There are few things more spiritually defeating than opening NetSuite on a Monday morning and realizing you have to manually update 87 BOMs because a sweetener got too expensive again.
Unfortunately, that was real life for this flavor manufacturing client.
Every time an ingredient changed—because of pricing, sourcing issues, discontinuations, reformulations, or just the general reality of existing in a supply chain economy—their team had to create an entirely new item record and manually update every BOM attached to it.
Sometimes that meant touching 50–100+ records. One by one. By hand.
Which is fine if your favorite hobbies include:
- repetitive clicking
- low-grade operational anxiety
- wondering if you forgot something somewhere
- becoming emotionally attached to CSV imports
The “This Cannot Possibly Be The Best Way” Part
The challenge: Manual BOM updates were slowing down the entire operations process, like an inefficiency sundae with an operational drag cherry on top. And it wasn’t simply the amount of manual work but the mental overhead as well.
Production teams were spending meaningful chunks of time doing tedious ERP maintenance instead of actual higher-value production work. People started delaying updates because they knew another change was probably coming next week anyway. Some BOMs even stayed inaccurate permanently because fixing them was such a manual process.
And the larger the organization became, the more absurd the workflow started to feel.
Here’s the thing about manual workarounds: they're fine until they become a bigger barrier than the original problem they were meant to solve—especially in fast-moving manufacturing environments where time and order turnaround matter for business success.
Realizing this, our client needed a way to:
- Reduce manual effort
- Eliminate risky workarounds
- Improve operational inefficiency
- Speed up BOM revisions
- Create more scalable workflows inside NetSuite
And (most importantly) they needed a solution that fit within realistic timeline and budget constraints.
So They Called Anchor Group
The client showed us the workflow, pointed to the painful parts, and essentially said:
“How can we stop doing this forever?” Which, in all honestly, are our favorite kinds of meetings. After all, there's something deeply satisfying about solution-building yourself out of a problem before it has a chance to become next month's 5-alarm fire.
Our team found there was technically an alternate solution available, which was via CSV imports. But that approach came with enough risk to stress everyone out, where one bad import meant suddenly finding yourself spending an entire Thursday night manually cleaning ERP data while questioning why you didn't go to medical school like mom wanted.
So instead, we built a custom script solution directly inside NetSuite. This solution was safer, cleaner, more scalable, automated (.), and also came with significantly more guardrails against data disasters.
Plot Twist: The technical curveball
Halfway through the project, we hit a technical limitation: Certain aspects of BOM revisions weren’t directly scriptable using the original approach. They needed different script triggers to do what we needed it to do while fitting within their operations workflow.
This is usually the moment where bad implementation partners start saying things like: “Well, technically…” (we prefer not to do that.) Instead, the Anchor Group team pivoted and rebuilt the solution architecture, instead using workflow action scripts that could properly support the functionality the client needed.
By pivoting to a script centralized on workflow action instead of directly in the BOM, the team not only solved the issue at hand, but created a more elegant solution for the client, allowing the client to apply the script elsewhere in their system for future functional needs.
The End Results: Automated BOM component swapping inside NetSuite (aka: less clicking; more meaningful work.)
Here’s the thing about employees: they’re also real-life people. They have hopes and dreams and a desire to be part of something meaningful. And in creating this suitelet solution, we helped solve the client’s manual workflow problems and bring back time for meaningful work into their operations team’s day-to-day.
Instead of manually hunting through records every time an ingredient changed, the process became streamlined, scalable, and substantially less vulnerable to the fat fingers, forgotten clicks, and other general casualties of human error. Updating BOM components across the organization no longer required a scavenger hunt through NetSuite, giving employees more time to focus on meaningful work rather than the mundane blah blah of data entry.
By building an automated operations solution that allows for faster updates, the client also saw a significant reduction in operational bottleneck tied to BOM maintenance and "component substitution workflows” (NetSuite’s words not ours).
The impact included:
- Reduced manual ERP administration hours
- Faster BOM updates
- Improved consistency across operations
- Lower risk of human error
- Fewer workflow delays caused by pending revisions
- More scalable operations for future growth
Fewer manual workarounds, less operational friction, and reduced risk of human error meant the client also built more confidence into the NetSuite system overall. Which became the second biggest win for them, because (most significantly): the operations team got their time back. Which turns out to be very important when you hire smart people who like doing smart-person work.
One of Our Favorite Outcomes
After launch, the client’s internal NetSuite administrator who had worked alongside us and learned from us modeling what to do, started building additional Suitelets internally based on the one we implemented together. In other words, we consulted ourselves out of a job. Which—hear us out—is something we love seeing. Genuinely.
Our goal has never been to operate like Great Aunt Martha, guarding the secret ingredient to her lemon bars so nobody else's ever taste quite right. (Oddly specific. Also true.) Instead, we want our clients to hit that knowledge sweet spot where they understand what their systems are capable of, allowing us to solve bigger, more interesting problems together down the road.
Ironically, most teams still want our help anyway because, not shockingly, people are busy. But there’s a huge difference between clients who say, “we don’t understand this system,” and the ones who say, “we finally understand what’s possible now.”
That second group is way more effective.
Our final thoughts
Most organizations don’t realize how much operational energy gets quietly drained by repetitive ERP tasks until somebody finally removes them.
Like an iceberg, the manual workflows seem to technically function above the surface...but underneath the surface:
- Employees avoid touching certain processes
- Updates get delayed or ignored
- Workarounds stack on top of workarounds
- Confidence in the system erodes, one human error at a time
- Everyone starts compensating manually
- Other priorities stay in backburner purgatory and never get their flowers
This is usually the point where companies reach out to us—when the system is still crawling along, but the real-life people inside it are. So. Tired.
So, if your operations team is still spending large portions of their day manually maintaining workflows inside NetSuite, there’s a very good chance the process can be automated more intelligently.
And no—you don’t need to sit through a sales pitch disguised as a discovery call to make this happen. When you chat with us, you’ll talk to a REAL (all caps for emphasis) consultant. No business development rep or “solutions evangelist” (the horror.) and definitely not somebody who only just discovered ERP software 11 minutes ago and now wants to “hop on a quick call.”
We only have real, experienced, on-shore consultants who understand manufacturing workflows, operational scaling, automation strategy, and the strange emotional journey that is ERP optimization and implementation.
We may be biased, but we think you’ll really like us.
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