Some of the biggest manufacturing businesses are making the switch to Cloud ERP - are you planning on upgrading? NetSuite ERP’s suite of cloud-based products includes a variety of solutions for a variety of industries - including NetSuite for manufacturing. Keep reading to learn more about NetSuite ERP software modules for manufacturing, with modules for real-time data, resource planning, production processes, supply chain management, and more. 

Table of Contents:

1. NetSuite CRM
2. Engineering
3. Planning and Scheduling
4. Order Management
5. Supply Chain Management 
6. Production Control 
7. Service and Support 
8. Financial Management
9. Shop Floor Control
10. Quality Management 
11. Implementing NetSuite for Manufacturing

According to The Balance, the Manufacturing industry is forecast to increase faster than the general economy in the upcoming years. As countries are starting to realize that they need to protect their homegrown intellectual property, they’re doubling down on their efforts to manufacture products in-house. 

If you’re running a fast-growing business, you probably know that an Enterprise Resource Planning solution is the key to success. NetSuite ERP is the world’s number one ERP solution with tools and solutions for a variety of different industries.

You need a solution that can handle every aspect of your business, from warehouse management to inventory and financials. If you’ve been wondering what ERP solution is best for you, look no further.

NetSuite’s complete business solution is built to ensure that your manufacturing company is ready to take on long-term growth and expansion.

NetSuite for Manufacturing helps manufacturers automate key tasks, accelerate quote-to-cash cycles, improve visibility, inventory management, and productivity with a range of modules including CRM, HCM, eCommerce, and more. 

So if you’ve been debating about whether to go with NetSuite vs. Other ERPs, we’ve done the work for you. Keep reading to learn about the 10 best NetSuite ERP software manufacturing modules for your business. 

NetSuite ERP Software Manufacturing Modules: 

With a variety of modules and tools offered for manufacturing companies, NetSuite has everything you need. To get you started, we’re running you through the most important and impressive modules. 

1. NetSuite CRM

NetSuite CRM is a powerful Customer Relationship Management tool that gives NetSuite users a real-time, 360-degree view of all their customers, from one unified platform.

NetSuite CRM provides a seamless flow of information throughout the customer lifecycle, right from the moment someone becomes a lead through to opportunity, sales order, fulfillment, renewal, upsell, cross-sell, and support.

NetSuite CRM is a key module for all growing businesses with expanding client bases, and a long list of services and products, which makes it a key NetSuite ERP manufacturing module. 

NetSuite CRM features include:

• Lead Management: Track partner leads and referrals, analyze conversion rates and ROI by lead source, and more, within a single application.
• Forecasting: Get real-time sales forecasts and assess the amount of potential revenue that exists at each phase of the sales cycle.
• Sales Tracking and Order Management: Place and track orders,  gain full visibility into leads, orders and sales activities, and create custom reports.
• Case Management: Automate support case assignment, management, and escalation, quickly route, track, and respond to cases, and more.
• Real-time CRM Dashboards: Share and view real-time information from a customizable NetSuite dashboard for every role and department. 

2. Engineering

NetSuite’s Engineering Module helps improve product design and BOM management by ensuring that production engineering changes propagate end-to-end and are reflected in downstream BOMs, demand plans, and procurement orders. 

It also provides:

• Extended capabilities for inventory control tracking.
• Planning and costing of items in project-controlled environments.
• Flexible inventory costing methods.
• Streamlines team management with allocations of people with data, processes and business systems.

3. Planning and Scheduling

Proper planning is the key to any successful project. That’s why NetSuite for Manufacturing offers Planning and Scheduling as a key NetSuite ERP software manufacturing module. 

This feature allows users to automatically balance demand and supply, to ensure your inventory is in the right place at the right time.

On the scheduling front, it allows users to create realistic schedules using a real-time scheduling engine (both backwards and forwards) while offering:

• Flexible scheduling codes.
• Finite and infinite capacity scheduling with user-defined constraints.
• The ability to view your schedule using multiple graphs. 
• Drag-and-drop scheduling functionality.

4. Order Management

Order Management for Manufacturing easily improves order management by automatically transitioning any and all orders to shipping/logistics and account receivables, and fulfilling orders based on your global inventory availability and business rules.

This module also: 

• Supports multi-step picking, packing, and shipping. 
• Provides real-time visibility into your entire order management process.
• Provides data on orders, trends and order conversion rates, etc. 
• Integrates with carriers such as UPS, FedEx and USPS out-of-the-box.

5. Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management is a key NetSuite ERP software manufacturing module for synchronizing with suppliers and purchasing departments, and simplifying distribution resource planning, by ensuring that data flows from your inventory, to whoever needs it. 

The module boasts a list of features like:

• Global, real-time view of your inventory status and supply chain data, and key spend.
• Improves distribution resource planning by automatically suggesting and generating purchase orders and work orders, and transferring orders across multiple locations, when appropriate. 
• Integrates demand planning forecasts and required inventory levels based on historical data, sales forecasts, average trends, and seasonal fluctuations.
• Automatically maintains stock levels by creating restocking alerts and reordering forms.

6. Production Control

Seamlessly improve scheduling, work order management, and product quality with NetSuite’s Production Control module for Manufacturing businesses. Users can create, release, update and monitor work orders throughout the production process, all from one place. 

Features of Production Control include:

• Automatically create work orders from sales orders in make-to-order environments. 
• Trace lot and serial numbers by enabling both to be registered through purchasing receipts, inventory, shop floor control, and sales order fulfillment functions. 
• Simplify multi-level work order processing by enabling a single work order to control a multi-level assembly. 
• Access full production routing capabilities including operational steps, work centers, labor, overhead and materials.
• Provide critical information for inventory tracking by creating and maintaining a complete history of each product kit throughout its lifecycle.

7. Service and Support

Manufacturing companies can easily streamline case management, manage warranty returns and enable customer self-service with NetSuite Service and Support. 

NetSuite's integrated Customer Service Management solution provides a 360-degree view of customers in order to improve customer satisfaction, attract new customers and lower service costs.  Sales, support, service, and fulfillment departments can access important customer data in real-time, allowing them to provide better support while driving sales. 

Service and Support provide benefits like:

• Automated case management capabilities that assign support tickets to unique customer email addresses, including the ability to escalate issues based on customizable parameters. 
• Enables products to be returned to one of many locations, where available. 
• Provides lookup codes that automatically trigger return and repair processes.
• Offers a collection of online training resourcing, including training videos, webinars, and weekly bulletins.

8. Financial Management

Financials are a part of every company - so make sure you’re doing them right. Financial Management is a key NetSuite ERP software manufacturing module for enhancing intercompany accounting, costing and payment management.

Financial Management features include:

• Customizable dashboards that display accounts receivables, orders and accounts payable data. 
• Automatic report building, including income statements, balance sheets, consolidated reports, variance reports, and side-by-side comparisons.
• Ability to create an unlimited number of general ledger accounts, sub-accounts, and segments. 
• Streamline invoice creation by automatically calculating sales taxes, finance charges, and discount terms. 
• Manage and control the complete asset lifecycle across depreciating or non-depreciating assets, from creation to depreciation, revaluation and disposal
• Automate allocations, currency management tools and period locking for period-end closes.

9. Shop Floor Control

Get complete control of your shop floor with NetSuite Shop Floor Control. This feature delivers real-time updates from the shop floor via NetSuite's interactive tablet application and traditional barcoding. This helps manufacturers plan and record what, where, when, why and how your products are currently being manufactured.

Manage your shop floor with features like: 

• Real-time reporting functionalities deliver updates on the product manufacturing cycle, including what, where, why, and when.
• Access information anytime, anywhere from a  user-configurable tablet application.
• Issue materials, enter production, record downtime and identify quality issues as they happen.

10. Quality Management

Last but not least in our list of NetSuite ERP software manufacturing modules is NetSuite Quality Management. Ensure your products are always the highest quality with all the tools you need to define inspection plans, pass / fail criteria, collect results and monitor in real-time.

NetSuite's Quality Management helps your company deliver the highest quality products while minimizing manual labour. 

Key features of Quality Management include:

• Ability to define and maintain inspection plans.
• Collect in-process and incoming inspection results.
• Easily create and compare to pass/fail criteria for all manufactured products.
• Access integrated non-conformance reporting.

Implementing NetSuite for Manufacturing With GURUS Solutions

Are you ready to upgrade the way you manage your manufacturing business? Stop manually managing your products, and running around to collect information - with NetSuite, the information you need comes to you.
 
Now that you’ve seen all the NetSuite ERP software manufacturing modules available to you, it’s time to find out how you can get your company equipped with NetSuite. 
 
As a consecutive 5-star NetSuite Implementation Partner, with over a decade of ERP experience and over 21,000 NetSuite implementations under their belt, GURUS Solutions have become experts in their field. 
 
Having implemented, integrated, and customized NetSuite solutions for a variety of manufacturing companies, GURUS Solutions knows what it takes to help your business succeed. 
 

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