Although there are amazing NetSuite partners with great technical skill, unfortunately there are other firms that are focused on sales that may have poor development ability and leave their customers high and dry after promising the moon. Much of our consultancy work has been built on helping ‘fix’ poor implementations that other partners have performed, who leave their clients with lofty bills and incomplete systems.

A client came to us after a sub-par NetSuite implementation. They manufacture biological products akin to a pharmaceutical company. They have been in businesses for decades and were running a legacy “ERP system” that was custom software running on a dedicated Windows XP server and hired a consulting company to unsuccessfully implement NetSuite from this data.

I say “ERP system” in quotes because it did not tie in to any of the financials and was mainly used to track inventory and builds, but over the years led to many inventory discrepancies and guesses on the true financial impact of the business.

The initial NetSuite consulting company they worked with set them up for failure by not considering some of the most basic issues:

• No Proper Training – They provided a single training session with no materials afterwards leading to large amounts of improperly entered data from undertrained employees.
• Lazy Financials Setup – They lumped all of the company’s financials so that on the consolidated financial reports it looked correct, but upon closer inspection none of the GL accounts mapped to the correct location or subsidiary.
• Unit of Measure Conversion – they incorrectly set up all of the primary units of measure leading to much confusion on all of the native NetSuite reporting.
• Approvals process bottlenecks – Instead of setting up approvals based on groups or hierarchy within departments, everything hinged on certain employees approving the majority of expenses and POs, so when they were out sick everything came to a grinding halt.
• Incorrect Manufacturing processes – They never asked the critical questions or took the time to have the company audit their Bill of Materials or Routings they were importing into NetSuite. Combined with unit conversion issues ( LBs to KGs and Hours to Minutes) this created all sorts of incorrect outputs for the value of their assemblies.

The list goes on and and created much more work of fixing the historical transactions that were done incorrectly. Choosing the right NetSuite implementation partner can make all the difference and save a company hundreds of thousands in time and money.