3 Things you can do RIGHT NOW in NetSuite to Save Time

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Caleb Schmitz, CRO at Anchor Group
Michael Mueller, eCommerce Account Executive at Anchor Group
Anchor Group (Company Page)

Podcast Transcript:

Cleaned Transcript:

Michael (00:00)

Hey everybody, thank you for joining the Anchor Group podcast. In today's episode, we're going to be focusing on NetSuite 2026, how to start the year off right. Going into a new year, you want to make sure you're starting off the year on the right foot with all your software, all your business processes. So we're going to speak to Caleb, who's an expert in the NetSuite arena to understand what should you be doing in NetSuite to make sure that it is primed and ready to go for a great year in 2026.

Caleb, thanks for joining the podcast today. I'm excited to hear what your thoughts are on getting NetSuite ready to go very strong into 2026.

Caleb (01:12)

One of my first things that I think people should be doing is to do a bit of an audit and interview each of their key process stakeholders. A lot of times key process stakeholders just get so slammed and so busy that they can't take a moment to pause and think about how things could be better. By having that dedicated time—it's something that we do sometimes where we have a dedicated session where we're really trying to understand where some pain points are and challenge them. So even if a client doesn't have time to interview their own team, we often will take that role too.

But I would say if you do have an internal IT team member or leader, this is a great way to understand where there are actually pain points that these key stakeholders often don't have time to even analyze and think through. What are the problems in the first place? What are the points that are creating friction? Only when there is a fire drill do they really pop up and make you aware of them.

So if you take a moment to be intentional, to go process by process, click by click on each one of those key process areas with your key stakeholders, you'll be able to interview and understand some of the things that are really a pain for them to deal with. If you just go through and say, "Hey, we're just going to process a sales order," or "What is the purchase order process?" and just click through it—sometimes just clicking through it together, each of the steps will help draw more awareness. "What if we did this a little bit differently? Hey, I saw that you just populated that field there. How many times are you populating that?" "About every 30% of the sales orders we're populating that." "Well, what if we just auto-populated it? Would that help save one more click 30% of the time?"

These are things you can interview your key stakeholders and challenge them on. They may just not be self-aware because they've been in the motions and really in the weeds for so long. It can be nice to have that outside perspective from a consultant or from a different business leader to challenge them and say, "Let's make that better."

Going into 2026, there are so many inefficiencies that people have, and they can really be solved with simple automations—not hard ones, nothing like crazy magic. It's just simple automations. Being intentional about discovering them in the first place is key. So that's the number one thing I would say going into 2026 that people should be doing. It'll open up other larger problems too, but you can make a lot of difference with solving small problems.

Michael (03:52)

Caleb, I know we talked to a lot of companies that use NetSuite, and oftentimes companies that have used NetSuite for three years, five years, or more—a lot of times their NetSuite environment can just kind of turn into a Frankenstein where the data gets really messy, really dirty, and things aren't optimized. They don't work as well as they should. So I totally understand how taking some time and being very intentional—it's probably a thousand other things we could be doing—but taking time to be intentional and spend that time focusing on the internal processes is totally worth it in the long run because then you aren't dealing with a messy infrastructure later down the road.

Caleb (04:31)

And what you'll notice is when you have data that is—there's a common phrase, garbage in, garbage out. But one thing is you can control the garbage in. If you're realizing your garbage out of your data is creating bad reports, the best way to help support the garbage in is one, the easiest and lowest cost, just training people. But there's human error from that, getting that data in. And automation really can help with how to control your data and the input of that data in the first place. That is a great way to start—by adjusting those processes.

Michael (05:07)

So Caleb, if adjusting processes and taking time to understand that is the most important thing for running NetSuite in 2026 and setting up for a great new year, what would you say is the second most important thing companies should be doing to set up for 2026?

Caleb (05:24)

They also need to be starting to think about the next big initiative that they're going to be working on. A lot of times that means additional modules from NetSuite, even some third-party solutions. Customer portals are a great example of that. Invoicing, handling your payment flow better. And what will help you discover what the best big project is for you is that first step of interviewing each of your key stakeholders.

You may be able to do some quick wins with those smaller, simple enhancements to automation. And then there could be discovering something bigger at the same time. That's going to lead you to probably wanting to implement another module with NetSuite on top of that, or integrate additional software to be able to have more data for a better output of reporting.

I'll take an example for us internally. We use NetSuite internally. Last year, my big initiative was to really build out our CRM for the sales team and our advanced PDF templates—the way we build estimates, our item structure, all of our fields, our ordering of those fields, different checklists, all of this. It's really been built out where I did an iteration of improvement in December and there's like two small field tweaks. It was almost nothing, which was great. That's at a good spot.

Now my next one—I realized that we want to track more on the marketing side, the MQLs, the marketing qualified leads and the SQLs. So really my personal focus as an admin here for our CRM component is going to be on the marketing infrastructure, tracking marketing key events and going through each one of those phases.

But as part of that, I realized that I need our lead data to come into NetSuite faster than what it is right now. There's enough volume where it makes sense for us to integrate our forms—a lot more of our forms—into NetSuite. So one of the first initiatives that I already drafted requirements for our team to develop as soon as they stop being busy is integrating a form, our online form, into NetSuite. We always reply within like two to five minutes on our website to people that reach out.

But I also want to be able to capture more data that is accessible via integration, like Google Analytics data—the first page and the last page and all the different sessions that user is on. Because if you don't know about this, I could see every single person and their email that visits the website. I know it's kind of scary, but that is all websites. If that does scare you, all websites are doing that. But I want to take that data—there's all this data accessible to me that I want to be able to integrate into NetSuite.

So in this example, what I'm trying to illustrate is that integrations can help give you additional data that you maybe don't normally have access to, to give you a fuller picture of a customer journey. That could be on your procurement side, on your order management side, on your CRM side, and marketing. All of these areas create a better view of your customer throughout the whole journey. Integrations can really help with that. I would say number two is integrations—getting more quality data that is automatically synced to give you a holistic view of your customer.

Michael (08:59)

I do want to highlight something, Caleb, that you mentioned, and that is the CRM function in NetSuite. A lot of times from the companies that I speak with, that seems to be somewhat of an overlooked function that NetSuite has. And as you've just explained, you can really customize that to however you need to. It's exciting to hear that here at Anchor Group, this is something that we're going to be diving more into in the year of 2026. And there's a direct correlation between how we manage those and revenue and profit coming in the door for the company.

I think that's a wonderful thought process that other companies can take in for maximizing NetSuite in 2026. So Caleb, as we start to wrap things up, let's think of one more thing. If you had to say—we've got one, we've got two—what would be a third way that companies should be working in NetSuite to really set it up for success in 2026?

Caleb (09:52)

The third one would be an audit of time. I talked in that first one really about auditing your processes, seeing what they're doing. But part of that is auditing their time. The first person that I would start with would be sales reps—see if there are sales reps manually entering sales orders, like inside sales reps. Then second, people in the customer service team, people who are taking customer service calls. "Where is my order? When is it going to be shipped? Is the work order done?" And maybe if you're manufacturing, "When is that work order going to be complete?"

All of these take a surprisingly large amount of time to answer—all these customer questions that are data that just exists in the ERP to begin with. And the third one would be customer portals. I've consistently seen that as an area of great improvement for a lot of companies, just by giving more self-service functionality to the ERP data.

I'd say one of them would be being able to just see the status of a work order—not only just the status of the sales order itself, but passing work order information onto the sales order so it's visible in the customer portal. We do lots of scenarios like that. Adding cashier or self-service to your payments—those would be another way to do it. Paying invoices and being able to order.

There's a lot of time spent by sales reps manually plugging in orders. And it's not as simple as just saying, "Hey, this is now available for you." The next step after that, that you should prepare for after you go live with a customer portal—phase one should be designing an incentive structure to incentivize your internal team to coach those customers to begin using it in the first place.

That second piece—if you already have a customer portal, you really should start designing an incentive to help educate your customers to use it. It can be incentive for your customers, but what's usually missing—people do like a "get 5% off your next online order" or something like that. That is not enough for all customers because most of the customers, it's not their personal money. They're just an employee.

Really, you should be incentivizing your own internal staff—that sales rep, that customer service team—by helping give them maybe some type of reward to help coach those customers to start using the customer portal in the first place. So those three primary areas are what I would start with in 2026.

Michael (12:19)

I do want to call something out here because in a short amount of time, in about 10 minutes, we've gone through quite a few things that companies really should be doing as best practice in NetSuite rolling into the new year. And here's the catch—that might feel kind of burdensome and feel like a lot for some companies, especially if you don't have a very large internal team. If you've got a large internal team and you can shift some people's time around to accomplish these three things that we've outlined here, wonderful.

But if you don't, these are still best practices, they're still very valuable. And that's where leaning on a consultant can be helpful. That's where Anchor Group could come in. So if you're sitting there listening to this and you're thinking, "No way do we have the time to do those three things," well, then it might be worth having a conversation with us. We'd be happy to help. These are things that our team specializes in. And that's really a way that you can really be prepared for 2026.

Caleb, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the three things that companies should be prioritizing in NetSuite in 2026. I think there's a lot of good advice and expertise in those three suggestions. So thank you.

Caleb (13:30)

It'll be a great year. I think people can really make a lot of progress with optimizing their NetSuite environments going into 2026. And I'm excited to see all the stuff that we do for our clients too. Every time our team delivers stuff, it just wows me—some of the things that they've been delivering, constantly delivering that delight. So I love it. Thanks, Michael. Appreciate it. And we'll jump on the next podcast very soon.

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