What is a NetSuite Health Check Assessment?
A NetSuite health check assessment or optimization is a structured review of your existing NetSuite environment to determine how well the system is supporting your current business processes and objectives.
The specific areas assessed will depend on your business, NetSuite configuration, and current priorities. The end goal is to understand what is working, where problems or inefficiencies exist, and what should be addressed next.
A NetSuite health check assessment can ultimately provide a roadmap for optimizing your environment, helping organizations improve efficiency, address pain points and make better use of the NetSuite functionality they already have.
10 Things to Review During a NetSuite Health Check Assessment
1. Review Your NetSuite System Configuration
Your NetSuite configuration should reflect how your business operates today, not how it operated when the system was originally implemented.
A NetSuite health check reviews:
- Current configuration and preferences
- Enabled features and modules
- Order management processes
- Purchasing processes
- Inventory processes
- Financial processes
- Manufacturing processes
- Areas where your NetSuite setup no longer aligns with current business needs
- Manual workarounds or processes happening outside NetSuite
A configuration review can help identify opportunities to simplify your system, improve efficiency and better align NetSuite with your current business requirements.
2. Evaluate NetSuite Customizations, Scripts and Workflows
A NetSuite optimization assessment should examine existing scripts, workflows and other customizations to determine whether they are still necessary, efficient and functioning as intended.
This can include looking for:
- Outdated customizations
- Redundant workflows
- Inefficient scripts
- Complex automation
- Customizations that may contribute to performance or maintenance issues
- Customizations written legacy version of SuiteScript that require updating: NetSuite is phasing out legacy versions of SuiteScript (1.0, 2.0, and 2.x) making SuiteScript 2.1 the mandatory standard for all custom scripts by the 2028.2 release.
A customization that made sense several years ago may no longer be necessary if NetSuite has since introduced standard functionality that addresses the same requirement.
3. Review NetSuite Reports, Saved Searches and Analytics
Reports, saved searches, dashboards and analytics are among the areas where NetSuite customers commonly seek support. A NetSuite support partner can help identify reporting, saved searches and analytics as one of the most frequent customer needs.
A NetSuite health check can evaluate whether your reporting environment is giving users the information they need.
Consider:
- Are reports still relevant?
- Are users relying on outdated or duplicate saved searches?
- Do dashboards provide useful information?
- Are key business metrics easy to access?
- Are employees exporting data to spreadsheets because they can’t get what they need from NetSuite?
If users consistently have to work outside NetSuite to get basic business information, it may be an opportunity for NetSuite optimization.
4. Review Roles and Permissions in NetSuite
As employees change roles and organizations grow, NetSuite roles and permissions can become outdated.
A health check can review whether users have the appropriate access to perform their jobs while maintaining appropriate controls.
This may include identifying:
- Duplicate or outdated roles
- Users with unnecessary permissions
- Users who don’t have access to information they need
- Roles that no longer reflect current responsibilities
- Opportunities to simplify role structures
Optimizing roles and permissions can also make the NetSuite user experience easier by ensuring employees have access to the information and functionality relevant to their responsibilities.
5. Evaluate Business Processes and Workflows
A NetSuite health check shouldn’t focus solely on the technology. It should also consider whether NetSuite is supporting the way your business actually operates.
A thorough review can be organized by business area:
- General Ledger
- Accounts payable and receivable
- Fixed Assets
- Inventory management
- Order management
- Purchasing
- Manufacturing operations
- Demand Planning
During each review, walk through how the business currently handles key processes in NetSuite. This can help identify:
- Manual or time-consuming processes
- Process inefficiencies
- Workarounds outside of NetSuite
- Areas where the current configuration doesn’t support business processes
- Underused NetSuite functionality
- Opportunities for automation or process improvement
The goal is to understand how NetSuite supports day-to-day operations and where changes could improve efficiency, simplify processes and better align the system with current business needs.
6. Evaluate Third-Party Integrations within NetSuite
Most NetSuite environments connect with other applications that support areas such as banking, ecommerce, CRM, payroll, shipping and other business processes.
A NetSuite health check assessment can evaluate whether these integrations continue to work reliably and support your current needs.
Consider:
- Are integrations still necessary?
- Is information flowing correctly between systems?
- Are errors occurring regularly?
- Have changes to connected systems created new issues?
- Are there integrations that are no longer being used?
Optimizing integrations can help reduce manual data entry, improve data consistency and make it easier for users to work across the systems they rely on.
7. Assess NetSuite System Performance
A NetSuite optimization assessment can help identify potential sources of recurring performance problems, including configurations, customizations, scripts or workflows that may be affecting the system.
Warning signs may include:
- Slow dashboards
- Searches or reports that take an unusually long time to run
- Slow record loading
- Scripts that time out
- Recurring performance complaints from users
It’s important to understand why performance issues are occurring and whether there are opportunities to improve the overall system.
8. Review Data and Data Management
A NetSuite health check can evaluate whether your data is accurate, consistent and useful for reporting and decision-making.
Areas to consider include:
- Duplicate records
- Outdated data
- Data inconsistencies
- Unused fields or records
- Search and reporting accuracy
- Configuration data such as items, customers, vendors and your financial structure
- Information being maintained outside of NetSuite
Poor data management can affect reporting, operational processes and the confidence users have in the information they’re getting from their ERP.
Data quality is an important part of NetSuite optimization. Improving the way data is managed can help users spend less time correcting information and more time using it.
9. Review NetSuite Releases and New Functionality
NetSuite continues to evolve, with new functionality and updates rolling out twice a year. Your NetSuite health check should consider whether your environment is keeping pace with new releases.
This includes reviewing:
- Existing customizations and configurations
- Upcoming release requirements
- New NetSuite functionality, including Oracle NetSuite Next and new AI capabilities
- Potential upgrade issues
- Features that could replace existing workarounds
A NetSuite support partner can work with you to test customizations and feature enablements in a release preview environment before an upgrade. Doing so can help identify potential issues while also helping you understand which new capabilities may benefit your business.
NetSuite Next and AI capabilities are also creating new opportunities for organizations to improve automation, productivity and how they use their ERP data. As part of ongoing NetSuite optimization, it’s worth evaluating whether new functionality could improve existing processes or replace manual workarounds.
Maintaining your system is important in order to make sure you are taking advantage of improvements that could benefit your organization.
10. Identify NetSuite Optimization Opportunities
After reviewing individual components of your NetSuite environment, it’s important to look at the bigger picture.
Where could your organization:
- Automate manual processes
- Simplify workflows
- Improve reporting
- Eliminate unnecessary customizations
- Better use existing NetSuite functionality
- Improve system performance
- Reduce reliance on spreadsheets or other workarounds
- Prepare the system for future growth
A successful NetSuite optimization strategy should prioritize improvements based on business impact rather than simply making changes for the sake of changing the system.
What Should You Get from a NetSuite Health Check?
Document Your Findings
A NetSuite health check should provide a clear summary of what was identified during the review, including:
- Executive summary: A high-level overview of the current NetSuite environment and key findings
- Quick wins: Opportunities that can be addressed relatively quickly to improve efficiency or resolve pain points
- Configuration changes: Recommended changes to the current NetSuite configuration
- Modules and features: Opportunities to better utilize existing NetSuite functionality or consider additional capabilities
- Third-party considerations: Integration or external system changes that could improve processes
Prioritize Recommendations
Recommendations should be evaluated based on business impact, complexity and priorities.
Consider:
- Which issues should be addressed first?
- Which improvements offer the biggest potential benefit?
- Which changes are quick wins versus longer-term initiatives?
- What resources or investment would be required?
- What should the action plan look like?
Determine Next Steps
The final step is turning the findings into an actionable plan. Depending on the results of the NetSuite health check, next steps could include:
- Configuration changes
- Process improvements
- Workflow or automation updates
- Additional NetSuite functionality
- Integration improvements
- Data cleanup
- User training
- Ongoing NetSuite support
A health check should leave you with a clear understanding of what’s working, what could be improved, what should be prioritized and what to do next.
When Should You Perform a NetSuite Health Check?
You shouldn’t wait until something goes wrong to review the health of your NetSuite environment.
An annual NetSuite health check assessment can provide a useful opportunity to evaluate whether your system is keeping pace with your business.
A health check makes sense when:
- Your business has grown significantly
- Your business processes have changed
- You have added new NetSuite modules or functionality
- Your implementation is several years old
- Users are experiencing recurring system issues
- Performance problems are becoming more common
- Employees rely heavily on spreadsheets or manual workarounds
- Your customization backlog continues to grow
- You’re preparing for a major NetSuite release
- You want to identify opportunities to get more value from your existing NetSuite investment
- Your original implementation was not customized to your business
- Your original implementation prioritized getting the system live over long-term optimization
The timing and scope of a NetSuite health check or optimization project will depend on the complexity of your environment and how significantly your business has changed.
For some organizations, an annual review may be sufficient. Others may benefit from additional assessments following significant business changes, system updates or major optimization projects.
Your NetSuite environment should evolve as your business evolves. What worked when you first went live may not be the best approach several years later. Business processes change, employees change, new functionality becomes available, and your organization’s needs become more complex.
Terillium’s NetSuite consulting services can help you assess and optimize your NetSuite environment through a SuiteAssessment. Our award-winning NetSuite team will conduct a comprehensive health check assessment to evaluate your business processes, configuration, reporting, integrations and overall system health, then provide documented findings and recommendations to help you prioritize improvements. Continual NetSuite optimizations can allow you to continue to grow using NetSuite.
If you need ongoing assistance after the assessment, Terillium’s NetSuite support services can provide continued expertise to help address issues, implement improvements and keep your NetSuite environment aligned with your evolving business needs.
Ready to get more from your NetSuite investment? Contact our NetSuite experts to discuss a NetSuite health check assessment and identify opportunities to optimize your environment.
