NetSuite ERP

Take some training courses.

Plan ahead and have all the people you need committed to the project.

Executive involvement is critical. Make sure you have a good handle on the metrics you would like to ultimately manage. Work as a team to document your business requirements. Whiteboard often. Understand NetSuite's best practice capabilities. Have a central person identified to handle all report and analysis requests (ie - don't allow multiple people to create reports; have one person create reports and distribute them to decision makers via the NS dashboard or whatever form). Make sure you understand critical dates and develop the project plan accordingly.

I wasn't here for the implementation, but from what I've seen, I would rate it a 5-6. I would recommend contracting with a NetSuite partner. Data migration can be a big driver of implementation complexity.

I feel if we had had NetSuite Services do our implementation, we would have used much more of the out-of-box functionality and had Best Practices instituted sooner. I would not recommend an outside services provider for the initial implementation.

As mentioned earlier, make sure your key players dedicate time to the implementation. I would also get several references from vendor on other implementations they have done.

Highly consider using a consultant for the implementation. Also be prepared to change your internal business processes to fit within NetSuite, as the opposite is much more difficult to maintain long-term.

Implementation is relatively simple compared to other software packages. Carefully reconcile closing balances from the old system with opening balances in Netsuite, and lock the old system so changes can't be made.

The implementation was very poor and very costly. In the end we had to reconfigure mostly everything over the next year to get it working in a desirable fashion.

Try to utilize the product as is before incorporating any custom scripting or processes.

Implementation was fine but could have gone quicker. NetSuite provided me a implementation guide who I did not think was very knowledgeable. I recommend that you make sure the organization knows how they are going to use the software and come up with an implementation plan before importing all of the data.

NetSuite’s own implementation team did not have a lot of understanding about how we did things, like the way we recognize revenue etc. It was more cost efficient to have our contractor do it. Their services in general cost a lot of money. We ran concurrently with QuickBooks and NetSuite for three months and compared numbers to make sure reconciling, then made the cut-off. Depending on where you are/ what system you’re using you should make sure your chart of accounts is good. Make sure you make the right decisions in setting it up and make sure that the revenue lines that you have decided on are going to the right accounts. Also, try and not make the system too customized.

We initially tried to have NetSuite implement but we did not have a lot of success. They didn’t want to put in all of our historical sales order data, and at the time, we had a lot of 3-5 yr contracts that would have been on a spreadsheet. We hired a contractor called Jim Gamble to come in house and help with the implementation . Jim now works at BridgePoint Consulting. I would recommend him. He had an accounting background and understand systems. The NetSuite consultants didn’t understand our revenue model and how it worked. Jim did. With the initial NetSuite team, we not satisfied at all. With Jim, we were very satisfied. One of the downfalls with NetSuite is that they had in their mind how it needs to be implemented, but didn’t take into account our considerations. At the time, their customers were much younger than us and didn’t have historical data. They also worked with companies that did one year contracts. They had no do desire to listen to our facts. With 800-900 customers with multi-year contracts, we would have been maintaining spreadsheets for numerous years. They weren’t willing at all to work with our specific situation. I understand they have best practices, but sometimes those best practices don’t fit the client. They didn’t have any out of the box thinking – very prescribed implementation.