Oracle NetSuite gives companies fantastic enterprise resource planning (ERP) and cloud-based business tools to streamline business processes, accelerate growth, drive innovation, and remain competitive. But relying on NetSuite’s reporting and “saved searches”—basically a module that helps you build a custom spreadsheet with NetSuite data—can lead to endless loops of analysis that hold a business hostage.
NetSuite Saved Search: An Outdated Approach Requiring Lengthy Workarounds
NetSuite saved searches are reusable definitions that search a NetSuite environment based on specific criteria, parameters, filters, and formulas, providing users with subsets of NetSuite data that matter to them. At first glance, saved searches appear to be time-saving tools that provide quick access to such data subsets. But—while NetSuite saved search was a great innovation at the time it was introduced—it has not been able to keep up with today’s data analytics requirements.
Even savvy NetSuite users struggle to construct a good saved search: you have to start with the right saved search type and then navigate a myriad of field names, hunting and pecking for the right ones. NetSuite experts can go further—building in formulas and SQL queries, highlighting certain data, placing search results on user dashboards, and emailing results to users—but it’s still not an easy process.
That’s why NetSuite SuiteAnswers and the web are full of advice for using NetSuite saved searches “more effectively” and “optimizing” the way you create them. Some common suggestions regarding saved searches include:
- avoiding timeouts or datasets that are “too large” by limiting your data set within dates or other key criteria;
- avoiding the use of the “contains” condition, which can bog down the speed of the search;
- removing extra columns of data, so it takes less time for NetSuite to load the results; and
- scheduling searches that take a long time to process to run in the background then email the results to select recipients when complete.
In short, what these articles really are instructing you to do is use complicated workarounds that artificially narrow your data, which risks stripping your analysis of the details and fidelity needed to make well-informed business decisions.
And, perhaps more importantly, the analysis capabilities within NetSuite are insufficient, leading users to manually manipulate saved search data in non-NetSuite tools, such as Microsoft Excel.
Incorta Analytics: A Modern Platform for Easily Accessing, Integrating and Analyzing NetSuite Data
With Incorta, NetSuite users no longer have to accept the inherent limitations of saved searches as the best they can do when it comes to reporting and analytics for NetSuite data. Incorta lets organizations:
- light up all NetSuite data for real-time analytics in only a matter of hours;
- perform analytics on virtually live data—no more endless iterations of downloading static saved search data and having to constantly re-do Excel analysis;
- liberate analytics from two-level joins as restricted by NetSuite’s static saved searches, so users can explore trends using multi-dimensional analysis;
- quickly mash up NetSuite data with other sources to gain visibility across functional and system silos;
- easily extend current analytics to include predictive/prescriptive (machine learning) use cases; and
- seamlessly roll out NetSuite analytics with 100 percent built-in security.
Technical teams in particular value Incorta because it gives them:
- Faster access to and use of analytics for NetSuite. Pre-packaged reports, dashboards, and KPIs get users up and running quickly, and reduces reporting times from hours to just seconds without degrading the performance of other business applications.
- Access to all NetSuite data. Incorta can quickly load and update tens of millions of transactions, extending to all of your data including custom records, fields, and transactions.
- Flexibility in KPI/dashboard development and iteration. Incorta allows you to build and iterate reports with sophisticated analysis without having to reload NetSuite data, rebuild cubes, or engage in the cumbersome Extract Transform Load (ETL) process of traditional data warehouses.
- Up-to-the-minute business insights. Fast, easy analysis of data common to NetSuite applications—as well as data from other sources (Salesforce, ServiceNow, Marketo, other planning systems, etc.)—gives users up-to-the-minute insight.
- Streamlined security. There’s no need to maintain separate security policies for Incorta because it inherits the application user security configurations from NetSuite.
- Flexible deployment to the cloud or on-premises. A variety of options let organizations harness the power of the Incorta platform in the deployment manner they prefer.
Incorta unshackles business users from static, cumbersome saved searches and empowers them to have real-time conversations about data, with no advanced technical skills required. In addition, Incorta makes self-service business discovery and instantaneous access to insights on NetSuite data available to a much wider range of users—essentially anyone who can work with a dashboard.
With Incorta, NetSuite users no longer need to resign themselves to cumbersome workarounds and outdated approaches for analyzing data.
Are you ready to move forward with Incorta?
Find out more about how Incorta can analyze your NetSuite data—read the Multi-dimensional Analytics and Reporting Solutions for Oracle NetSuite solution sheet.