Introduction

NetSuite Administrators do so much more than “administer” the system. Yes, they are responsible for supporting IT general controls, including user access and change management, but they are also responsible for enhancing and extending the system capabilities. They do this by working directly with their end users on requirements, determining the best possible solution when there are typically many ways to solve any given problem and will sometimes execute the development work necessary or partner with their NetSuite Developers to put the business requirements into a technical specification document.

They are truly the Swiss army knife that can do it all. As a result, NetSuite Administrators have to be very intentional about how they spend their time. If they spend too long managing the day to day administrative tasks they leave no time for making the system more effective and efficient for their end users. Conversely if they spend too much time making enhancements and not managing controls, user access, etc. then the application can become unwieldy relatively quickly. Striking the right balance is an art form and is far from easy.

It’s not always easy being a NetSuite Administrator

While juggling the many responsibilities of being a NetSuite Administrator, it is important to have the right mindset for managing both short-term and longer-term priorities. Short-term priorities will typically be ongoing end user support and addressing requests quickly and efficiently. Longer-term priorities likely include bigger system enhancements and installations of new bundles and SuiteApps.

Whether you’re new to NetSuite Administration or a veteran Administrator here are a few things to consider when managing your NetSuite environments:

Proactive instead of reactive

Do you know when a system bundle update has been installed or when a script has errored out?

Larger managed bundle updates typically come with some advanced warning, but smaller updates are pushed without the knowledge of the NetSuite Admin Team. It’s important to track these bundle updates to pre-empt any issues that could arise in that specific process area e.g. if there is a managed bundle update to the Advanced Electronic Bank Payments feature, you might want to give your Accounts Payable team a heads up to be extra vigilant for potential system issues.

Script errors are more challenging because it is not always obvious if the error logged actually broke a process for your end users or not. Having the ability to quickly filter through these error logs is important, so you can focus on investigating the right errors. Looking at script errors in the last 24 hours is going to help NetSuite Administrators be proactive in addressing issues. Not proactive in the sense of addressing the issue before it happens, but proactive from the perspective of being aware of an issue shortly after it occurs and resolving it before your end users are even aware there was an issue in the first place.

Leverage NetSuite saved searches to proactively stay on top of potential system issues - capture the latest results from workflow and script changes and have them front and center on your NetSuite homepage or have them captured as a reminder with a traffic light system to flag changes in the number of saved search results

Salto Tip: Customize your Administrator dashboard to pull logs of all key errors on a daily basis. Review these when you first log into the system with the goal of addressing any underlying issues before your end users have even logged into the system themselves.

Prioritizing technical debt cleanup

Unless you are implementing a brand new instance of NetSuite, technical debt should always be top of mind. The amount of technical debt is not directly synonymous with the length of time a NetSuite instance has been active (although there should be some correlation), but is moreso tied to the level of customization and development performed in the system.

It is important to review the entire body of NetSuite customizations periodically to ensure they are all still operating effectively as originally intended when each customization was first implemented. Ask yourself whether the customization is still required or not. Review logs to see the last time a script or workflow was executed. Identify custom fields that have never been populated and saved searches that haven’t been run in more than a year.

Taking a proactive approach to managing the technical debt that builds up over time will ultimately lead to improved system performance, especially when you compare well maintained environments to those without any maintenance.

Salto Tip: Make sure to leverage the NetSuite Application Performance Management (APM) SuiteApp to help identify key areas of technical debt to clean up.

Build vs Buy

With the ability to customize pretty much anything and everything in NetSuite it is often the default choice to build a custom solution vs looking to purchase the solution from NetSuite or NetSuite’s partner network.

The reality is that many companies run into the same challenges and NetSuite partners have solved many of these. They also manage and maintain these solutions with product enhancements and compatibility with future NetSuite releases (so you don’t have to!)

So before you go down the build path make sure to explore the solutions available to you in the SuiteApp Marketplace, because chances are someone in the NetSuite ecosystem has already solved the problem you’re attempting to solve.

NetSuite continues to innovate across all key areas of the platform. Let’s explore some of the latest enhancements to these features in 2024 and how they benefit NetSuite Administrators.

New NetSuite Features

As NetSuite Administrators, it is vital that you stay on top of new features and functionality made available to you, in addition to existing features that are being deprecated so that you can plan accordingly. NetSuite releases occur every 6 months and Administrators should be reviewing the release notes, in detail, to determine the change impact to their business as well as identify opportunities in new features that can be implemented in the future.

Here are links to the 2024 NetSuite Release Notes for quick reference.

• 2024.2 NetSuite Release Notes
• 2024.1 NetSuite Release Notes

Challenges with Managing Customization Manually

NetSuite Administrators own system customizations from custom roles to custom forms to custom workflows to custom records. The list goes on. They typically have to manage this on top of their day to day support duties.

Each custom solution deployment to Production takes time, even something as small as a custom field. Some customizations are almost impossible to deploy manually without some risk of human error and leveraging some of the out of the box tools available can lead to dependency issues that delay a deployment.

One custom workflow context set incorrectly, or a custom role permission inadvertently set to “Full” can have significant consequences for a business running NetSuite. Unfortunately there isn’t an exhaustive list of things that can go wrong with a manual deployment, the risk is truly inherent in the manual nature of the exercise.

You might be lucky and catch such an issue shortly after deployment so there is no prolonged impact. Those not so lucky could be explaining to their auditors how a change was erroneously made or worse to their customers as to why they were impacted by an error caused by a system deployment.

To reduce the risk of running into these issues, some NetSuite Administrators will execute redundant checks and balances to make sure that everything has been deployed correctly. This might involve more than one member of the NetSuite Admin Team overseeing the deployment to cross reference the custom solution in the Sandbox environment with what is being deployed in the Production environment. All of this simply slows the deployment process down and is not foolproof. This is also arguably a waste of time for these strong technical resources that could be adding value elsewhere across the business.

Not sure how costly getting deployments wrong can be to your business? Check out this blog post (with a calculator) to help you make that assessment.

Now, let’s explore solutions to these challenges.

Solutions for Managing NetSuite Customizations

As we just discussed, managing these customizations across NetSuite environments can be difficult. It can divert much needed time and resources away from other areas of the business and yet still results in a HIGH level of risk given the vast number of configuration settings on any one custom solution.

NetSuite offers multiple native solutions for managing your NetSuite customizations. These native solutions include Copy to Account, Suitebundler and SuiteCloud Development Framework (SDF). Depending on the customization you are attempting to deploy to Production, you will need to determine the most appropriate option.

All NetSuite Admin teams are faced with the same challenge of managing system customizations, typically across multiple NetSuite environments e.g. Production + Sandbox. When managing in flight work across these environments it can be hard to stay on top of dependencies. Given this uphill battle, NetSuite Administrators are exploring alternative solutions. One solution they are exploring is Salto. You can see more details about the Salto SuiteApp here. The Salto SuiteApp is helping NetSuite teams in a multitude of ways.

It allows them to perform environment comparisons across all of their NetSuite environments, which makes it much simpler to identify any deployment conflicts prior to migrating customizations to Production. In this, the Salto SuiteApp is allowing the team executing these migrations to be proactive in their approach instead of reactive.

In addition, Salto gives NetSuite Administrators the flexibility to execute deployment rollbacks with a few clicks. Rollbacks are generally a top priority when they need to occur and having the tools available to manage this process in a matter of minutes (if not seconds) can be the saving grace for any NetSuite Admin Team.

Now that you have successfully deployed your custom NetSuite solutions to Production, let’s consider some best practices that NetSuite Administrators should adopt.

Best Practices as a NetSuite Administrator

1. Testing strategy - If you haven’t captured sufficient testing scenarios and tested fully in your Sandbox or Development environment, you might find yourself needing to roll back solutions more frequently than desired.
2. Technical debt - Prioritize technical debt cleanup to avoid declining system performance over time. If NetSuite is running slow it is very likely to be a result of the accumulation of custom NetSuite solutions deployed over time.
3. Managed bundles - Monitor your managed bundle updates. Inform your users when updates happen so they can be extra vigilant. It will also help you be proactive in addressing issues related to specific bundles.
4. Production deployment - Leverage the solutions available to you to manage your production deployment process seamlessly. Do not let this be a time suck for your team when they should be focused on adding value to the business.
5. Role-specific dashboards - Take advantage of the ability to create custom dashboards for your end users and customize to meet their specific process needs. This will make for a positive and productive experience in NetSuite.
6. Proactive error review - Monitor workflow, suitescript, integration and other error logs, with the goal of finding and fixing issues before your end users are even aware there was an issue in the first place.
7. SuiteApp marketplace - With the flexibility that NetSuite offers, the “build vs buy” discussion comes up a lot. Don’t forget to leverage the SuiteApp marketplace to see if a NetSuite partner has already solved the problem you have been tasked to solve.
8. System documentation - NetSuite knowledge is often retained with a few key team members. It is important to share this detailed process knowledge, typically in the form of a knowledge base, with the broader team. Your current and future team members will thank you for it. As will your auditors!
9. User access policy - Leverage the Login Audit Trail saved search to track user access. If you do not have a policy in place today that governs user access, think about putting one in place. Removing access after inactivity for 90 days is commonplace.
10. NetSuite releases - Partner with your end users to keep them informed of changes coming in the upcoming NetSuite release and work with them on testing new functionality (and existing functionality to make sure it still works as expected) in the Release Preview environment.

Salto Tip: Check out this FREE NetSuite Administrator training course on Salto Leap to see how you can become a Master NetSuite Administrator and NetSuite guru for your company.

Useful references

• Guidelines for NetSuite Administrators
• NetSuite Account Administration
• Internal Controls in NetSuite
• Getting Help for Administrators
• Common mistakes made by NetSuite Administrators

For more Best Practices to manage your NetSuite customizations, check out Salto’s blog posts that explore some of the things that NetSuite Developers and NetSuite Administrators should be leveraging within the NetSuite ecosystem.

Final thoughts

As companies continue to grow and scale with NetSuite, more and more is being asked of NetSuite Administrators to customize the system further to meet growing business needs. With this, more NetSuite enhancement projects are running in parallel now more than ever and as a result it is becoming increasingly challenging for NetSuite Administrators to deploy these changes manually, while avoiding NetSuite environment dependencies often generated through the simultaneous development work taking place.

Consider adopting the above best practices to leverage your company’s investment in NetSuite to the fullest. Focus on value-add initiatives and not spending critical time manually migrating custom NetSuite solutions between environments only to deal with deployment dependencies after the fact.