E31 SuiteWorld 2023

Timestamp

Subject

5:36

Sponsored by Acura MDX

15:45

Apple Never Introduced a Category Killer

20:15

NetSuite Keynote Coverage

22:43

The Hype that is AI

26:01:00

Suite Up

31:30:00

NetSuite New Releases

35:08:00

AI Becomes Real

38:00:00

Peak Outliers in ERP Marketing

42:00:00

Importance of ERP Development

Links of note

Keynote SuiteWorld 2023 Evan Goldberg, CEO

Details on New NetSuite offerings, Gary Wiessinger's Keynote

Global Smartphone Market Share

PFE Open/PFE MFX up and Under

October 2023. NetSuite is hosting SuiteWorld, the annual gathering of users, partners, developers, consultants, and anyone else affiliated with the NetSuite universe.

It’s been a busy year in ERP in general, NetSuite in particular. There are now over 37,000 companies running on NetSuite – phenomenal growth. Around 2019? They had just broken the 18,000 companies on NetSuite mark – so the user community has doubled in 4 years, or 3 years plus a Covid timeout.

Anyway – SuiteWorld attendance is critically important for top performing NetSuite-using Companies. Even more important for companies not yet using NetSuite.

Why is that you ask? Why would you go to a users conference if you’re not a user. Here’s the story. New to ERP, clients are looking at ERP, considering which ones to select. User conferences in general are a great idea. I mean, everyone wants references – demos are really great, but not great reality. You want to see real-life examples. Well, there’s about 3,000 users at NetSuite you could talk to.

Does NetSuite really work as advertised? You’re going to see lots of companies, who, at one time were exactly where you are. How does this work? And the answer is two-fold – it doesn’t work like you think it would, and two, if you follow the process, just like these 3,000 folks did, you too will get there.

Is it worth it? The majority of the folks at SuiteWorld will tell you they wished they’d started sooner. The rest got into NetSuite as a startup – mostly because they’d used it at a former employer already.

Another critical thing we’ve learned from past clients. About a third of ERP failures can be attributed to implementation fatigue – and we’re talking the entire system up and running but features they expected and wanted, well, doesn’t really work.  Truth is, It gets hard at the very end of an implementation and it’s been a long haul to get there, and the internal team often quits at the 5 yard line – says something like ‘well, the software really doesn’t work like it did in the demos’. When the issue is, yes, it does work, but not the way YOU’RE trying to do it. So having the opportunity to actually see the intended functionality working for other companies – your internal team will realize that yes, we can do this if they did it – there is a way. And they take the ball from the 5 and push it over the goal line.

If you’re already running NetSuite, then it’s even more important to get to SuiteWorld.

You’ll find out first-hand all about the new developments being released this year. Even get a chance to see demonstrations and some hands-on labs working with new features.

Plus there’s the best-in-class Presentations. Other companies who use NetSuite, who have seen tremendous results, telling you exactly how they did it. You can ask them questions, take notes, get handouts, follow up with the product leaders from NetSuite – why they designed it that way, how it works best.

Then there’s everything else. All the affiliated software products, apps, programs, platforms, portals – everything that works with and around NetSuite. Might not be something you’re doing this year, but you learn about it and next year, when Management tells you your department needs to improve by 5%, you know about an app that has bumped productivity by 20% for other users. Tell them if they want 5% internal improvement we need to add this to the capital budget.

If you’ve been to SuiteWorld before, you know. If you’ve never been to SuiteWorld , you need to go.

Now – you may say, we’re happily using not-NetSuite for our company software. Fine – the underlying ERP best practice theory we’re defining here, is the User Group – why User Groups are important, how and why our research shows the best performing companies participate heavily in User Groups, and we can be talking about any business software user group - you really should be attending the SuperBizProMax ERP annual user conference – if of course, you’re the kind of company using SuperBizProMax for your ERP.

Research shows, it’s the easiest way to getting more from your ERP and other business software and based on what we’ve learned, it’s a no brainer every year –

Here’s my ERPodcast actual demonstration – switch over to my mobile microphone

Mike shuffle SFX

Walk out of the Cave Creek Arizona -  Rolling Thunder Studio into the garage

Garage Door opens SFX

Get in the car

Carstart/Rumble SFX

And we are ready to pull out…

But first we should mention today’s demo travelling episode is being brought to you by the 2011 Acura MDX  - this one has just under 150,000 miles and lots of features you won’t find anywhere else, my favorite being zero down and zero monthly payment at a zero interest rate for zero months because it was paid off years ago.

The story starts a few years back,

I was flying with my Dad in his 4 seater Piper single engine airplane and I asked him ‘Hey Dad when was this plane manufactured’ – he said 1954 – which was a question I wished I’d waited until after landing to ask– kidding - of course aircraft maintenance is very different than what the average auto owner neglects to do – but it got me thinking…Later on, when we pioneered ERP for  a couple  clients in the aviation maintenance sector, so I thought, why not take a few tips from those guys and just drive this Acura for 20 years – we’re over halfway there so far – which is working out great. A new MDX would be average $750 monthly payment for 5 years or more, and when you’re not dropping $750 every month,  when you do spend money on your vehicle, you get to do it exactly how you want – new high performance front end suspension components better than stock – going all digital/bluetooth instead of the CD stereo – yes that’s an outboard amp driving the subwoofer, even had the seats re-done in fine Corinthian leather – whatever I want – it’s kind of cool – and I realized - -  our consulting practice, ProfitFromERP is based on learning new things from every client project – we’ve had major or minor in over 400 ERP projects both big and small – and along the way, like I said, we work to learn something from all of them. I’m not just talking about applying aircraft maintenance standards to make a car last over a decade and beyond – even though that worked pretty well.

Our consulting is derived from learning from every ERP implementation – and the thing is, we’ve found, with the right approach from the internal team, the right group of users can actually make even bad software work well – and even better when improving the software selection process itself – so why not break that methodology down into repeatable actions using great software.

– the internal process, how the internal team and users approach the software project and deploy the ERP – that’s what makes the real difference – so we’ve studied the best companies approach and distilled it down to ten different steps or stages that we’ve observed

That’s how we came up with the ProfitFromERP methodologies – and one of the things we noticed was our top performing companies would ask early on ‘Is there an active user group for this new software’ – which at first I thought, that is really geeky and sounds pretty lame…software user groups? That was back when I already knew everything, before I learned I didn’t. Watching the internal teams we were consulting with come back from SuiteWorld and our list of active ERP projects would just explode based on new requests – they’d seen new things and new ways to work with existing modules, and we realized we could not continue to let our customers tell us how to consult – so we started going to software conferences. Anyway – the end result is, top performing companies get much greater value out of the software they already have by participating in user conferences – they get payback in no time.

So are you finally convinced to head off to SuiteWorld?

We’re headed that way now and we’ll be reporting back on this Episode 31 of the ERPodcast, the official podcast of ProfitFromERP – our consulting firm dedicated to helping clients select the best business software, implement using best practices and continue supporting internal teams to drive efficiencies, increase revenues and achieve, Profit From ERP.

Got the green light, lay on some highway tunes

MFX Doobie Bros

And We’re off to Vegas.

PFE Open #3

OK, here we are…NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference – we’re out here in the concourse – and things are starting to heat up. Normally there are some 2 to 3 day training classes prior to the  the actual conference starting - - -  but like us, most people start arriving the afternoon before keynotes – and already lots is happening – there are several thousand attendees already checked in. There are hundreds of NetSuite Partners and software vendors from all types of Apps and related programs that work with NetSuite. Outside developers, folks who’ve written a program specifically for their organization using the NetSuite development toolkit  - often, it works so well they take it to market to sell to other NetSuite users - – if enough people buy the app to make it profitable, well,