NetSuite was the first cloud company founded as a cloud ERP system. It was never a server-based system that later moved to the cloud. It was started in the cloud. There are currently 36,000+ customers on NetSuite. It’s a very popular system and because of this, can be very beneficial to your company. Let’s explore moving from JD Edwards to NetSuite.

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NetSuite includes everything you think should be in an ERP system. Financials, distribution, manufacturing, and then some things that might surprise you.

NetSuite has HR payroll, which not every system has (JD Edwards does). But it also has CRM with marketing automation built right in. NetSuite’s CRM is very user-friendly and stands up against competitive CRM software.

The other thing that’s very different within NetSuite is that it has an eCommerce module called SuiteCommerce. Moving from JD Edwards to NetSuite, you can publish your web storefront and transact with your customers and they can buy your products right on the web. This is built right into NetSuite, which is pretty unique.

NetSuite is built on a single database, just like JD Edwards. At the center of both databases is the General Ledger (GL). Everything that affects the GL hits right away in NetSuite, in the same way it does with JD Edwards. NetSuite also includes the SuiteCloud Platform, which are the tools you use to develop and extend NetSuite. Again, just like JD Edwards, it has these tools built in. Last NetSuite and JD Edwards both include multi language, currency, country and subsidiary.

The SuiteCloud platform includes a bit more than what is typically built into other systems. There are reporting tools to build your reports and SuiteConnect, which allows you to do integrations. Whether these are real-time, API integrations or more of the batch integrations, that’s all possible within NetSuite, similar to JD Edwards.

SuiteScript is programming within NetSuite, where you can write scripts or do custom coding. NetSuite also includes SuiteFlow, a visual workflow tool. We find most NetSuite customers build their own workflows. That’s different than other systems, where workflows are somewhat hard and technical. The visual workflow tool in NetSuite is pretty easy to use.

Many tools that are extremely useful in JD Edwards also exist in the NetSuite world. Not just applications, in the cloud you have the tools to customize the application, build scripts, and integrate to other applications. This is surprising to most people as they think cloud applications are not customizable.

Similar to JD Edwards, NetSuite works well in all industries. Software services, asset-based, nonprofits, manufacturing, wholesale distribution, it runs the gamut of many different industries. Many people do not associate NetSuite with manufacturing, but it does have very strong and very robust capabilities within its manufacturing module.

NetSuite currently serves 36,000 customers. At a high level, this means the robust customer base benefits you, and having more people run your ERP system. The real benefit is that many other platforms integrate to NetSuite.

All NetSuite customers have upgrades twice a year through automatic upgrades. You leave on Friday, you come back on Monday, you are on the new version. And in our handful years of having a NetSuite practice, Terillium’s never made a dollar of revenue on a NetSuite upgrade. That’s because, as NetSuite built their system, they built it as a cloud-based system that users can customize and all of those customizations roll forward in an upgrade. That means you never have to pay for another upgrade when you have NetSuite. None of our customers have ever paid a dollar for their upgrades, in consulting costs or software costs.

All NetSuite customers are on the latest version of NetSuite, that means no more upgrades. This is a huge consideration for you if you are between the fence on upgrading JD Edwards or implementing something like NetSuite. In the JD Edwards world, anytime you upgrade, you are looking at a significant cost event to have a team of consultants come in and upgrade your system.

Two upgrades occur every year and you get minor upgrades throughout the year. NetSuite provides a preview environment for your upgrade, and you can test and ensure everything comes forward. They built the system knowing that people will customize it, and that they are going to have to upgrade it continuously if it’s a cloud system. Every NetSuite customer in the world is on the same release of the software.

You get the best of both worlds. You are always on the latest release; you get the latest regulatory updates and the latest technology that launches when revenue accounting rules change. You get an update that fixes that for you in your NetSuite system, and you never have to pay consultants for an upgrade.

This is significant if you are looking at your long-term cost of having a system, you can remove the cost of upgrades when switching to NetSuite. The other big difference here is there is no more hardware to manage. NetSuite is a cloud solution, so that means that you don’t have to buy or manage servers. Oracle does that for you. This means your uptime is guaranteed. Oracle guarantees a 99.5% uptime on NetSuite and they have a website called status.netsuite.com, where you can check to see what the uptime has been over the last year. It gives stats such as how many transactions have been performed in NetSuite over the last year. You will also see the status all across the world of what’s going on with NetSuite. Over the last year it’s been 99.98%.

You get all of the scale of a multi-billion-dollar company like Oracle managing your solution for you. Oracle’s security team is always watching the system. These data centers have physical security, where armed guards are not letting anyone into the data centers. They do data mirroring, disaster recovery, failover, fire protection, heating and cooling and backups.

It’s true multi-tenancy, with multiple layers of redundancy. That is how they are able to achieve all of that uptime. They’re always watching the security so rest easy that security in the cloud is there.

To see the NetSuite system firsthand, watch our NetSuite dashboard demo below.

Implementing NetSuite has been shown to save some organizations money year over year. One particular company, the Indianapolis Zoo, realized this. Running a JD Edwards system that was approaching end of support, the Indie Zoo needed to look at an upgrade or migration that would work for them. Since they were paying yearly maintenance to JD Edwards and facing an upgrade to the operating system on their servers, NetSuite was an obvious choice.

Considering the impending JD Edwards upgrade, operating system upgrade, and the annual maintenance of the system, NetSuite came in at a much more budget friendly (and OpEx!) option. The cost to implement and run NetSuite provided positive ROI over a period of three years when compared to the JDE upgrade and maintenance.

Now, The Indy Zoo has a new modern cloud-based system, with new capabilities, in place that is saving them money too. With Terillium’s deep expertise in JD Edwards and NetSuite, the migration of data from one platform to the other was seamless and complete…no data was lost.

It can be shocking to realize, when considering upgrades and maintenance, that you can pay for a brand-new NetSuite implementation, move to a totally new system, and save your organization money too!