NetSuite 2018.1 New Features for Manufacturers

NetSuite is a true cloud solution and includes major releases twice per year as part of your subscription. The fantastic thing is that the upgrades happen automatically and at no additional cost. Within a few weeks of a new release, 100% of NetSuite customers now have the updated release and access to all of the new great features!

Here are the key new features that impact manufacturers from its latest update.

Advanced Bill of Material (BOM) Enhancements

• Now able to add custom fields to the BOM components records and revisions records
• Enhanced web services to facilitate easy integration with other systems such as your PLM to the BOM records
• Easily link other BOMs and assembly records to the BOM record
• Automatically copy routings when copying the BOM
• Set effective end dates when a new revision is created

Supply Chain Control Tower

This is a global time-phased view that summarizes your current and future inventory position across your global supply chain. With this, you can know when and where demand is beginning to outpace or fall behind the plan, supply is beginning to outpace or fall behind demand, and inventory is growing beyond or falling behind planned levels.

• Provides the ability to visually monitor your inventory, demand, and supply across your entire global supply chain
• Time phased view to help identify future imbalances in demand and supply
• Filter and drill down into transactions to take action directly from the Tower
• Export the entire grid to Excel for further analysis

Inbound Shipment Management

This feature was introduced in 2017.2. Update 2018.1 adds several important enhancements.

• Enter landed cost (freight, brokerage fees, duties, etc. ) against the inbound shipment record
• Multicurrency enabled
• Multiple ways to allocate the costs (value, quantity, weight)
• Can use SuiteScript to add complex logic and calculations to personalize for your companies specific needs

Fulfill Sales Orders From Warehouses in Different Subsidiaries

• Define global inventory relationships that includes location restrictions
• Reduces the number of steps required to perform intercompany transactions
• Allow warehouses from other subs to fulfill product directly without the need to perform a drop shipment
• Fully integrated with NetSuite’s Advanced Order Management

Quality Management Updates

Quality Management was part of update 2017.2 as a standalone module. Before that it was only available as a part of advanced manufacturing. In 2018.1, NetSuite has  several new enhancements.

• Now available for use with standard manufacturing
• Quality Management previously focused on incoming materials from vendors, but it now can be triggered from an assembly or manufacturing activity or receipt of finished goods
• Can perform inspections from a tablet (iPad, Android)
• Capture image from the tablet interface and automatically attach to the quality record

There is much more to cover, but these features will provide the most benefit to manufacturers. It’s amazing and refreshing that NetSuite is able to consistently provide this type of new release functionality twice per year, and that within weeks 100% of NetSuite customers can take advantage of all of these new great features.