LONDON, Oct. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/
-- NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading
provider of cloud financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce
software suites, today announced the latest Professional Services
Automation (PSA) enhancements to NetSuite OpenAir, featuring new
flexible international functionality to help global professional
services organisations easily expand into new regions. Advances
include intuitive and intelligent reporting, powerful budgeting,
and an enhanced user experience. This new release is a huge step
forward for Professional Services Automation, bringing
unprecedented benefits to professional services organisations of
all kinds, enabling them to optimise resource capacity,
maximise profitability, and arming them with robust and flexible
international capabilities to get operations up and running quickly
in new markets.
Professional services organisations often face the challenge of
dealing with siloed information while trying to maximise the
efficient use of staff. Traditionally, these organisations have
relied upon Excel spreadsheets or on-premise reporting tools that
require IT involvement to get relevant data that was often too
outdated to make critical business decisions. Meanwhile, budgeting,
which is a critical factor in the success of a professional
services business, has become even more complicated with the
emergence of subscription, usage and hybrid pricing models that can
include both services and products. Other software solutions in the
market can't account for this complexity and instead force
businesses to store financial data in multiple systems and
spreadsheets or require complex integrations. Professional services
organisations need a system that not only manages the complexities
of the industry today, but is also flexible and scalable enough to
adapt to change.
NetSuite OpenAir is the best-in-class professional services
automation software designed for organisations of all sizes
including both service-based companies, and services divisions
within product companies such as a hardware or software company.
NetSuite OpenAir can be easily integrated with any ERP and CRM
instances that are already in place in these companies, or as a
module of the overall NetSuite solution. NetSuite OpenAir gives
professional services organisations the ability to run their core
business operations including project management, resource
optimisation, project accounting, time and expense management, and
billing and revenue recognition. Delivering end-to-end automation
and visibility, NetSuite OpenAir helps professional services
organisations gain real-time insights, increase project
profitability, maximise billable resource utilisation and make
informed, data-driven decisions.
The new NetSuite OpenAir features announced in the latest
release include:
New, Flexible International Capabilities for Global Services
Organisations
Professional services organisations seeking to expand
internationally or simply take on projects abroad, confront
significant challenges in recognising revenue in accordance with
foreign regulations and accounting for foreign currencies. With
this latest release, NetSuite OpenAir supports the management of
project accounting for international and global-delivery
businesses. Key features for international services businesses in
the latest enhancement include:
- A new performance console that introduces a rules engine
and algorithm for automatically adjusting auto-billing and
auto-revenue recognition settings on completed projects.
- Greater foreign exchange currency decimal precision,
allowing customers to more easily integrate with other ERP systems
when billing or recognising revenue in foreign currencies.
- New project accounting functionality around advanced revenue
recognition, including the Balanced Income vs. Forecast (IvF)
rule, a key requirement for some of the most advanced global and
international customers, allowing for forecasted and actual revenue
amounts to be rebalanced automatically each fiscal period to ensure
the most accurate method of recognising project based revenue.
"With the latest improvements around auto-billing and
auto-revenue, as well as support for the new IvF rules, OpenAir is
a key platform that will allow us to grow and expand
internationally," said Mark Skinner,
VP Business Integration at Valtech, an International Digital Agency
with offices in 13 countries. "The breadth of the solution allows
us to manage our expansion into new markets around the world."
Intuitive and Intelligent Reporting
For years, services organisations have struggled with reporting
tools that are either too complex for front-line employees to build
their own reports or lack the sophistication for in-depth analysis.
NetSuite OpenAir's new reporting capabilities feature an intuitive,
user-friendly and flexible interface that leverages an intelligent
algorithm that ranks data across key criteria. This enables users
to run business-critical reports on the fly. No longer will
services executives need to turn to IT to assemble complex reports
based on siloed data. Instead, NetSuite OpenAir gives them
real-time visibility into the organisation to maximise resources
and adapt to business changes.
"The new NetSuite OpenAir reporting interface makes creating
reports an absolute breeze," said Rick
Lucas, VP of Professional Services Operations at Softchoice,
a leading provider of IT solutions and managed services. "The
ability to drag and drop components and watch the results populate
in front of your eyes is a game changer. But the best part is the
new ranking algorithm where in the past, we would have to hunt for
that elusive report buried in our saved report list at month end.
Now, it bubbles to the top, making our period-end reporting process
so much quicker and easier."
Powerful Advanced Budgeting
Historically, services businesses have had to track projects and
staff in separate systems from finance and budgeting, creating
significant challenges in tracking profitability. NetSuite
OpenAir's new Advanced Budgeting module supports both cost-based
and billing-based budgets with an efficient budget grid to allow
for simple, quick financial entry; while Optimistic vs. Pessimistic
comparisons and color-coded performance indicators enable financial
teams to get more control and visibility than ever before. Armed
with deep, real-time insights into staffing, performance and budget
status, finance executives can conduct better planning and budget
allocation for improved resource management, ultimately leading to
increased profitability. The latest NetSuite OpenAir enhancements
include new budgeting functionality in a simple-to-use interface,
featuring:
- Workflow controls, giving finance leaders the control to
approve and lock down figures, which can dramatically improving
confidence in the data.
- Configurable cost categories, allowing teams to enter
cost categories that are unique to their industry and business
(e.g. buying servers for a software company, outsourcing creative
work or a prototype for an advertising agency) in a single
repository.
- Automated expense and time/labor entries, dramatically
simplifying one of the most cumbersome services processes.
"We needed a budgeting tool that was powerful enough to give us
the financial controls we require, with a user-friendly interface
that enabled us to maintain our project costs without extensive
overhead," said Bhagi Gohil, VP of
Strategic Initiatives at American Express Global Business Travel.
"The latest budgeting enhancements in NetSuite OpenAir fit the task
perfectly—we're now getting more accurate tracking and visibility
into our project budgets and can instantly identify discrepancies
through the automated color-coding."
Enhanced User Interface
With the latest release, NetSuite OpenAir has again improved the
user experience, allowing business users to work faster and get the
job done more efficiently. The updated QuickView capability
provides key data on projects and people without the need to search
or click through multiple tabs or applications. This can enable
faster, better decision making as important underlying information
is pushed to users with the appropriate context.
"Professional services organisations need a system that not only
manages the complexities of the industry today, but is flexible and
scalable enough to adapt to changes in the future without the need
for massive customisations or new implementations," said
Paul Farrell, SVP of Product
Marketing. "With far more professional services organisations using
OpenAir than any other solution on the market, we are committed to
investing in its growth in order to meet our customer's evolving
needs and remain the leading provider of solutions to the
professional services market."
In addition to NetSuite OpenAir, NetSuite also offers NetSuite
Services Resource Planning (SRP) for companies that require ERP,
CRM and PSA functionality within one single system. For more
information about these two products, please visit
www.netsuite.co.uk/psa.
About NetSuite
In 1998, NetSuite pioneered the Cloud Computing revolution,
establishing the world's first company dedicated to delivering
business applications over the Internet. Today, NetSuite provides a
suite of cloud-based financials / Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP) and omnichannel commerce software that runs the business of
more than 30,000 companies, organisations, and subsidiaries in more
than 100 countries. For more information about NetSuite, please
visit www.netsuite.co.uk.
Follow NetSuite's Cloud blog, NetSuite's Facebook page and
@NetSuiteEMEA Twitter handle for real-time updates.
NOTE: NetSuite, OpenAir and the NetSuite and OpenAir logos are
service marks of NetSuite Inc. Third-party trademarks mentioned are
the property of their respective owners.
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SOURCE NetSuite Inc.