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Blog: Best Practices for Supply Chain Planning Integration with NetSuite

NetSuite ERP integration with GAINS

“The World’s Most Deployed Cloud ERP System”

With more than 33,000 customers, tech giant Oracle’s NetSuite is “the world’s most deployed cloud ERP system.” NetSuite, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, provides its users with a suite of applications for managing their financials, operations, CRM, and e-commerce operations. The software offers built-in reporting and analytics tools providing organizations with insights into their operations. Offering a high degree of customization, NetSuite allows businesses to tailor the software to their needs.  

NetSuite integrates well with a variety of third-party tools and applications, including GAINS, allowing businesses to connect their existing systems and data sources, streamlining their operations and improving efficiency. NetSuite’s integration capabilities are a key reason many companies choose it as their ERP solution.

Bridging the Gaps with GAINS

As an ERP solution, NetSuite does provide some basic supply chain management capabilities and is a start for a company looking to dip its toes into supply chain planning. However, many companies, particularly those with more complex supply chains or complicated requirements, often find they have greater supply chain planning needs than NetSuite can support. Thus, using a solution like GAINS can help to better and more efficiently address the nuances of supply chain planning and help companies better meet their specific goals.

Make no mistake, NetSuite’s capabilities as an ERP are excellent, but a more advanced, specialized supply chain solution like GAINS can provide capabilities beyond NetSuite’s abilities, including:

  • Inventory optimization – GAINS is a best-in-class inventory solution that has been proven time and time again to decide the best inventory strategy for each SKU and right-size inventory while increasing customer service levels. Netsuite alone has limited inventory management options.
  • Accounting for seasonality – GAINS offers sophisticated algorithms to account for seasonality that provide time-phased solutions in demand, inventory, and replenishment.
  • Identifying trends – GAINS identifies trends in demand history and lead times in order to handle uncertainty withing a long planning horizon vs a single year of visibility with Netsuite only.
  • Advanced forecast modeling – With more than 50 forecast models to choose from, GAINS provides users with dedicated classes of models including low-volume or uncommon parts that could be challenging to predict and can cause excess inventory or lost sales.
  • A comprehensive solution – GAINS excels at the intersection of demand planning, inventory optimization, supply planning, and S&OP. 

Benefits of a GAINS and NetSuite Integration

Aligning your software systems to work more closely together can deliver significant value and more insights into how to improve supply chain performance. The GAINS/NetSuite integration is a proven combination that helps companies to scale and mature their supply chain planning process. The benefits of integrating NetSuite with GAINS’ supply chain platform include the following:

  • Smarter decision-making: Transparency across systems helps users better understand the business’s overall health in real-time and allows GAINS to provide more tailored and nuanced results, affording your company a distinct advantage over your competition.
  • Easier automation: GAINS solution is pragmatic and easy to adopt, allowing our customers to evolve the supply chain planning process at a higher speed so the team can focus on real value-added tasks daily.
  • Better communication: Integrated tools makes communication easier between your internal teams, partners, vendors, and customers. This allows for greater company synergy and increased collaboration between departments.

GAINS Best Practices for a Successful NetSuite Integration

GAINS avoids the usual integration pitfalls by utilizing our Specialized NetSuite Integration Toolkit to seamlessly blend our solution into your NetSuite environment. Another advantage GAINS has is our extensive experience successfully launching our solution in hundreds of different software ecosystems. We’ve integrated our solution into many widely used environments, including Oracle and SAP, as well as smaller, more specialized, or homegrown systems.

While each customer integration is unique, many issues are universal. GAINS has worked diligently with our NetSuite customers to mitigate any potential risks of integration issues, ensuring successful integration. GAINS users are able to rely heavily on our experienced professional service team members leveraging our P3 Methodology to ensure a smooth integration between GAINS and your existing software solutions.

Some of ‘GAINS’ recommended best practices for a successful implementation include:

  • Defining objectives and requirements: Define the desired outcomes, timeline, and budget. This will help to ensure that everyone involved in the implementation project is aligned and working towards the same goal.
  • Planning and execution: Developing a detailed implementation plan outlining the steps, timeline, and resources required to integrate NetSuite and GAINS successfully is critical. Assigning roles and responsibilities ensures that everyone involved in the project clearly understands their tasks and objectives.
  • Prepare and train: Utilize training provided by the GAINS project team as well as periodic GAINS University sessions to prepare and train your team on the new functionality, including any potential changes to processes, workflows, and reporting. This will help ensure that the transition is as smooth as possible and that NetSuite users can use GAINS effectively.
  • Test, test, test: To ensure the integration is working as expected and to ensure no significant issues need to be addressed.
  • Monitor and evaluate: GAINS works closely with your team to regularly monitor and assess performance and track key metrics.

You can ensure a smooth and successful NetSuite implementation by following these steps and working closely with the GAINS team.

Getting Started

NetSuite integrates well with GAINS and can help companies better streamline operations, automate processes, and improve accuracy. Companies with more complex supply chains may need to supplement NetSuite with a solution like GAINS.

The integration process can be complex and challenging, but GAINS provides our customers with our dedicated professional service team and P3 Methodology to ensure a successful implementation. Our proven best practices include defining objectives and requirements, planning, execution, preparation and training, testing, monitoring, and evaluating.

Want to find out how your business could benefit from integrating NetSuite and GAINS? Contact us


Related:

Oracle and GAINS: Quick Deployment and Sustainable Value

GAINS and Your ERP: Creating a Connected Enterprise

Grimco & GAINS a Model for Efficiency

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