the issue but still we were not getting response on time. Then, we have to reach out to AE to get things resolved.

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Good support. It's knowledgeable and best used for consulting.

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I had in person training for a day when first got the software. The training was good. The challenge was that there was a large gap between training and when we went live so we forgot quite a lot

Online training is quite strong. I have used for specific pieces of functionality.However it is not sufficient in all areas.

I felt NetSuite Professional Services did an excellent job of guiding us in the implementation. I also felt our internal teams were a little resistant to the change and engagement of new software. Had we performed better engaging and buying into the new software, I would be able to rate the implementation better. Therefore, the lower number should not be viewed as a deficiency with the software or the professional services teams, but as an reminder of how important complete buy-in from the local users is.

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We came from an AS400 system. NetSuite is supremely advanced and more capable than our old system. We initially selected NetSuite for its reporting and analytics capabilities. From there, we looked at its automation and manufacturing capabilities. It has really outclassed our old system at every turn—it is not even close.

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Previously, my company was on an aging mainframe system. The cost and effort to move to Oracle Customer Care and Billing, as well as integrate with the Oracle Utility MDM and MWM modules, was done out of necessity but also larger external acceptance and innovation. By this, I mean that Oracle's product line was growing quicker with newer features than the competitor we weighed (SAP).

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We have been able to scale our business 25X without any major overhaul with Netsuite. Its dashboard setup makes onboarding new employees very easy and allows data to be shared across multiple offices. Its cloud setup does not put any pressure on IT to scale servers or other infrastructure. We have been able to become much more efficient in all aspects of the business.

• Really it's been nothing but positive for us right now. My team is super excited to get to use it every day. They love the interface is easy to use. The fact that we've got all the security and audit logs in there gives me comfort as the senior finance person to be able to understand what's going on to track it, but it's also not bogged down in unnecessary bureaucratic processes or administrative processes. It allows our team to be very responsive and dynamic and that's great for us.

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• I'm not aware of any negative impacts implementing the application had from a financial perspective

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