A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.

Escalent

Look Beyond to find the Right Solution

What are the challenges faced by most enterprises when it comes to implementing a solution like NetSuite?

NetSuite is an excellent solution for rapidly growing companies who are looking for a centralized system for all their functions like accounting, customer relations, inventory and warehouse maintenance, human resource management, and reducing inaccuracies and inefficiencies. It would be my third association with NetSuite implementation, and the thing that I have understood while working with it is that we need to invest a significant amount of our time in process designing, understand what business changes we want are, and how do we want to do it. With its incredible flexibility and functionality, NetSuite product has the capability to help automate most of these business processes.

I worked for an organization before this that had just started to implement the NetSuite solution, but their whole process design and how they would be using it wasn’t addressed upfront. The organization was still trying to configure the system, which is excellent, but if you don’t know what you wanted to do, you may not get the expected outcome.

Mistakes can be costly and risky for business. Whether it’s implementing NetSuite or any other cloud-based applications, it is no secret that business owners need to deeply understand the size and the complex needs of their business before the implementation to avoid any costly mistakes. To reap the benefits of such applications, it is paramount for them to understand their business needs and align it with these applications built-in, off-the-shelf configurations. It’s important for organizations to infer their process designs, process workflow roles and responsibilities to ensure a successful ERP implementation. This will take time and energy; however, in the end, it will bring out better results.

And, most of the times, change management can be a challenge for individuals. For example, a company, who had been using an in-house home-grown system for over 20 years, is now being introduced to a solution like NetSuite. For a company like this, changing to NetSuite would be a difficult transformation. It will not only be difficult from the system perspective but, more importantly, from the people's perspective, as ensuring each employee is in touch with the system can be a daunting task.

With your leadership, what are the strategies your team took while implementing cloud-based solutions?

We are a professional service organization where we manage projects for varied industries, a catalyst for progress in industries facing disruption. To help industries progress efficiently, we took the best of the breed approach. We went with another application for project management as opposed to NetSuite. It’s always fair to choose a solution based on how it will impact your business and how cost-effective it will be.

It’s always fair to choose a solution based on how it will impact your business and how cost-effective it is

Besides, as a company that works with these cloud-based solutions regularly, we understand that a single solution cannot be right in every application. The toughest decision a company has to make is to either choose an all-in-one system or take the best of the breed approach depending upon its process or application needs. For example, a company can choose Salesforce for its CRM process or Adaptive for its budgeting and planning process. While selecting a solution, a company needs to ask themselves, “Is this the solution that will meet all their requirements?”, because there are benefits if the solutions are fully integrated as opposed to having to build an interface between a NetSuite and a Salesforce. Organizations can choose just any other supply chain management solution or any other applications that are seamless and very cost-effective.

Software is just a tool, and you should not let it drive your business, but the other way around. At our company, we try to not only understand the process but our requirements, and also understand how we want to run our business and how to leverage technology to automate business processes.

Do you have any suggestions or advice for budding entrepreneurs looking to embark on a similar professional journey along the lines of your service and area of expertise?

Cloud-based solutions are here to stay. It will revolutionize how businesses are performing their business processes. Now more than ever to perform process successfully, organizations need to leverage technologies to their fullest extent and make sure that their teams are the power users of these systems. Let them use these systems to do their daily job instead of them doing it manually and hence, be more productive.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.