Day after day, NetSuite users face an onslaught of manual data entry, approvals, status updates, and more that take up valuable hours. According to Gartner, workers spend on average 20% of their time on repetitive tasks that provide little business value. Many companies fail to leverage one of NetSuite’s most powerful tools to eliminate these redundant processes – workflows.
Workflows act as a simple robot arm for your organization, proactively triggering actions based on business conditions without human effort. With no-code workflow builders in NetSuite and intelligent automation connectors, streamlining repetitive workflows has never been easier.
In this post, we will walk through the top 10 NetSuite workflows to consider automating for major time and cost savings.
1. New Customer Onboarding
Modern purchasing often begins with eCommerce-like self-service before sales rep involvement. Making new customer onboarding automated, digital, and self-serve does wonders for your sales velocity. Example workflows include:
- Account/Contact Creation – When a prospect submits a web form, automatically use the data to create matching accounts, contacts, and lead records in NetSuite. Alert sales reps a new lead is ready for follow-up.
- Credit Checks – Automatically run customer credit checks upon web form submission to accelerate deal quoting.
- Welcome Emails – Send personalized welcome emails to new customer contacts when their account is created.
2. Customer Renewals
Rather than relying on finance to remember when contracts are up for renewal, workflows can flag customers 30/60/90 days before term dates and notify the right sales reps and customer contacts. This prevents valuable accounts from churning due to forgotten renewals.
3. Approval Processes
Expense approvals, marketing requests, PTO requests, invoice approvals – sound familiar? Minimize email chains asking “Can I buy this?” with workflows automatically routing different spend requests to the right managers/executives for Yay or Nay decisions, based on spend amount rules.
4. Order Processing
Don’t let new sales orders pile up in limbo without action. Trigger order validation, fulfillment creation, inventory decrement, and more based on order status changes like:
- New → In Review – start financial review
- In Review → Approved – decrement inventory, create fulfillment
- Fulfilled → Delivered – email tracking info to customer
And keep orders moving along through each step automatically.
5. Inventory Management
Avoid painful monthly inventory counts. Embed barcoding/scanning apps to continually sync stock levels. Then trigger purchase orders to preferred vendors automatically when certain inventory items dip below predefined thresholds.
6. Late Payments Collections
Don’t let AR team resources get sucked up chasing late customer invoices. Workflows can automatically:
- Send invoice copy reminders to customers on due date
- Assess late fees after X days overdue
- Send to collections agency after Y days overdue
With custom criteria tailored to your collections process.
7. Vendor Onboarding
Just like enhancing new customer experience, the vendor onboarding process is ripe for automation. Streamline accounts payable with workflows to handle vendor self-registration, tax documents collection, purchase limits assignment, and more with no AP data entry needed.
8. Financial Processes
Accounting teams navigate endless monthly close tasks ripe for workflow automation:
- Send outstanding receipts requests on last day of month
- Reconcile unmatched bank/CC statements after import
- Calculate late fees on past due invoices
- Close purchase orders > 60 days old
- …and so much more
9. Employee Onboarding
The average new hire onboarding takes 2 months before full productivity. Slim down this timeline and free up HR capacity to focus on more strategic initiatives. Use workflows to automatically:
- Send welcome new hire communications
- Schedule first week orientation sessions
- Assign free online training courses
- Request laptop/software credentials after start date
- Trigger 30/60/90 day checkins with manager
10. Event Management
Bring order to the chaos of event project management. Workflows can connect disparate tasks like venue requests/deposits, sponsorships, attendee registration, speakers, etc. on a preset timeline leading up to the event date.
Have a sales booth at a trade show coming up? Workflows can automatically request printable collateral from marketing 6 weeks out then order lead scanner rentals 2 weeks out to prevent last minute chaos!
Bonus: Alerts & Notifications
Sometimes you don’t need automated process triggers, but alerts on certain conditions are still invaluable. Common use cases include:
- Sales reps notified when their opportunities approach close dates
- Account managers messaged when their customer cases aren’t resolved quickly
- Department heads alerted on budget overages
- Executive team warned of abnormal financial KPI results
Proactively finding workflow opportunities takes some initial discovery legwork. But once built, your entire organization benefits from unlocked productivity and capacity to focus on more rewarding initiatives.
Why Choose SuiteRep for Your Workflow Automations?
With 200+ successful NetSuite implementations under our belt, SuiteRep has the production experience to expose automation potential within YOUR unique business processes. Too often we find companies investing in the NetSuite platform barely scratch the surface of built-in workflow tools that offer tremendous efficiency gains once configured to your needs.
As a 5 Star NetSuite partner with a focus purely on NetSuite rather than disparate bolt-on apps, our consultants have the breadth of platform expertise combined with manufacturing and distribution domain experience to deliver workflow solutions that become a competitive advantage.
Want to evaluate workflow automation opportunities within your organization? Let’s explore where redundancies exist that technology can eliminate!
