The ERPodcast Gene Hammons

It's not another Top Ten ERP list, not a Top Five, not a shootout or comparison, but the Best ERP for Your Business.

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.

E30 CFO Leadership Conference West 2023

 E30 CFO Leadership Conference West 2023

ERPodcast Episode 30.2

Intro MFX

This week in ERP….(or at least my week in ERP)

Hey Folks – Gene Hammons, Director of ProfitFromERP with Episode 30 of the ERPodcast…

Interesting week however you look at it - locally, here in AZ, Tempe to be specific, the CFO Leadership Council held CFO Leadership Conference West 2023 - thanks to my friends at Oracle NetSuite and Avalera (the tax guys) they were able to sneak me into the Networking Event held poolside at one of the local mountainside Marriott Resorts. And fortunately, fall came to the desert three days prior to the event and it was a great evening under the stars. A week earlier and it would have been 103 degrees with the smell of roasted CFO’s wafting across the desert.

Got to talk to a lot of different CFO’s from lots of different companies all across the country. I’d say attendance was in the 200-400 range, but that’s a guess on my part. A lot of the sessions were on technology for finance, using automation in driving better data and how data driven organizations had clearer and faster reads on how their specific company was performing in a wildly fluctuating market. It goes without saying that we’re dealing with challenging market conditions these days. Makes me wonder if it goes without saying, why do I keep saying it.

We’re beginning to see real functionality with AI in finance software – more on that next week – Many CFO’s report their staff spending more time on accuracy than analysis, and the focus here was using automation to drive the accuracy, AI to report anomalies and staff can concentrate on analysis to provide real service to the rest of the organization.

Many of the CFO’s were with companies already using NetSuite - and the new numbers are out, NetSuite is now over 37,000 companies using the Suite. I remember 2019, not that long ago, when they were ecstatic at breaking the 18,000 companies mark. The conventional wisdom at the time was NetSuite had seen 30% growth year after year but driving 30% increases of a 10k customer base is a lot easier to achieve than pulling off 30% growth on a base of 18,000 customers - so surely there was a ceiling coming soon. Execpt it didn’t….and here’s a few reasons why

The Oracle Boost – I don’t know if you know the NetSuite history, initially, Larry Ellison Oracle Founder and CEO, provided once Oracle employee now NetSuite Founder CEO Evan Goldberg with initial funding to start a cloud based business software – so Larry owned a good deal of the stock in NetSuite. Oracle, for reasons we’ll cover other places, wasn’t a big player in cloud technology, but as NetSuite grew, Oracle could shortcut it’s way into cloud technology by acquiring NetSuite – which turned out to be really great in many areas.

Going Global

2019 I also was at a NetSuite Suite Success Training in Denver . We heard that Oracle, was driving huge development dollars into the NetSuite platform.  I first saw NetSuite really take off in our customer base around 2014, back then, NetSuite was a US market product.

As I met my fellow Suite Success team members in Denver, I met other students from Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Ireland, London, Paris, Germany, Thailand-I think, India, Sri Lanka - and that’s the ones I remember. That kind of illustrated the global impact NetSuite was starting to have in foreign ERP providers and global markets with Oracle-backed development rolling out NetSuite versions specific to other countries, localized to tax and legal issues of those particular markets - that was part of the new development Oracle was providing - driving new markets globally, so NetSuite could replicate the tremendous success they’ve had stateside and start serving a worldwide market. And that’s just some of the huge expansion of NetSuite capabilities and functionalites

ERPodcast Episode 29

The Perfect Time for ERP

MFX/Intro

Welcome to the ERPodcast Episode #29 – The Perfect Time for ERP – that’s the title and theme of today’s examination of just that - when should a growing company undertake an ERP project?

And it’s not a simple question. Any ERP project is massive, whether you’re a $12m annual revenue company going from Quickbooks to Sage Intacct or a $200m company replacing DynamicsGP with a new cloud-based ERP.

ERP is an intensive project, needs a ‘all hands on deck’ approach and the stakes are high. There’s legendary stories of Hershey’s Chocolate almost losing the company when a failed SAP effort meant they couldn’t ship product in the middle of the peak Halloween to Christmas season – not good – and there’s also scores of those types of stories from lesser known and more private companies.

So when is, The Perfect Time for ERP?

We’ll talk about 3 real world examples of recent ProfitFromERP clients and the drivers behind those examples.

There’s also a world of opinion in the world of startups – do you do the ERP project Pre-IPO to show potential investors solid financial controls and operational efficiency? Do you wait until the next round of funding to be able to afford the higher end ERP’s with related SEC reporting tools to make sure of compliance needed by a public company?

Then there’s the staffing balance – we’ll have more people on board next year so we can spread the ERP implementation workload across more resources….but if we had ERP already installed we’d need to hire fewer people for the same size operation.

Here’s the conundrum – most of us don’t hire for excess capacity. It’s more like we’re not really sure of the data, it’s coming from disparate spreadsheets, running late, last minute– but the staff is working overtime and Saturdays – if we just had one more person to chase down the data… which is a good solution, but by definition, a growing company continues to grow and we keep adding one more person just to keep up, pretty soon there’s 22 desks in the business office and we’re looking for more space because everyone’s working overtime and Saturdays.

Putting things off til some magical ‘some day’ only gets us from complexity to mass complexity.

Then one day we wake up and we realize ‘WOW - it would have been a lot easier to implement ERP when the business was simpler and we could have managed growth in a lot more systematic method’. Plus, instead of rolling out training to 50 people all at once, we comprehensively train the first 10 and teach each onboarding employee the exact steps using the new software specifically for their job duties. And maybe even start hiring people who’ve already been using the same ERP we just implemented.

So what’s The Perfect Time for ERP?  Let’s look at some real-world examples. Stories of companies that took a leap at different stages and how that all turned out. I’m your host, Gene Hammons, Director of ProfitFromERP,  our business consulting firm helping clients actually create Profit, From their ERP projects. Right back after this!

Stinger out.

Hey – a word about sponsors. Putting together the ERPodcast is a labor of love, it’s often our first introduction to new clients, we also think it’s about giving back to the community, sharing stories of real world ERP projects, how the market works, things we’ve experienced over the years and so on. .

As long as there are still ERP projects that fail or have huge cost overruns or don’t do what the demo looked like it did – as long as there’s a bad project out there, we’ll keep pushing out the know-how to avoid those situations

But – running a growing company ProfitFromERP – just like any other emerging company, there’s a lot to do. Time is critical.

And if we’re going to allocate the time to the ERPodcast – well, we need to do it as more than a net loss leader – s

It's Crazy Out There!

We can't control the outside world, but as Uncertainty reigns externally, Business Equilibrium results when we create better data certainty within our businesses. See how other leading companies have managed the raging seas of uncertainty in the boat of Cloud ERP 







































ERPodcast - Ranked #3 in Top 15 ERP Podcasts!

 



Recently - Feedspot.com a digital content aggregator assymbled a Top 15 ERP podcasts list - and the ERPodcast came in at #3 - Unfortunately, we dropped in the recent rankings and today's episode contains the original recording we posted on LinkedIn when the original rankings came out - apologies for any confusion!





























































About today's ERPodcast























MIsaligned incentives - budget shortfalls - tight implementation timelines - How do you conquer the most common pitfalls leading to a failed ERP implementation? The ProfitFromERP methodology bakes in best practices so you end up watching company goals and, like we say, ProfitFromERP, our clients make ERP PAY!















E28c ERPodcast - Certainty in an Uncertain World



 



MFX up and under (but louder than last time)



 



 



It’s the ERPodcast Episode 28 – The official podcast of ProfitFromERP.com and I’m the Director, Gene Hammons, Over the past 18 months, we’ve helped about a dozen companies get through challenges we never thought any of us would face.



 



If you’ve listened to earlier ERPodcast Episodes, you know what a huge advantage digital companies had dealing with a world gone virtual.



The #1 Issue? Uncertainty. The country, the workforce, supply chains, inflation, is covid up or down? Opening up or locking down?



- - There’s a world of uncertainty out there  - - - if we’re going to maintain the right business equilibrium we need to create more certainty within the four walls of our businesses.  We can’t control outside uncertainties but we can surely affect the internal workings That’s Our ability to respond. That’s response – ability – and here’s how some of our clients define business responsibility today.



 



One big uncertainty is in today’s workforce. How do we deal with the changes, what are the technology issues that can even stop top talent from joining your firm? So let’s talk about how can technology help us get more done with the fewer people we actually do have on staff



We’ll examine that.



 



Supply Chain issues? Overseas shipments are bringing back the old phrase Slow Boat from China – which many of you didn’t even know was a phrase – tech can’t help get your boat unloaded. But we can use demand planning to anticipate shortages long before your ship is just offshore with the parts, raw materials and goods your customers are already waiting for – never mind the trucking



 



 



Creating certainty in an uncertain world comes down to the Information in Information Technology – just in case you forgot what IT stood for.  Is your information good enough, timely enough, informative enough?

What don't they tell you about ERP?

Unaligned incentives, unseen success factors, the things you don't know you can't control. But success is possible - yes, even ProfitFromERP