NetSuite SuiteAnalytics: Listen and Learn

The NetSuite Podcast

Find out more about NetSuite LCS and check out a list of upcoming events and available courses: https://bit.ly/3Cypwbz NetSuite Principal Education Consultant Mark Gildea from the Learning Cloud Support (LCS) team goes deep on how NetSuite analytics and reporting work and how customers can get the most out of them for the second episode in our Listen & Learn series. Mark touches on who will benefit from a greater understanding of NetSuite SuiteAnalytics [3:34] before breaking down the different ways to query data in NetSuite [5:12], including saved searches, reports, and workbooks [7:08]. If you’re a beginner, Mark provides a few suggestions on how you can up your skills when it comes to NetSuite reporting [9:59]. He then shares SuiteAnalytics use cases where he’s seen customers find success [15:21] and how these insights can be valuable to employees across the business [18:25]. From there, the NetSuite expert shares more about live classes from LCS [19:29] and additional training sessions that come with the LCS Company Pass [25:38]. Like what you learned? Subscribe Now! http://bit.ly/NetSuiteYouTube Follow Us Here: Mark Gildea: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-v-gildea/ Oracle NetSuite LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/NetSuiteLI Facebook: http://bit.ly/NetSuiteFB Instagram: http://bit.ly/NetSuiteIG Twitter: http://bit.ly/NetSuiteTW #NetSuiteAnalytics #SuiteAnalytics #NetSuiteReports #NetSuite #NetSuiteERP -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;04;07 - 00;00;21;17 Hey, SuiteListeners, welcome to The NetSuite Podcast. I'm Ian McCue, a cohost of this podcast, and today I'm excited to continue our Listen and Learn series. We kicked off this podcast series earlier this year with the goal of giving customers useful tips and tricks that will help them get more out of NetSuite, For part two of the series, 00;00;21;18 - 00;00;43;05 we're talking NetSuite Analytics with Mark Gildea, a principal education consultant on NetSuite’s Learning Cloud Support or LCS team. Mark describes the differences between NetSuite reports, saved searches, workbooks, and NetSuite Analytics Warehouse and the role each plays in giving stakeholders across your business the insights they need. He shares useful background information for beginners on how these tools work, 00;00;43;07 - 00;01;03;04 then dives into how you can identify the right tool for the job and specific use cases that have driven eye-opening takeaways for customers he's worked with. Mark also walks through the resources available for NetSuite users to deepen their expertise. That spans self-service training through MyLearn, a number of live events, and personalized training sessions with education consultants such as Mark. 00;01;03;06 - 00;01;26;29 If you're a NetSuite customer looking to take advantage of all the reporting analytics capabilities in NetSuite, this is the episode for you, and it's coming up next. You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. 00;01;27;02 - 00;01;40;27 We’ll also feature customer growth stories, discussing the ups and downs of running a company and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale. 00;01;41;00 - 00;02;08;08 So to start out, Mark, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at NetSuite? Absolutely. As you said, my name is Mark Gildea, and I'm based here in Miami, Florida. I've been at NetSuite for three years now, and I'm a senior education consultant. And in addition to that, I lead a team of some analytics experts who deliver live event webinars. 00;02;08;08 - 00;02;31;01 And then I also participate in what we call Learning Labs that we deliver at various cities around the country. And so you're part of NetSuite Education Services and the Learning Cloud Support or LCS team. Could you remind our listeners about what your team does? Absolutely. First, probably want to know what LCS is—it's Learning Cloud Support 00;02;31;03 - 00;03;02;24 and what we do is we support what's called the LCS company Pass. And there are two, there's the standard and the premium. And then we also have what we call LCS live events or webinars. We support event packs, we also create videos, student guides, we do quick reference guides. And then also we have some advising sessions that we deliver that support the online training and what we call MyLearn. 00;03;02;26 - 00;03;40;20 And can you share a bit more about what topic you're going to be covering today on the podcast? Absolutely. Analytics, without question. It's my favorite thing that I deliver and analytics does incorporate different topics. So there are reports, there are saved searches, workbooks, and then this brand new edition called NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, also known as NSAW. And who do you think will kind of benefit the most from today's topic and from this conversation about analytics? 00;03;40;23 - 00;04;10;24 I would say the ultimate goal for our customers is to gain insights into their business. So I'd say, for example, a sales manager, obviously they want to know how well their sales reps are performing, maybe even where they're performing the best. You know, you got your project managers who are interested in how much did we sell the most of, the least of, what are the most profitable items. You can imagine 00;04;10;27 - 00;04;38;14 a warehouse manager needs analytics to understand how they’re processing their incoming, you know, their purchase orders or what's going out, those sales orders. Maybe have a production manager who needs to know how well your processes are running. And obviously the C-suite, because you need to know where you are, right, in order to make a plan of where you want to arrive, sort of that first step. 00;04;38;17 - 00;05;08;19 So I would say anybody in any company that relies on data to make informed decisions, and I don't think it means just managers. There are certainly sales reps that want to know what they're doing best so they can find out what they can exploit to do even better. Yeah, absolutely. It makes a lot of sense as we, you know, talk about data-driven decisions and people, you know, using data to kind of guide these key decisions, 00;05;08;19 - 00;05;32;06 so definitely see how it could be useful for really anyone in the company. How would you describe Mark kind of the differences among the different ways you can query data in NetSuite? And when might someone use one of those options over another? Great question, and absolutely a question that I hear from my clients. So let's kind of break it up into different products. 00;05;32;06 - 00;06;00;14 First, let's talk about so searches and reports. Now, those two modalities--and both of those are they're creating SQL for us, they’re interfaces that create SQL for us--and it's important to understand that they are accessing different datasets. But what they do is they give us real-time data that we can use to create these in-depth financial statements. 00;06;00;14 - 00;06;25;05 Our reports are really good at creating those statements, like income statement and balance sheet. They can also be set up to send alerts, for example, with saved searches. If you get a brand new customer in your sales queue, you can get an email. You can also set up a schedule to send out any of the financial reports quarterly, maybe to the CEO. 00;06;25;12 - 00;06;50;10 However, they can only--there's a little drawback--we can say that they can only join data by one level. So what does that mean? What that means is you can imagine you're doing a query on the customer record and the customer record happens to be attached to the transaction record. So I could query, let's say, the sales orders of the customer. 00;06;50;12 - 00;07;20;24 And then you've got that sales order that has a link to the item record and you can get that data for the item name, let's say, or the purchase price. Now in saved searches and reports, you can't make that double job to go from customer to transaction to item. And that's where SuiteAnalytics Workbooks comes into play. This particular modality has the benefit of what we call an infinite join. 00;07;20;27 - 00;07;56;20 So if you know databases, it's just that there to join datasets, so you can skip and you can combine data from disparate sources. Also with workbooks, you have the option of creating pivot tables and you can put those pivot tables on your dashboard, and that's a visualization that isn't available in either searches or reports. Now, reports can expand by levels, but it doesn't necessarily have that pivot and it also offers you different types of charts. 00;07;56;22 - 00;08;22;23 Now, that's where this new product comes into play. So we've had connectors for a long time, where you can connect from outside data sources to NetSuite. But then we have this NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, this is another separate product. The other three I mentioned come with everybody’s instance, everybody has access to reports, searches, and workbooks. NSAW is separate. 00;08;22;24 - 00;08;47;20 Now this is sort of workbooks on steroids because the visualizations that you can get from this product are things I've never even heard of. So you can imagine, you've got things called scatter plots, maps--of course I know what maps are--and sunburst charts. And not only does it connect it to other data sources, but many more than just a connector. 00;08;47;22 - 00;09;15;05 And it does one additional thing. It can maintain historical data. So you can imagine, you have companies buying other companies and changing the name. Typically, you would lose that continuity, but with NSAW, it will maintain that continuity all in one visualization and one, let's say canvas. Now, that comes to gosh Mark, that's a lot of information and a lot of querying methods. 00;09;15;05 - 00;09;44;00 Well, how do I know which one I should choose? That's one of the things that I get asked quite often. So the way that I would answer that question is to say if it's visualization and you're looking to do a stacked column or a stacked bar or area chart, then a workbook is what you're going to use. You can do with reports, but only those that can be made into snapshots, 00;09;44;07 - 00;10;05;01 and then you're limited to only an area, a line, a bar, a column, and a pie chart. And you can't stack any of that. And saved searches have the fewest visualizations, meaning it just has one--a column chart. So Mark, analytics can seem a little bit intimidating to a lot of people that maybe aren't as well-versed in this stuff. 00;10;05;03 - 00;10;31;12 What do you suggest we kind of start to, as we start to figure out, you know, how can we learn about these topics and how they apply to NetSuite? Great question. So those LCS Company Pass subscribers, they can access a variety of different training from MyLearn. And in MyLearn we have Learning Paths, and those are typically 4 to 11 hours. 00;10;31;12 - 00;11;01;19 Then we have courses, which are in chunks of about maybe an hour, hour and a half. And the same thing goes for a series that we call “How Do I?” So it's easy to access when you're on your home page in MyLearn, there's a big tile there or a big section there that has listing of those “How Do I? Courses, and those start from 5 minutes to I think an hour and 10 minutes. 00;11;01;22 - 00;11;30;18 So little chunks of knowledge. Then you also, right through MyLearn, and there's a tile that says “Live events.” You click on there and you've got access to all of these webinars that we deliver. Every single week, every day of the week, there's some live event webinar going on. Now specifically for saved searches, we do have well saved searches and workbooks, 00;11;30;18 - 00;12;06;00 that's every Wednesday. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, that's brand new and that is every other Monday. And then reports we have a live webinar every Tuesday and those are delivered by education consultants such as myself. And you also will learn things that you wouldn't even find in SuiteAnswers or Help or not even in Google. We also do these Learning Labs that have workshops and those are all over the country, and then event packs. 00;12;06;02 - 00;12;27;27 Awesome. Well, lots of great options there for people to learn more and kind of build these skills. As we think about analytics, what are some of the challenges beginners face in basically getting the analytics or the information they need from NetSuite? Well, one of them we went over earlier and that's when we were talking about, you know, how do I know which modality to use? 00;12;28;00 - 00;13;08;27 So that brings me to a really important point. And the biggest challenge for new analytics users is understanding their data, their records, and how those records are linked together. Understanding how they can find the label of the field, because that's going to be their biggest challenge. And then, if they know and they go to my live events, as they learn all of those little tips and tricks on how to locate the field and display that information. 00;13;09;00 - 00;13;31;11 And the next thing to consider, we were talking about which modality to use, here's a big one to consider now that we're talking about understanding your data and how it links up. So, for example, you could go to a customer record in NetSuite and you can go to the financials subtab and you could see the AR aging. 00;13;31;11 - 00;14;06;05 It's going to tell you how many times the customer was late 0 to 30 days, 31 to 60, etc. and you'll see that each one has a label, but then when you go to do a saved search, you get this message that says "error, field not found.” So we all know, or maybe you don't know, but there are standard AR aging reports that we have available, and those all pull in using the reports modality, all of that AR information. 00;14;06;05 - 00;14;29;20 If we wanted to do that in a saved search, we would have to create a formula to do it. It could be done, but it's not as easy as just selecting a field. So, what does that mean Mark? It means that if you can't--because we mentioned earlier that reports have a data source that's separate from saved searches, that again is separate for workbooks-- 00;14;29;22 - 00;14;53;27 so just because the record, and in this case the customer record, has the field, doesn't mean that each modality can pull that data in. That is a major consideration is which one can pull in the data. So sometimes it's, “Well I can only pull it in using a report,” so you've got your answer: it would be a report. Yeah 00;14;53;27 - 00;15;18;15 that's great background to kind of know before you or as you maybe kind of dig into some of this stuff. NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud financial system, is everything you need to grow all in one place: financials, inventory, HR and more. Make better decisions faster so you can do more and spend less. See how at NetSuite.com/pod. 00;15;18;17 - 00;15;41;29 What are some of the other reports, searches, and workbooks in that with that you've found clients to find useful? Well, let's break it down. Let's start first with reports. So in reports we have a lot of great out-of-the-box reports, but all of them are customizable. So it's easy to just use those as, let's say, a template. 00;15;42;01 - 00;16;03;22 And one of the cool things that you could do with reports is, we’re all interested in comparing ourselves over time. We want to know not just what we did maybe by week, month, quarter, and year--all of that is preprogramed in reports, by the way. We can customize it, so we can say, you know what, I want to know sales today, 00;16;03;29 - 00;16;28;25 I want to know yesterday, I want to know this week and last week, and I want it relative to today. Well you can do that in reports and you can also do it our fixed, for example, relative to the date that you have the report filtered for. So you have the two options, relative to today or relative to a report date. You can do the same thing with matrix saved searches. 00;16;28;27 - 00;17;00;15 So those are also easily set up to make comparisons relative to today or in specific time periods. So you can imagine, you know, you could do sales. So a list of your, let's say your sales reps and how many sales orders they had last week, how many sales orders they had this week, how many they had 30 days ago, 60 days, 90 days. Or it could be fixed time, it could be quarter one, quarter two, quarter three quarter four. Or months, 00;17;00;15 - 00;17;31;01 right? You can even figure out, what day of the week are they selling the most. So you can even do it by day of the week. So you can get a lot of information using that matrix feature. And the same thing goes with workbooks. Now you got the ability to do a pivot table so, you know, reports you can expand level by level and the saved search, you can have that summary view and a detailed view. For workbooks, you get the pivot table, 00;17;31;05 - 00;18;07;02 so you got those little collapsible fields. So just imagine you got classification for the industry type and sales rep. So you could take all of that, you could pivot on the industry type, and you can expand and collapse that, and then you could put a subtotal and you don't have that ability to do in the matrix saved searches. And you can subdivide your columns, just like I mentioned for reports and matrix searches, but you can't choose relative time. 00;18;07;04 - 00;18;28;07 So it would be this quarter, last quarter, this month, last month, you get the picture. Yeah, that's great. It sounds like you can kind of be as big picture and as broad or as narrow as you want and really just get exactly the information you're looking for depending on what that is. Precisely. So it's easy to imagine, right, how customers could benefit from NetSuite Analytics, 00;18;28;07 - 00;18;56;12 but how have you seen all these customers that you work with benefit from all these awesome capabilities that you've been describing? Well, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, it's incredibly important to anybody who needs data to drive their decision-making. So your C-level is obviously going to benefit from understanding, you know, trends because we just mentioned, you know, comparing sales over time, for example. 00;18;56;12 - 00;19;24;08 So you can see if the trend is your friend. You could see where or what items are selling the most and where they're selling the most. So sales managers, of course, they're interested in knowing how well they're selling, am I making my goal, and certainly their direct reports are looking for that information as well. And then you've got, you know, production, not only the production manager, but those people who are being evaluated, 00;19;24;08 - 00;19;45;04 they want to understand how well they're doing. And I wanted to dig in a little bit to some of the other ways that our customers can learn about the analytics functionality in NetSuite. So you mentioned earlier that during the live events that LCS does, you teach things that aren't available through MyLearn or SuiteAnswers? Could you elaborate on that a little bit? 00;19;45;06 - 00;20;09;27 I'd be happy to. Every year we have we have our regular cadence as I mentioned earlier, for the saved searches every Wednesday and we deliver a different topic. Well, the fourth Wednesday of every month we deliver something new in saved searches. So let me give you two examples of two live events that I delivered earlier this year. 00;20;10;02 - 00;20;34;28 In fact, I delivered one of them just today, so it's fresh in my mind, right. The first one would be running totals. So there's a SQL code that you can use to calculate running totals. So what does that mean, Mark? Who's going to find that important? Well, I would say in terms of accountants, you can look at your GL accounts just like you can in reports and you can see the running totals. 00;20;34;28 - 00;20;55;14 You can create a SQL code to display that in a saved search and then put that on your home dashboard. And the same thing applies with the bank accounts, because that's typically something that you would see if you pulled open your bank statement, it generally has that running total. And then something that you're not going to find in SuiteAnswers, 00;20;55;16 - 00;21;24;01 and I tried Googling it and I couldn't find a NetSuite answer to that. And then that brings me to the next one. And this is taking people's HTML skills to the next level. And it was showing how to create borders, buttons, and hyperlinks. So what it was is we can create a hyperlink that can, with a click, open in a pop-up window. 00;21;24;04 - 00;22;05;09 Now, if you Google, can you create a pop-up window in NetSuite, every place tells you you can’t. However, you can, and I have the code, and I give that to the participants so that they can copy and paste it and create a template. And as I mentioned, well, what are you going to do with borders and buttons? Well we can make that hyperlink look really cool and we can make a little emoji, let's say, to pop open an email template, and we can create it to look like a button, and then we can indicate borders around that button. And we can even put images so that when you click on an image, it'll 00;22;05;09 - 00;22;32;04 create a pop-up. Another thing that we went over, and it's something that people think that you can't do, which is have a saved search reference another saved search. So I show the audience how to create a hyperlink that when you click it, it will open another saved search. So imagine I created an item saved search, and I wanted to see all of the transaction on that item. 00;22;32;06 - 00;22;54;04 Well, if I just do a saved search, it's going to be so busy with every single line item for every single sales order. So, in order to avoid that, I can create a link that when the end user clicks it, it will launch a transaction saved search and filter for the name of the item that I clicked on that line. 00;22;54;06 - 00;23;13;14 And last is imagine I've got the product manager and he's like, oh we're out of this because, you know, I can look at this saved search and it tells me that I only have three available and I know that I need more. Well we can create a link that when you click it, it's going to open up a pop-up window. 00;23;13;17 - 00;23;37;10 , it is going to reference a template, and it's going to pull the primary contact of the primary vendor on that item record. So it's going to do all that work for you. And if you know anything about templates in NetSuite, that's going to prefill the name of the vendor for you and even your email signature. So you get all of that at the click of a button, 00;23;37;17 - 00;24;07;02 you learn that in this live event, and this is something that you're not going to find anywhere. Yeah, that's very cool stuff. Are these classes kind of structured around your experience level or your familiarity with NetSuite so people can kind of figure out what might be right for them? For all of the live events, there's a description that lets you know, for example, for that one, it was an advanced HTML. But it honestly was, I think, beneficial to anybody because once you have the code, it's really a template, 00;24;07;04 - 00;24;33;28 so you don't maybe need to know the, what does that "a” mean? Is that an anchor tag? Is that href? What is that, a hypertext reference? It doesn't matter if you know all that good stuff if you come away with a template. So even though it probably is more advanced than some people might have, I think it's definitely something that people found beneficial and took something away. 00;24;34;00 - 00;24;52;29 And you don't know what you don't know, right? So at least now they know it exists that you can do something, because they've been Googling it and finding out, well, you can’t, but you can--you just got to look me up. So are these live events only offered in English, or can people see them in other languages as well? 00;24;53;02 - 00;25;26;01 Great question. I do speak Spanish and I deliver the analytics in Spanish. We have only three of the 124 that we have in English. We're expanding, so now we have three, but that's planning to be expanded. We're up to 18 in Portuguese. We finally finished our "basic usability” or introduction to NetSuite. We've got in French, German, and simplified Chinese, and they just added, as I'm looking, they just added one more to the German. 00;25;26;01 - 00;25;47;08 So continue looking, because you can filter by language, and you'll see month by month those are going to be increasing because our team is working on that. Great question. You also noted that the LCS Company Pass comes with advising sessions. How can those kind of be used to support these analytics efforts that the companies might have going on? 00;25;47;10 - 00;26;12;14 You just asked the right question at the right time because we were just talking, you know, what happens if, let's say I can't attend those live events because that border button and hyperlink, that's done for the year. So what can I do? Well, we’ve got two types of passes I mentioned, standard and premium. So standard gets four advising sessions and premium gets six per year for the subscription. 00;26;12;17 - 00;26;37;25 So you could say, oh, my education consultant is Mark. You could say, you know what Mark, I missed that webinar that you gave, can we schedule something? The answer is yes. That takes place from a demo environment, and that supports MyLearn training. So I set it up, and personally I will set it up as a workshop because let's be real, 00;26;37;25 - 00;27;03;19 you didn't learn NetSuite by watching. So obviously my audience isn't going to learn anything by just watching me. So I give them the option because they, as LCS Company passholders, can access the exact same demo account that I'm using, so I have exercises for them to do. So I'll do a demo of, let's say, how to do a case expression, and then I'll have an exercise for them to do. 00;27;03;22 - 00;27;29;00 Now it takes place in a demo account and it can't take place in the customer's environment, we do have event packs for that. So Mark, you mentioned event packs there. Can you tell me a little bit more about the event packs and what they offer? I'm happy to. Event packs are sold in groups of four, each event can be up to 2 hours, 00;27;29;02 - 00;28;04;11 we have an hour and a half of delivery and 20 minutes built in for questions, and you can have up to 15 participants. Now, one thing I do have to mention is they cannot be recorded. But, you can use an event pack to have a professional video created. You can also use an event pack and you can talk to your education consultant to see how many events are consumed and how many that equals to how many reference guides or how many videos. 00;28;04;13 - 00;28;28;04 But yes, they can be used to create videos and quick reference guides, and we also do onsite. So if they purchase at least two, one pack for each day, we'll go onsite and deliver right there in their premises. Something else you mentioned are Learning Labs. Where can customers find out where and when these Learning Labs are going to be held? 00;28;28;06 - 00;28;50;15 Such a great question because they are free to all of the LCS Company passholders and even to people we call prospects, people who are interested in NetSuite and they're attending to see, you know, what's going on. And it's so easy to get there. So when you go to NetSuite.com, on the very top of our web page, there's a search bar, 00;28;50;20 - 00;29;22;28 and if you type the words “Learning Lab,” hit Enter and it's going to take you to a list of the cities and it will give you the times, the venue, and then a breakdown of all of the events. And every single one of those Learning Labs have analytics workshops. Recently, they have been for creating key performance indicators, doing a demonstration on that new product NetSuite Analytics warehouse, 00;29;22;28 - 00;29;43;17 NSAW. And then another one, NSPB, one on reports and then another on workbooks. So those are some of the topics in analytics that you would see, and of course you come see me at some of them. Yeah, lots of options there to learn about a lot of different products. That's great to see. 00;29;43;20 - 00;30;13;22 Any last pieces of advice, Mark, for those that are just kind of looking to up their game when it comes to NetSuite Analytics? Practice makes perfect. Three words. I didn't know what HTML or SQL before I joined NetSuite, and the way that I learned NetSuite was going into MyLearn, taking those 11-hour classes, getting the demo environment and doing the student exercises. And for our customers, 00;30;13;22 - 00;30;36;09 I mean, what better thing to practice that you can't break your system. It's not like a workflow or practicing creating a sales order--that's going to impact something. Practicing with saved searches, I mean, you're not going to break anything about it. Practice makes perfect. All right. I love it. Well, thank you, Mark, for joining us today. I learned a lot and I hope our listeners did too. 00;30;36;09 - 00;30;58;01 So thank you. Alright. Mark offered a bunch of ideas that customers can apply today to realize the full potential of NetSuite reports and analytics. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Be sure to check out all the trainings and events he mentioned to unlock an even deeper understanding of your business. And if you don't have an LCS pass yet, this is all the more reason to get one. 00;30;58;03 - 00;31;17;26 I want to thank Mark for joining us on this episode of the podcast. I also want to thank our editing crew, Oracle, and as always, all of you for tuning in. If you want more episodes just like this one, make sure you subscribe to our channel and give us a rating and review. Thanks so much, and talk soon. You just listened to The NetSuite Podcast. 00;31;17;28 - 00;31;27;02 Be sure to tune in every week with more NetSuite developments, stories, and insights into the benefits of one integrated system to help you run your business.