Whether you’re just embarking on your NetSuite implementation or you’re looking to put a new business process into place in your existing NetSuite environment, leveraging systemic controls is a great way to ensure that your organization’s desired processes are followed exactly as designed. That being said, putting too many systemic controls in place can lead to bottlenecks that create unnecessary delays and cause frustration for employees and customers alike.
So how do you know whether you are creating effective controls or are inhibiting productivity? In this post, I’ll share six signs that you might be overcomplicating your processes in NetSuite.
- All records of a specific type require approval.
As a general rule, it is best to establish acceptable parameters for new records that do not require review (i.e. under a certain dollar amount or submitted by certain users/user roles) and to only require a manual review when records don’t meet the specified requirements. In addition to reducing processing time and improving efficiency, this also helps to reduce human errors. When a user is only reviewing records that don’t align with the established standards, they are less likely to overlook a potential issue.
- Only one user can complete a specific action.
If your process includes a step that can only be performed by one specific user, it’s only a matter of time before that step becomes bottlenecked. The user might be occupied by other tasks, away on travel for business or on vacation, or out sick – regardless of the reason, the process that relies on that user grinds to a halt. If you find that a step of your process is reliant upon a single employee, consider expanding the list of staff members who can perform that function or preemptively train a super user or system admin to act as a back-up if additional users cannot be included.
- An approval process is being added for records that don’t natively require approval in NetSuite.
NetSuite has native approval processes built out for a wide variety of record types, including journal entries, purchase orders, and vendor bills (along with others). While NetSuite is designed to be customized to support your business’ unique processes (including custom approval processes), I frequently encourage organizations that are requesting approval logic on records that do not natively support approvals to consider whether or not it is truly necessary. Since access to create records can easily be controlled with permissions at the role or user level, I find that many of the concerns that businesses are trying to address with the approval process can actually be met by adjusting permissions. In conjunction with permission changes, they often opt for proactive notifications (like dashboard views or saved search emails) in place of a hard-stop approval process. There are valid use cases for approval on non-standard records, however those tend to be edge cases and are not common in most implementations.
- Your process is designed around an infrequent occurrence.
When developing a new business process, it is important to think through all known use cases as well as some of the “what if” scenarios that you may not have encountered yet. You should, however, avoid restructuring your process to accommodate those unusual scenarios that only rarely occur. I’ve seen solid, streamlined workflows devolve into needlessly complex, multi-step processes with numerous custom fields, email notifications, and approval steps just for the sake of addressing an issue that occurs once or twice a year. While you should be able to keep these issues on your radar so that you can take the necessary steps when they do come up, it may be helpful to run an ROI analysis to determine what level of review is needed. For example, if you find that the added steps result in one additional minute of processing time for each order placed and you receive 50 orders per day that require this additional processing, then your staff has to spend more than 300 additional hours per year performing these extra steps. If the issue of concern only occurs once or twice a month, then the cost per order works out to be 13 – 24 hours. This quick analysis often helps clients decide whether the added complexity is justified.
- Records without financial impact have review or approval processes.
In most organizations, financially-impacting transactions are typically those with the tightest controls, since they have direct impact on your P&L. If you find that you are wanting to have more control than what is offered by native permission restrictions on a record that doesn’t have financial impact (commonly entity or item records), it might be a sign that your process has become overly complicated. If your primary concern is visibility and data consistency, these can often be addressed with more user training, dashboard adjustments, and saved search email notifications.
- The process is being implemented in place of having a direct conversation with staff.
On more than one occasion, I’ve seen system process controls act as stand-ins for fixing bad behavior at the source. I’m an advocate for reviewing data to ensure that naming conventions and other internal processes are followed when new records are added – as the saying goes, “trust but verify” – but there still must be trust. Your staff needs proper training on policies and processes, adequate permissions to perform their core job functions, and to be held accountable when they are not in accordance with business rules. If your controls are in place of any of these three, instead of being supplementary to them, then it might be worth reconsidering your approach to make corrections at the user level instead of adding complexity to your system.
One of my favorite aspects of working in NetSuite is the way that it can be adapted to support custom and complex business processes with relative ease. But just because something can be done in NetSuite, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be done. Spend some time thinking about the reasons behind the logic that you are defining to determine what is truly adding value to your organization and what might just be creating bloat or bottlenecks.
Do you have questions about business processes or approval flows in NetSuite? Contact Concentrus today to discuss your needs.
About Us
Concentrus is a complete NetSuite solutions provider that guides organizations through how to use NetSuite to reach highly focused business goals and objectives. We provide NetSuite implementation, developer, integration, and customization services to ensure that you have a long-term solution that is tailored to fit your systems, people, and processes.
Read About Our Implementation Methodology
Want more NetSuite Tips and Tricks? Check out our Short & 'Suite videos
