How to Achieve Data-Driven Decision-Making with NetSuite

Posted On July Tuesday 18, 2023

NetSuite is a leading cloud business software suite comprising ERP/financials, CRM, inventory, eCommerce, and HR applications. It helps companies run their business seamlessly while offering excellent efficiency gains as well as cost savings.  

NetSuite’s ERP system controls all the main functions, that include accounting and finance, orders and procurement, and inventory. Clients can add options, including CRM for sales, service and marketing automation, Human Resources (HR) for personnel records, performance management and payroll, Professional Services Automation (PSA) to plan and track projects, and omnichannel commerce for both online and in-store sales. All these modules have one common database.  

With a central data source in place-information is accessible to authorized users across business functions. 

Why Adopt Data-Driven Decision-Making (DDDM) 

As technology advances, organizations are implementing the concept of DDDM, which is nothing but the process of making crucial business decisions based on data instead of intuition or rather personal experience. Let me quickly take you through the benefits of adopting data-driven decision-making in an organization. 

• Make more efficient decisions: DDDM makes companies more efficient. By concentrating on actionable insights and data analysis, employees can save resources and time by avoiding mistakes. 
• Reduce business risks: DDDM helps organizations improve their risk management systems. With the assessment of information collated from data analytics, organizations can understand their business environment better and identify problematic areas.  
• Enhance revenue: When properly utilized, data analytics enables organizations to increase their revenue as well as their customer base. When organizations make use of data analytics tools, they can develop strategies for how best to deploy changes. 

• Accurate predictions about the future: DDDM helps businesses make useful decisions about the future. This in turn allows organizations to be better prepared for any eventuality.  
• Improved customer service: DDDM also helps businesses offer better customer service. Data from past interactions can be used to improve customer satisfaction by detecting areas for improvement and deploying processes that could address common grievances. 

Data-Driven Work Environments

We have understood that data is undoubtedly a crucial success factor in data-driven work environments, cultures, and organizations. A recent report from McKinsey Global states that “data-driven organizations are twenty times more likely for new acquisitions in terms of customers and six times more likely to retain the customers than those leaders who work on speculation with no valid financial or factual reasonings”. 

Regardless of organizations encouraging a data-driven work culture, there are still productive tasks being performed manually, numerous dashboards and sheets shared across one screen, duplicate and disparate data from different departments, and so on. What this means is that organizations face a significant challenge in dealing with data, which in turn makes it difficult to implement data-driven decision-making. 

How NetSuite can Help? 

The big question is how can NetSuite help with data-driven decision-making. 

ERP systems contribute significantly to an organization’s efficiency and productivity. The integration across all functionalities of an organization in one centralised location makes communication and connection among different departments easier. 

The industry is such that the most critical business decisions have to be made in real-time or as close to it as possible. For this to be possible, businesses need to have real-time access to all the data applicable to effective decision-making. This is exactly where Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software such as NetSuite comes into the picture with its capability to facilitate data-driven decisions.  

The following points highlight how NetSuite can help with DDDM: 

• Data available in one place: NetSuite has centralized data. Centralized data offers business users various perspectives (from finely detailed views to “the big picture”) on what exactly is going on – and the ability to make logical connections that result in valuable insights. 
• Enabling intelligent access to information: NetSuite is a well-crafted ERP solution that allows management and administrators to fix security levels and job-specific access, while the system itself permits authorized users to gain access to crucial information without having to waste time and energy seeking approvals from IT. 
• Allowing data analysis to be accessible: The DDDM process is completely dependent on interpretation and insight, which is made possible only through efficient and fast data analysis. NetSuite’s ERP software integrates powerful tools for analyzing Business Intelligence (BI) and transactional data without complicating things for people who need to use them. Personalized and user-friendly dashboards also help simplify the process of data analytics for business users. 
• Ease of sharing results: Comparison of data sets and making reasonable connections need to convert into decisions, which in turn dictate the actions that need to be taken. Most enterprise decision-makers are not data analysts, so the results of the data analysis need to be conveyed in a form that can be easily understood. Generally, this means text-based documents, charts, graphs, and infographics. An efficient ERP solution, such as that of NetSuite, comprises all the reporting software required to produce such output. 
• Helping employees act on their intelligence: In an organization where DDDM is the rule, the authority of action on data analysis cannot be in the hands of high-profile executives only. Employees who are actually working on the data need to be empowered to act on incoming data and changing conditions on a real-time as well as ad hoc basis. Again, the NetSuite ERP software allows the ability to do this, by setting rules and role-based policies for employees in each section of the business. 

• Learning from experience and knowledge: Sometimes, best-informed decisions can also be wrong. However, adaptive Business Intelligence (BI) systems such as those incorporated in NetSuite can use their accumulated archives of past results to design better responses and insights for future situations. 

Wrapping Up 

In an environment where data is crucial for an organization’s success, it is essential to understand how to utilize this data with the help of software to make better-informed decisions. Data-driven work environments can benefit immensely from the NetSuite ERP software, which operates in a single location across all organization functions. The future is shifting from physical client servers and conventional software models to -based applications that enable remote accessibility. Also, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on ERP systems serves as a tool for predictability and efficiency in an organization.