Tariff Uncertainty: 5 NetSuite Tools to Strengthen Supply Chain Resilience
As business leaders in product-based industries with global supply chains, it is more important than ever to mitigate any potential risks to your business from the ever-changing talk about the shift away from global free trade policy. For many product retailers, distributors, and manufacturers, the prospect of systemic higher costs will send their business into turmoil.
Organizations using NetSuite (now with over 41,000 users and growing), or those considering its adoption have access to powerful tools that can help them brace for these business challenges. Here are 5 NetSuite features that can help:
1. Understanding your costs
Landed Costs: Whether you are currently tracking landed costs and need to perform mass updates to properly analyze your gross margin or would like to introduce new processes in your ERP to provide this visibility (either actual or planned landed costs), Racette Consulting is here to help!
Standard Costs: If your business operates on a standard costing method, now is as good a time as ever to perform a periodic cost revaluation to properly account for your inventory asset values and associated cost of goods. This is critical to ensure products aren’t being sold at a loss.
2. Pricing
We all know that increased product costs may potentially mean an increase in the selling price for your goods. NetSuite has very flexible pricing strategies, but not all those strategies allow for ease of updating your product pricing in mass. At Racette, we understand and communicate the leading practices for NetSuite pricing to ensure ease of pricing updates. However, we also understand the need to accommodate strategic customer relationships, especially with long-term retail partners and other customers. Our expertise allows us to quickly and efficiently update your product pricing leveraging a few different tools. We also have experience with pricing audits within your ERP data, so that we can help you identify discrepancies between pricing set on the item record, and pricing on Transactions.
3. Supply Planning
One of the biggest ways that an organization can mitigate risks associated with tariff uncertainty is through a more flexible supply chain. NetSuite offers various supply planning tools that can help you manage shocks to your supply chain in the short term or through longer term strategic planning strategies. Plus, other features such as the Supply Chain Control Tower can be leveraged for recording snapshots and what-if analysis for potential changes in your supply chain. At Racette, we have also worked with clients to help configure procurement strategies that maximize leverage with suppliers to help offset some of the increased costs, or other material requirements planning options that support shifts in suppliers or contract manufacturers.
4. Analytics
The value any ERP can provide an organization is visibility and data. Whether you want to test the waters with a slight increase in your product pricing to see the impact on sales units or find other opportunities for new sales, NetSuite provides all the tools you need to gain insights from real time data. Evaluating product margins on key items and exposing potential product SKUs with unfavorable margins can make a big difference towards ensuring both short and long term overall profitability. Additionally, NetSuite’s Analytics Warehouse tool provides the capabilities to not only house your NetSuite data, but also pull in data from other external sources to form a truly powerful analytical platform (no more master excel spreadsheets needed!).
5. Planning & Budgeting
Another enterprise-level tool Oracle introduced that is available to NetSuite Customers is the Planning and Budgeting add-on tool (NSPB). It is one thing for an organization to react real time to the tariff uncertainty, but organizations that update their financial plans based on expected impacts from increased costs from tariffs will be better positioned in the future to make informed decisions and communicate better with investors. Whether you are already leveraging NetSuite Planning and Budgeting or are interested in seeing how your organization might benefit from this fully integrated platform, Racette has the experts that can take your financial planning tools to the next level!
We know it is difficult for businesses to react to ever changing information that will directly adversely affect profitability and supply chain partnerships. At Racette Consulting, we understand how your business can use NetSuite tools to help keep your business ahead of the game and ready to face the uncertainty each step of the way.
Author: Ben Katerberg, VP of Operations
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