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SuiteSuccess Order Management and Fulfillment for Manufacturers

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In today's demonstration of the NetSuite solution, you will see how you can use NetSuite sales order management, fulfillment and customer returns for your wholesale distribution business. Your NetSuite order management and fulfillment solution will help to drive cost containment with processing orders and returns. You can use NetSuite’s leading industry practices to reduce the amount of back orders across your inventory, reduce time and manual effort to customers resulting in a happier more loyal client base. Here are some of the most common industry challenges that we have heard in implementing NetSuite for over 3,000 customers:

  • Desire to grow the business and increase the win rate against competition,
  • Lack of visibility into inventory position leading to poor customer satisfaction and lost sales,
  • Forecasting is manual, time-consuming, and inaccurate — blurring visibility into future sales,
  • Order confirmation and invoice delivery to customers is not automated and can affect cash flow,
  • Shipping orders takes too long and labels are often printed from multiple systems,
  • Returned orders are difficult to track and difficulty in validating returns against sales,
  • Warehouse systems are disconnected from sales systems causing inaccurate inventory numbers that are not displayed in real-time,
  • Customers must call in to get their order shipment status, and
  • Lack of order rules enforcement slows the fulfillment process

The NetSuite solution tackles those challenges by providing you with a single cloud-based solution to monitor all areas of the business in real time on the order management side. You can engage your customers everywhere and accept orders via phone online, direct sales or EDI. You can easily convert quotes to orders, orders to fulfillment, invoicing to payment, and more. With automated built-in processes, you will improve quote accuracy, eliminate billing errors and strengthen revenue recognition.

Upon fulfillment, deliver on time, every time and exceed your customer’s expectations while minimizing shipping costs for your business. Reduce your number of pegs in the warehouse, improve efficiency with zone and wave picking, prioritize picking by carrier pickup time, efficiently implement change orders, handle packing notes, cancellations, changes and customer specific labeling, bill freight separately or inclusive with the product, and manage a comprehensive set of shipping options.

In the warehouse, streamline your storage with deep metrics of inventory controls, track every turn of inventory, and turn your warehouse faster. Gain maximum visibility into your inventory to sales ratios, minimize stock outs and obsolete items on the shelves, leverage distribution centers and multiple branches, reduce your inventory overhead costs, and analyze data metrics to improve warehouse efficiencies.

Finally use dynamic support and customer self-service. Empower your support team with a 360 degree view of each and every customer, track product defects as you support customer returns, offer a comprehensive self-service customer portal, provide access to orders for tracking and management, and deliver a knowledge base with content and frequently asked questions.

NetSuite solution is built using expertise from thousands of industry implementations. It is the first true cloud-based solution built from the ground up. With the NetSuite solution, users can get access from anywhere including mobile devices. Because NetSuite uses role based access and permissions, your assigned role will determine both but you are allowed to see and edit in the system as well as organize the information that you need to see on your dashboard. This means that you can efficiently see the most important information that you need to do your job quickly and decisively today.

We are going to do an introductory demonstration of NetSuite’s order management and order entry functionality. NetSuite is a role based system and a user of role dictates both what you can see and edit in the system as well as the organized information that appears on your dashboard.

We are looking at the dashboard of a sales representative today. A user's dashboard really provides one view of the entire business in real time from the point of view of your role in the company. So a sales rep might have a dashboard pertaining to information about his or her personal sales while a controller might have a dashboard pertaining to bills to pay an accounts payable or invoices to extend an account receivable.

Each portlet delivers information directly to me based on my role. Reminders send me alerts about pressing tasks that I need to accomplish in real-time. Key performance indicators show me different information and trends of important business metrics. Report snapshots can be utilized to show me information such as customers by sales or even item availability. We can also use navigation portlets so to quickly execute key business functions such as quote management or opportunity management.

With NetSuite, you can start the sales process at several stages. So an opportunity in an early stage orders that a sales rep would enter to track potential business. The next stage could be to quote of certain products and services to a customer or to a prospective customer. Finally we have that actual sales order.

So in NetSuite you can go from an opportunity to a quote or quote to an order with just one click. So if your business starts with quotations, you would likely enter a quote before converting it to an order but today we'll be starting directly with a sales order.

Let's start to generate a sales order for one of our best customers: Mr. Supplies. As we add Mr. Supplies to the sales order we can start to bring in some additional information such as behind items. Let's add an Android phone and then let's search for additional items we can now start based on any item specifications such as manufacturer material type to mention. And beyond here this item search has just a few fields to search on and I will look for items which are manufactured by Foxconn today.

You can now see that I have two items in my catalog that match my search criteria of manufacturer types Foxconn. Let’s enter a quantity of 2 next to the iPad and click adds multiple. Alright now we have two items added to the sales order and on each line we can see there are several columns with information about that item. Now we have two items added to the sales order and on each line there are several columns with different information about that item. After the SKU and the description we can see how many of that item we have available.

This number tells me how many of those items I currently have in the warehouses that aren’t committed to other sales orders just yet. Next I can see what price level that that customer is getting. In this case we can see that the customer is entitled to a 15% discount level for the Google Android but we are unable to offer a discount on the iPad so that price level is a list price. Next I can see the expected ship date. The customer has asked for two iPads and I have over 100 available. However on the Android phone we only have 90 available so if the customer asks for less than 90 we can ship that immediately. If however they wanted 100 of this Google Android item I can have NetSuite help me find out when that amount would be available to ship to the customer.

So enter a quantity in this case of 92 which is above what I have available and then let's click on the expected ship date icon. The expected ship date icon brings up a window with information that I can tell when I'll be receiving more of that item as well as what other orders are currently committed to those items. So NetSuite can analyze this data and let me know when we can expect to have enough the product on hand to ship that out. So you can see here the earliest available date in this case would be January 2nd 2016. If we change that quantity back to 90, we can see that the date will change and this is today's date December 29.

So I know that I can ship the 90 of the Google Android tonight. We can then communicate this directly to the customer and help to improve customer expectations and of course customer satisfaction along the way.

The next column over displays tax status and a tax amount for that item. Mr. Supplies is not a taxable customer so they are not set up with taxes in their customers. However if they were taxable and we were shipping to a location that has the tax, NetSuite could calculate the sales cost in that zip code.

So we have now completed adding items to this order for Mr. Supplies and next we will look at a shipping cost as well as payment terms. NetSuite provides a seamless integration with UPS, USPS and FedEx. So you will no longer have to log into an external system to get your quotes for parcel cost or to generate shipping labels. If you charge customers for shipping we will achieve the real-time rates from their shipping partner and then place that on the order. If they are using a different shipping method they can enter that quoted cost manually.

We're using UPS ground as our method today and let's calculate the costs. We have now calculated our shipping costs in real time for UPS ground. Let's take a look at our billing information. This customer has been set up with net 30 terms. So this is a default payment method set up for Smith Supplies’ orders. However we could also bill orders directly as a cash sale or as a credit card sale. If I click on credit card selection I can see that Smith Supplies have a few cards on file that I could use or I could enter a new one manually. I will leave these blank for now and we'll go ahead and use the terms of agreement that Smith has in place with us.

Let's save and print. Here is this kind of view of the order that we just submitted for Smith Supplies. The copy of this order can be automatically emailed to the customer and of course it is now pending fulfillment. We could also place these orders and an approval queue so that somebody could inspect them before they are sent through to the warehouse for fulfillment.

Now that we have completed order entry for this order we can change roles and go work in the warehouse to actually fulfill it. So let's take sales order number 720 and move into the role of a warehouse operator. As we move into the role of the warehouse operator you will notice that the dashboard is much more tactical than that of the sales representative. This focuses on key objectives like fulfilling sales orders and receiving purchase orders. We will be focusing on order fulfillment. With NetSuite, you can utilize a three-stage pick pack and ship process where we print pick tickets, pick orders and print labels or you could utilize a one-step fulfillment depending on your business requirements.

Let's fill the order we just placed. We can filter orders on a number of different factors including whether we can ship default order. We can use customer’s preference on shipping such as complete orders versus partial shipments. We can also filter on a shipment method for example if we wanted to fulfill all next-day air orders first. So the order that we just entered in our sales representative role — sales order number 720. If we were shipping lot controlled or serialized orders that we would be selecting at this point we would go ahead and decide the lot or serial number here and the system would tell us which ones we had available and in what locations providing automation to guide us through the process and eliminate errors. From the item fulfillment screen a UPS label is created automatically — no need to log into a third-party system to generate these labels.

We can speed up the fulfillment process and fulfillment operations and ensure for a much greater shipping efficiency. No miss keyed labels will be printed or inaccurate rates will be included. An email will automatically be sent out with an order confirmation which of course reduces calls in asking for order updates and improves your customer’s experience.

We have automatically captured the UPS tracking number on the package in the fulfillment as well once again increasing the efficiency of the order fulfillment process. The information is now available for any employee with permission to see these orders so anybody interacting with your customer can see the status of the order as well as the associated tracking numbers we have completed. Fulfillment of this order and the customer has been emailed the tracking information.

We have now moved into the role of the AR clerk and will notice that the accounts receivable dashboard puts the key pieces of information that I need to do my job directly in front of me so I can see which customers have orders that need to be fulfilled or which needs to be invoiced.

Let’s invoice this customer and print a form. Our AR clerk can now print the invoice and email directly to the customer and we have completed our order management seat. We've now seen the built in processes and best practices developed from all the experience with thousands of NetSuite customers. We have been able to quickly enter orders to find items, price according to customer price agreements, set order fulfillment date expectations on those orders, and efficiently fulfill the orders without having to physically take order information out to the warehouse. We can then sell to orders based on customer order preferences or fulfillment methods to prioritize our efforts and finally we invoice the customer. For information managing the AR process and collecting payment, please watch the accounting and finance demonstration.

As you have seen in this demonstration you can use the NetSuite sales order management fulfillment and customer return solution to reduce the amount with back orders, make faster shipments to customers and reduce the time and efforts and shipping customer orders.