NetSuite SuiteAnalytics: Listen and Learn

Find out more about NetSuite LCS and check out a list of upcoming events and available courses: https://bit.ly/3Cypwbz NetSuite Principal Education Consultant Mark Gildea from the Learning Cloud Support (LCS) team goes deep on how NetSuite analytics and reporting work and how customers can get the most out of them for the second episode in our Listen & Learn series. Mark touches on who will benefit from a greater understanding of NetSuite SuiteAnalytics [3:34] before breaking down the different ways to query data in NetSuite [5:12], including saved searches, reports, and workbooks [7:08]. If you’re a beginner, Mark provides a few suggestions on how you can up your skills when it comes to NetSuite reporting [9:59]. He then shares SuiteAnalytics use cases where he’s seen customers find success [15:21] and how these insights can be valuable to employees across the business [18:25]. From there, the NetSuite expert shares more about live classes from LCS [19:29] and additional training sessions that come with the LCS Company Pass [25:38]. Like what you learned? Subscribe Now! http://bit.ly/NetSuiteYouTube Follow Us Here: Mark Gildea: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-v-gildea/ Oracle NetSuite LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/NetSuiteLI Facebook: http://bit.ly/NetSuiteFB Instagram: http://bit.ly/NetSuiteIG Twitter: http://bit.ly/NetSuiteTW #NetSuiteAnalytics #SuiteAnalytics #NetSuiteReports #NetSuite #NetSuiteERP -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;04;07 - 00;00;21;17 Hey, SuiteListeners, welcome to The NetSuite Podcast. I'm Ian McCue, a cohost of this podcast, and today I'm excited to continue our Listen and Learn series. We kicked off this podcast series earlier this year with the goal of giving customers useful tips and tricks that will help them get more out of NetSuite, For part two of the series, 00;00;21;18 - 00;00;43;05 we're talking NetSuite Analytics with Mark Gildea, a principal education consultant on NetSuite’s Learning Cloud Support or LCS team. Mark describes the differences between NetSuite reports, saved searches, workbooks, and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse and the role each plays in giving stakeholders across your business the insights they need. He shares useful background information for beginners on how these tools work, 00;00;43;07 - 00;01;03;04 then dives into how you can identify the right tool for the job and specific use cases that have driven eye-opening takeaways for customers he's worked with. Mark also walks through the resources available for NetSuite users to deepen their expertise. That spans self-service training through MyLearn, a number of live events, and personalized training sessions with education consultants such as Mark. 00;01;03;06 - 00;01;26;29 If you're a NetSuite customer looking to take advantage of all the reporting analytics capabilities in NetSuite, this is the episode for you, and it's coming up next. You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. 00;01;27;02 - 00;01;40;27 We’ll also feature customer growth stories, discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;01;41;00 - 00;02;08;08 So to start out, Mark, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at NetSuite? Absolutely. As you said, my name is Mark Gildea, and I'm based here in Miami, Florida. I've been at NetSuite for three years now, and I'm a senior education consultant. And in addition to that, I lead a team of some analytics experts who deliver live event webinars. 00;02;08;08 - 00;02;31;01 And then I also participate in what we call Learning Labs that we deliver at various cities around the country. And so you're part of NetSuite Education Services and the Learning Cloud Support or LCS team. Could you remind our listeners about what your team does? Absolutely. First, probably want to know what LCS is—it's Learning Cloud Support 00;02;31;03 - 00;03;02;24 and what we do is we support what's called the LCS company Pass. And there are two, there's the standard and the premium. And then we also have what we call LCS live events or webinars. We support event packs, we also create videos, student guides, we do quick reference guides. And then also we have some advising sessions that we deliver that support the online training and what we call MyLearn. 00;03;02;26 - 00;03;40;20 And can you share a bit more about what topic you're going to be covering today on the podcast? Absolutely. Analytics, without question. It's my favorite thing that I deliver and analytics does incorporate different topics. So there are reports, there are saved searches, workbooks, and then this brand new edition called NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, also known as NSAW. And who do you think will kind of benefit the most from today's topic and from this conversation about analytics? 00;03;40;23 - 00;04;10;24 I would say the ultimate goal for our customers is to gain insights into their business. So I'd say, for example, a sales manager, obviously they want to know how well their sales reps are performing, maybe even where they're performing the best. You know, you got your project managers who are interested in how much did we sell the most of, the least of, what are the most profitable items. You can imagine 00;04;10;27 - 00;04;38;14 a warehouse manager needs analytics to understand how they’re processing their incoming, you know, their purchase orders or what's going out, those sales orders. Maybe have a production manager who needs to know how well your processes are running. And obviously the C-suite, because you need to know where you are, right, in order to make a plan of where you want to arrive, sort of that first step. 00;04;38;17 - 00;05;08;19 So I would say anybody in any company that relies on data to make informed decisions, and I don't think it means just managers. There are certainly sales reps that want to know what they're doing best so they can find out what they can exploit to do even better. Yeah, absolutely. It makes a lot of sense as we, you know, talk about data-driven decisions and people, you know, using data to kind of guide these key decisions, 00;05;08;19 - 00;05;32;06 so definitely see how it could be useful for really anyone in the company. How would you describe Mark kind of the differences among the different ways you can query data in NetSuite? And when might someone use one of those options over another? Great question, and absolutely a question that I hear from my clients. So let's kind of break it up into different products. 00;05;32;06 - 00;06;00;14 First, let's talk about so searches and reports. Now, those two modalities--and both of those are they're creating SQL for us, they’re interfaces that create SQL for us--and it's important to understand that they are accessing different datasets. But what they do is they give us real-time data that we can use to create these in-depth financial statements. 00;06;00;14 - 00;06;25;05 Our reports are really good at creating those statements, like income statement and balance sheet. They can also be set up to send alerts, for example, with saved searches. If you get a brand new customer in your sales queue, you can get an email. You can also set up a schedule to send out any of the financial reports quarterly, maybe to the CEO. 00;06;25;12 - 00;06;50;10 However, they can only--there's a little drawback--we can say that they can only join data by one level. So what does that mean? What that means is you can imagine you're doing a query on the customer record and the customer record happens to be attached to the transaction record. So I could query, let's say, the sales orders of the customer. 00;06;50;12 - 00;07;20;24 And then you've got that sales order that has a link to the item record and you can get that data for the item name, let's say, or the purchase price. Now in saved searches and reports, you can't make that double job to go from customer to transaction to item. And that's where SuiteAnalytics Workbooks comes into play. This particular modality has the benefit of what we call an infinite join. 00;07;20;27 - 00;07;56;20 So if you know databases, it's just that there to join datasets, so you can skip and you can combine data from disparate sources. Also with workbooks, you have the option of creating pivot tables and you can put those pivot tables on your dashboard, and that's a visualization that isn't available in either searches or reports. Now, reports can expand by levels, but it doesn't necessarily have that pivot and it also offers you different types of charts. 00;07;56;22 - 00;08;22;23 Now, that's where this new product comes into play. So we've had connectors for a long time, where you can connect from outside data sources to NetSuite. But then we have this NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, this is another separate product. The other three I mentioned come with everybody’s instance, everybody has access to reports, searches, and workbooks. NSAW is separate. 00;08;22;24 - 00;08;47;20 Now this is sort of workbooks on steroids because the visualizations that you can get from this product are things I've never even heard of. So you can imagine, you've got things called scatter plots, maps--of course I know what maps are--and sunburst charts. And not only does it connect it to other data sources, but many more than just a connector. 00;08;47;22 - 00;09;15;05 And it does one additional thing. It can main