SuiteWorld 2024: Key Takeaways from Solution Consultant Jack Loudon

SuiteWorld 2024 was held in the Caesar’s Forum conference centre in fabulous Las Vegas, with four of the Eureka Solutions team in attendance. After some sightseeing and acclimatising to the 40-degree desert heat over the weekend, it was finally time to get some work done by networking and attending NetSuite’s Keynote Speeches.  

With 7,500 attendants at SuiteWorld this year, it was a perfect opportunity for NetSuite to show off their new products, enhancements, and ultimately paving out what the future of NetSuite will look like. With that in mind, I’ll provide some key highlights from the event that are sure to raise some interest, such as the widespread roll-out of AI (as expected), SuiteProcurement, NetSuite EPM, and the new Redwood UI theme. 

I’ll begin as NetSuite Founder Evan Goldberg did by focusing on AI. Admittedly, I’m probably as sick as everyone else is hearing about it, repeated constantly by any and every tech company without any real solution. But sometimes it’s exciting?! Last year NetSuite announced AI Text Enhance to help with writing product descriptions, and beyond that there was very little AI to shout about. However, now there appears to be a direction that NetSuite are taking that will embed AI throughout the system. 

Oracle Analytics Assistant (or ‘Ask Oracle’)

Oracle Analytics Assistant, or ‘Ask Oracle’ has been introduced to attendees as NetSuite’s own generative AI function, ready for your next query. It can even carry out a conversation to ensure it provides the correct answer or solution. What kind of questions can you ask? Here’s an example – ‘I need a report that shows me the monthly average amount of days to pay an invoice over the last 12 months.’ Instead of having to build that report yourself, AI will attempt to create that report instead! Team Eureka is excited to play about with this feature to its full capacity once it comes out, as I’m sure you will be too.

Financial Exception Management

Another feature which has AI at the heart of it is Financial Exception Management. This brings a new dashboard to your system and uses AI to detect any financial exceptions that are out of the ordinary. In addition to this, it will provide a reason as to why it may be a financial exception, for example, a different nominal code has been applied to a supplier invoice than what is normally chosen for invoices from that supplier. This new feature will highlight any exception transactions, enable you to drill down for deeper analysis, or resolve them directly from the dashboard.

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse

NetSuite Analytics Warehouse (NSAW) was the next product to flex its AI capabilities. The demonstration was based on a sales manager looking at their increase in customer churn rate from their NSAW portlet on the NetSuite dashboard. By clicking through to NSAW and using the Oracle Analytics Assistant, they were able to quickly identify other sales reports between new and existing customers. The interesting part, however, is that NSAW was then able to provide a churn rate score for each customer, identifying (based on historical customer behaviour) which customers were key to focus on to maintain that relationship.

AI Improvements

Another small example of utilising AI is when using support tickets in NetSuite. Instead of having to scroll through the entire conversation in the communications tab captured from emails, AI will generate a synopsis of the ticket and highlight it at the top to give any reader an idea of the story even if they weren’t involved in the scenario. Not only will this benefit support teams and customers with quicker support resolutions, but also surrounding customer-facing teams who need a quick, detailed update on any queries.

SuiteProcurement

Moving away from AI for a minute, NetSuite have announced their partnership with Amazon Business and Staples for their punchout solution, SuiteProcurement. Aimed at providing efficiencies for indirect procurement, NetSuite users are able to click directly into their company’s Amazon account from NetSuite and add items to their cart. Depending on business rules, this will then automatically punchout a purchase request for supervisors to approve. Using GS1-like product categorisations, NetSuite will then know what non-inventory item/expense account to use for the transaction – which I’m sure would be the finance team’s first question! Lastly, in what is quite a turn of events for NetSuite, Employee Centre users when using this module will even be able to confirm goods received into the system! Unfortunately, we must caveat this by saying that this is only available in the US for now as they only have contracts with Amazon and Staples for that location currently. However, we hope to see these partnerships expanding in the near future. 

New Redwood User Interface

User design and experience was another major topic at SuiteWorld, with all demos being shown in their new Redwood themed UI. NetSuite highlighted that despite B2C apps and websites becoming so easy-to-use and intuitive, B2B systems – that people will spend more of their time on – are nowhere near as good as their B2C counterparts. Oracle’s Redwood team have spent years developing a system that they claim will make you excited to get into work and use! I have to admit, it looks great – I’d guess it’ll only give a moderate jolt to your Monday blues, rather than making you jump for joy into work!  

Enterprise Performance Management Product Package

NetSuite have also announced their Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) product package, comprising of existing products NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, and Account Reconciliation. Hosted on Oracle Fusion Cloud and directly integrated with NetSuite, it helps organisations gain the same enterprise-level efficiencies and accuracy into their financial processes. 

While this is just a rebranding of existing products, they also embellished on how AI will assist these efficiencies. Generative AI will now assist with identifying patterns, trends and anomalies, and then generate written commentary and narratives depending on the data, just in case you’ve missed anything! Like with the ‘Ask Oracle’ feature mentioned earlier, you will also be able to hold conversations and question the digital AI assistant to gain deeper understanding of the reports provided. 

For insight into the benefits of their EPM products, NetSuite have provided the following stats taken from a customer survey prior to the recent upgrades: 

• 61% of customers reported improved forecast accuracy 
• 51% fewer days spent on annual planning 
• 45% fewer days in monthly planning 
• 40% eliminated spreadsheets-based models 

While the above topics were key focuses during SuiteWorld, other areas covered include NetSuite CPQ, Customer360, SuiteBilling, Field Service Management and Bill Capture (still US only).  

We should also highlight that while some of these updates are already in motion, NetSuite remain strict in reminding us that the point of demonstrating new features is to indicate the direction that they are taking, rather than having the finished article. We will of course provide updates when these come to fruition! 

We hope you found our whistle-stop recap of SuiteWorld insightful and are as excited about the updates are we are. Eureka Solutions are already looking forward to SuiteWorld 2025!  

Should any of the new products and enhancements be of interest, or if you’d like to find out what these updates will mean for your account, get in touch with your Account Manager who will be able to provide more information and demonstrations. 

By Jack Loudon.