NetSuite 2020 Release 2 Helps Fortify Warehouse and Ecommerce Operations for Wholesale Distributors

Warehouse operations is one of the key differentiators for wholesale distributors and, as many distributors suddenly find themselves with excess inventory, managing those goods will be more important than ever.

Meanwhile, Bank of America expects Amazon Business to capture 10% of B2B commerce by 2023. That is forcing distributors to make investments in intuitive and integrated ecommerce platforms. They need powerful business logic, automation and transparency to compete.

Enhancements in NetSuite 2020 Release 2 address areas such as warehouse management, quality management, supply planning and ecommerce. Here’s how NetSuite 2020 Release 2 gives wholesale distributors the tools and capabilities they need to weather uncertainty and thrive.

Warehouse Management

NetSuite WMS now includes the ability to receive, transfer and pick goods inside a location without bins, including single order picking and multi-order picking at warehouses. Small warehouses benefit from the efficiency of hand-held picking without the overhead of managing bins.

World Class B2B Commerce

You can now quickly manage and approve new wholesaler customers to purchase from your ecommerce store. With an improved form and flexible approval workflows, the new SuiteCommerce Sign Up extension lets you easily manage the registration and approvals of buyers from your ecommerce store. Once the form is submitted, the interested buyer remains “unapproved” until an admin approves them to see B2B/wholesale pricing.

The new Merchandise Hierarchy Workbook enables analysis of items, inventory, sales and fulfillment data with pre-built customizable KPIs and reports. You can quickly analyze merchandise performance and view performance trends by category and identify new opportunities.

Autonomous Supply Chain

NetSuite’s new material requirements planning (MRP) capabilities for supply planning (available to customers who are using NetSuite Demand Planning) has been completely re-architected, featuring a dedicated planning repository that ensures planners can make decisions based on timely and consistent information. Planners can easily monitor, firm up or release orders for approval and aggregation; review and accept action/exception messages individually or in bulk; and pegging information provides planners full visibility into how demand is allocated to supply.

The planning workbench slices and dices data by product line, plan, location, user-defined item categories and groups. It highlights situations that require attention, helping to prevent both shortages and excess supplies, and provides what-if analysis capabilities for simulating multiple plans.

Additional precision can be provided to supply allocation by allowing inbound shipments to be included into the allocation of supplies, in context with related purchase orders. Additionally, fill rate optimization allocates existing supply to satisfy as many sales order lines as possible based on the given supply.

Quality Management

Enhancements to the Quality Management SuiteApp enable inspections to be triggered from advanced manufacturing production results. Additionally, location- and customer-specific inspections can be triggered from item fulfillments differentiated by shipping status, and enhanced support for high-volume sampling provides the ability to import inspection results by CSV.

Financial and Operational Excellence

Invoice grouping enables the consolidation of multiple invoices into a single invoice that’s delivered to the customer, and it also allows payments accepted at the group level to be applied to individual invoices. This reduces manual grouping, ensures accurate invoices and improves cash flows by decreasing days sales outstanding.

The preceding was posted on the NetSuite Blog and is intended to outline of general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.