The ERP Health Check: How to Keep Your NetSuite System Running at Its Best
SuiteDynamics, NetSuite Consultants & Developers
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Over time, a NetSuite system can get bogged down by an overabundance of records and workflows. Fortunately, regular performance checks can keep these issues from getting out of hand.
It may sound strange, but NetSuite Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems get sick sometimes. They may not cough or sneeze, but their coding and configurations can get snarled, slowing them down—much like a fever saps a person’s energy.
If a system becomes too slow, company employees may not be able to upload files, complete transactions, or perform other essential duties in a timely manner, which could grind work to a halt.
We don’t want to see your company hindered by under-the-weather software. Periodic ERP Health Checks keep a system running at full capacity by identifying internal issues before they slow your daily operations.
SuiteDynamics works with NetSuite to customize, implement, and maintain NetSuite systems. Our experts can examine your ERP as a standalone service or a part of our Managed Service Plans.
Key Takeaways
An ERP Health Check is a service that evaluates the overall performance of your NetSuite ERP System. It examines your software’s installed bundles, configuration settings, customizations, data usage, and, most importantly, speed.
“Generally, it's looking at the overall system health from a speed perspective,” SuiteDynamics CEO Jake Kleiner explains. “So, how quickly are transactions loading? How quickly are things like workflows and scripts firing? Are there any areas where it's clearly suboptimal?”
Kleiner also says a health check evaluates your overall business. During the process, NetSuite experts review your entire company, from marketing to warehouse management to accounting, determining whether departments are working in unison. They also identify process inefficiencies and pain points that your ERP system could resolve with a few adjustments.
Why Do You Need an ERP Health Check?
In a nutshell, this service ensures your company gets its money’s worth from your NetSuite ERP.
“Implementing as well as licensing a system like NetSuite is extremely costly,” Kleiner says. “You want to make sure that you're getting the full capability and the full functionality from the system you've paid for, including the investment in the implementation.”
He says customizations, like SuiteScripts and workflows, sometimes interfere with the system’s general functions, making it sluggish. Experts can examine those problems and find ways to refactor or reduce the modifications so the ERP software can pick up speed.
“Any type of record or page that's taking a long time to load is usually a big indicator that something needs to be optimized,” he explains. “You should also check system health if the software takes a while to load things like lists or record types when you're trying to work through forms or templates. That often means there's a lot going on in the background that needs to either be simplified or merged or refactored.”
Of course, your company may go a while without customizing a system. In that case, other issues can still arise during daily operations. That’s why Kleiner recommends you schedule an ERP Health Check annually to address potential problems before they wreck production.
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What Does an ERP Health Check Involve?
Experts perform an ERP Health Check using various tools that crawl through software, checking for vulnerabilities.
For instance, our team uses NetSuite’s ERP Health Monitor tool to evaluate a system’s overall performance and determine its speed. We also use diagnostic and third-party tools, like Flashlight, to get a broad sense of the software’s issues. Then, we make recommendations based on the results.
Kleiner says these health checks often uncover issues with the number of scripts firing on a single record or the number of records in the system. Too many of either will slow down the system’s ability to complete or save transactions.
Why Call the Professionals?
You may wonder why you should pay ERP experts to check your system’s health if the process merely involves running some diagnostic programs. According to Kleiner, diagnostic results mean nothing if you can’t do anything about them.
“Clients need professionals because they understand the system end to end and because most of the issues a health check identifies are technical in nature,” he says. “Those issues could be script refactoring, workflow revision, multiple script or workflow merging, or data architecture changes. These are all, generally, highly technical in nature, so you'll want some form of an advisor or a partner who can guide the process.”
As a SuiteDynamics partner, you can request an ERP Health Check as a standalone service or as part of a Managed Service Plan. You will pay for a set number of staff hours to perform the evaluation and determine recommended solutions. Our experts will also calculate the cost for those solutions so you can decide which fixes you want to make. You can even proceed with our recommendations in stages to preserve your budget.
“It's a very low-cost, low-risk process and approach,” Kleiner says. “At the end of the day, whether a client or a prospect decides to move forward with some of these improvements, there's a fixed cost. So, there's not going to be the risk of an expensive proposition. In the worst case, a client is still armed with good information as far as improvements, and they can always contact other teams to complete the fixes or do them internally.”
Get Maximum ROI From Your NetSuite Investment
It’s hard to run an efficient business when your NetSuite ERP system takes twice as long as it should to perform the simplest tasks. Your staff will get very little done, and your blood pressure will go through the roof.
We want your business—and your health—to remain stable. For a fixed cost, our ERP Health Check service examines your entire system, identifying problematic scripts, workflows, and other glitches that are bogging down your software. Then, we compile a list of recommendations that will eliminate those problems and whip your system back into shape.
We pull information from NetSuite material, SuiteDynamics experts, and other reliable sources to compose our blog posts and educational pieces. We ensure they are as accurate as possible at the time of writing. However, software evolves quickly, and although we work to maintain these posts, some details may fall out of date. Contact SuiteDynamics experts for the latest information on NetSuite ERP systems.
Part of this text was generated using GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. After generating the draft language, our team edited, revised, and fact-checked it to ensure readability and accuracy. SuiteDynamics is ultimately responsible for the content of this blog post.