NetSuite Unveils Next Wave Of Global Capabilities For NetSuite OpenAir -- Empowering Best In Class Professional Services Operations

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Excel spreadsheets or on-premise reporting tools that require IT involvement to get relevant data that was often too outdated to make critical business decisions.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.

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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.

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