Quick Hits: Transforming Your Supply Chain Reporting

Struggling to manage a complex supply chain? This quick hit session will empower you with actionable insight to improve decision-making and support growth in an increasingly complex, global landscape. See why customers rely on ZoneReporting for visibility into their purchasing & receiving, inventory status, and order management.

This quick hit session with Jim Doyle will walk through how your organization can use ZoneReporting to:

• Manage inventory & optimize stock levels
• Better understand inventory costs and value
• Analyze lead times to improve customer service

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Transcript

Hi everybody. Thank you for joining today's session on ZoneReporting, which is our app that unlocks Power BI reporting for NetSuite. Today we're going to be walking through how we can unlock insight as it relates to managing a complex supply chain.

So quick introduction to myself. My name is Jim Doyle and I'm a solution consultant here at Zone & Co. My background is heavy on the NetSuite side. I've spent five years in the ecosystem, including time working for NetSuite directly as a functional consultant supporting their manufacturing and distribution clients. So very familiar with all the functionality when it comes to inventory management and really where we can extend NetSuite to unlock the most benefit for clients.

I'm going to spend most of my 15 minutes today giving you a live demo, but I wanted to start with a minute or two on the challenges that we're addressing and the benefits that we provide. So these are the common reporting challenges that ZoneReporting was built to help NetSuite clients overcome.

First, is limited flexibility. It can be very difficult in NetSuite to define the complex business logic for calculating metrics the specific way that you need them. And then on top of that, NetSuite's single level join structure can really restrict your ability to pull together all the different records and transactions that are required to drive those calculations.

This also contributes to silos of information - whether that's across subsidiaries or departments that may be using NetSuite differently, or even from a systems perspective, if you're not able to integrate data from all your different applications, it's going to be very difficult to get a holistic view of your business.

And then we also hear pretty frequently that reports aren't actionable. Most ERPs are capable of safe searches, safe reports, maybe some basic pivot tables and bar charts. But ERPs aren't purpose-built for analytics, so they don't have advanced features to uncover the kind of insight that drives strategic decision-making and can support day-to-day operations. A tool like Power BI can.

Then finally, manual work. We talk to a lot of NetSuite clients who spend hours every month manually building reports in Excel, which is inefficient, it's error prone, it's definitely not scalable and you end up spending time and resources maintaining reports instead of activity that can more directly benefit the business.

So these are the challenges that our founders set out to solve and that's exactly what ZoneReporting does. That is we replicate NetSuite in Power BI, we reconcile it to the penny. That means I'm able to now use an industry leading BI and analytics tool to report against data from our best in breed ERP, NetSuite.

That opens the door to time-saving automations. I've got advanced analytics now that can build actionable reports to answer real business questions, plus the ability to integrate data from all my systems, not just NetSuite and all within a single enterprise-wide reporting platform. So now as a business, we're all on the same page.

So let's take a look at this in a demo, switching over to my Power BI. And I'm currently logged in through the web version of Power BI. For those unfamiliar, all you need is internet and a browser, similar to NetSuite. There's also a desktop version that I could be using. So I've got all my Power BI navigations. I've got my pre-built report templates. These are customizable. We'll take a look at these in a second. But before I go through those, I want to hit edit and just quickly address our data model, which is really the primary component of ZoneReporting.

Again, we have replicated the NetSuite data model in Power BI to include all those key record types. So you see chart of accounts, class, department, location, we bring in customers, we bring in employees, items, all the way down to the transaction line level.

We've built an ETL from NetSuite, our own connector, and what it's doing is it's pushing your NetSuite data into Power BI under the appropriate table and automating that refresh on a scheduled basis. So we've got our NetSuite data, and then we can also bring in any additional data sources. So here we've got some Salesforce data, Salesforce CRM. Here's some Google data. Power BI can connect to pretty much anything, including just spreadsheets, right, it's bringing spreadsheet data. And then we can blend that with our NetSuite financial data here in Power BI. And then we can also, of course, bring in any custom fields, custom records, custom segments that you have in NetSuite. Our connector is saved search based. So if you can add it to a saved search, we can bring it into our data model. And then on top of all of that, we have our measures, which are the pre, well, not, they are pre-built, but we can always customize or modify them.

What measures are in Power BI are the calculations or the formulas and business logic that define the metrics and KPIs that we want to calculate. So for every KPI or metric we see on the screen, there's going to be a corresponding measure. And we've got hundreds of them for financial measures.

Today we'll be looking at our inventory measures. So I've got cycle time measures. So I can look at, you know, days early late. I can look at inventory KPIs like turnover, inventory to sales, months on hand. I can look at historic purchasing, amount purchased, units purchased, cost per units purchased, statistics around my supply chain, like lead time, sell through rates. So a ton of measures here.

And you can use these to build your own reports. I could create a new page and build a report from scratch just using the data model or I could modify one of the pre-built reports. So know that, that you're able to use the data model.

And then we have our pre-built report templates that give you something to start with, out of the box. And so looking at a couple of these specifically within our supply chain reporting package, I can look at key ratios. So here I've got some inventory key ratios. I'm looking at turnover, GMROI, inventory, months on hand. This helps me see for specific segments of the business, you know, items, classes, locations, what's driving these metrics at the aggregate.

And so I can look and see, all right, for our North Carolina warehouse, we see some disturbing trends across the board. Or if I go to a specific class, I can see, hey, maybe our turnover ratio is down and we've got more months on hand from an inventory standpoint overall, but maybe specific classes look healthier. And so I can start to look at my different classes.

That's the power of Power BI is, hey, this is a dynamic screen that I can slice and dice however I want. Again, as long as I'm capturing it in NetSuite, now I can bring it in and analyze it here in Power BI.

We can also look at our supply chain costs. So here I'm able to see these supply chain management costs broken down by department and then I'm contextualizing them against the business. I can see those as a percentage of revenue and a per unit sold basis. So I can understand the impacts of spikes in overhead. I can understand where it's coming from. And then I can understand the impact that it's having on the business. And maybe that helps me make the business case for some sort of investment to make sure that this doesn't happen again, right?

A lot of times we see these costs, but we don't really understand the impact to the business. But now because we can bring everything together, Power BI allows us to do that.

We can also look at things like sell through rate. So here I've got four different sell through rate calculations. You see, we calculated in three different ways, or excuse me, four different ways. Clients always have different ways that they want to calculate sell through rates. So we provide these four ways and they can always modify or customize measures depending on how you would want to calculate it.

And then when it comes to looking at like lead times and cycle times, there's a couple of ways to do that in NetSuite. So here on the left, we're looking at our purchase order cycle time. And that is going based on the actual, I lost my zoom it here, give me one sec. Whoops, we're all over the place. All right, we'll keep going.

So here we're looking at our purchase order cycle times. And this is going to show me our actual receipt date from the purchase order date. So this is when you enter the purchase order, the time it takes before you actually receive it. And then the same for our sales orders.

Now, where this breaks down a little bit is if you are doing some demand and supply planning in NetSuite and you've got your purchase orders planned out in the future. You're, you're, you've got them in the system, but you're not necessarily releasing them to the vendor or the supplier, or you've got, you know, blanket POs where, Hey, you know that they're going to be releasing, quantities of them throughout the life of that PO. And so that actual purchase order date isn't really an accurate representation of, of when you are expecting them to ship that order.

What we can do is look at our, expected dates. So in NetSuite, you can capture expected receipt dates on the line levels of your POs. And so now I'm able to see what percentage of purchase orders are we receiving on time, in full, and on time and in full based on expected receipt dates and the actual dates that we are receiving them in. So this can help me understand the reliability of my suppliers. Hey, if I see these rates start to drop, maybe I've got to adjust my lead time expectations or have a conversation with that vendor. Hey, you know, we're seeing these rates drop. I don't want to pass that on to my customer. So maybe I'm adjusting my lead time expectations and then we can check our work here on the right.

This is going to show me the percentage of sales orders that I'm fulfilling on time and in full again, based on that planned ship date on the line level of the sales order. So whether you want to go based on planned dates, actual dates. We can do pretty much anything as long as again, you're capturing it in NetSuite on that line level. And then I can also look at historic purchasing. So here's my amount purchased. So I can see, all right, here's by vendor, all our purchasing, by item. I could click on a vendor. This is going to show me the two items that I purchased from Stephenson Custom, or I can click on an item like that card item and here's the four suppliers that we've purchased that card from.

This is helpful, but maybe I also want to look at cost per unit sold. Down here we see a little portlet for that, but we have a whole page dedicated to cost per unit sold. So I can come and plug that card item in and take a look and see from a cost per unit standpoint, who do I want to go with? This is a little bit of a different picture than when we just look at total historic amount purchased. So we just want to provide all the angles and all the information and then you can make those decisions that are going to best benefit the business from a purchasing standpoint.

And then we can also look at open transactions. So here I've got my open purchase orders. I've got 411 lines of open POs. That's a lot of POs. It can be difficult to sort of organize that and understand the mix and the composition and when we can expect things to be coming in. So this helps me keep on top of that. I can see by vendor, the amounts, the quantities, our expected receipt dates. I can see by item. And again, if I click on a vendor, Marquez, all right, here's the 36 lines of open POs that we have for Marquez. Or I can click on an item and here's the one line we have for this item. If I click this item, can see, all right, we've got three orders, four lines open with three different suppliers for this card item.

So any questions I have about purchase orders, great page for me to go. We can do the same for sales orders here. 424 lines of sales orders. Can click customer. Can click an item for this assembly item. We've got 50 open lines for this assembly item. We're a little late, but now I've got my hit list of customers that I want to go and talk to and make sure that, hey, we're adjusting expectations if we're not going be able to deliver a specific item for whatever reason.

And then last but not least, projected inventory. We can help look at demand and supply and help balance that. So here we've got a weekly view of all my items and my planned supply. That's typically NetSuite supply orders, purchase orders, transfer orders, work orders, and demand, which can be a demand plan in a spreadsheet, a demand plan in NetSuite, it could be actual demand in NetSuite, future ship date orders, right? We can do that. Or an aggregate. Ultimately, what we want to do is get that demand in there so we can give you that planned ending inventory by week or by month out across your planning horizon.

And now you're able to see, hey, we're projected to stock out of this priority item during Christmas. Let's order now instead of when we're going and pulling orders in November and the shelves are empty. You can be proactive there.

All right. So that was just a quick run through. Hopefully that gave you a sense of how we can help product companies, again, at a high level.

Flexible reporting. We have handcuffs are off in Power BI so we can do a lot more there. It's all going to be in a single platform so you can use it across all your departments and systems. And we automate this so you're not having to export to Excel, build reports every month, update reports, and then worry if it's accurate, we just automate it and it's going to have that live connection to NetSuite. And now no worries from a reporting standpoint. So thanks everyone for joining.

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