Following questions can be asked to leads to NetSuite to understand about their business and determine the correct NetSuite edition and modules required.
Product Based Questions
- How many users would you need to access your ERP? What is the breakdown of those users (warehouse, retail store front, financials, order entry, etc).
- Approximately how many order transactions do you do a month and a year? If you have in-store POS systems, what is the approximate transaction volume per terminal per store?
- Where do your orders come from (ecommerce, retail transactions, sales reps, EDI, third party vendors, etc)? Please include the approximate percentage breakdown of these orders (60% ecommerce, 30% sales rep entered, 10% EDI, etc.), and if you sell online please include from which sites (your own, amazon, shopify, wayfair, etc).
- Do you have any retail locations? If so how many, and what is your current POS solution? Do you require a connection with your POS solution?
- How many legal entities do you have across how many countries?
- Are you using a platform to manage email blasts and marketing campaigns? If so, which one? How many marketing campaigns are you currently doing a week/month/year?
- Do you use any contract manufacturers? If so, what percent of your MFG is contracted out?
- Do you forecast items to purchase based on demand, seasonality, linear regression or historical average or do you just use min max points to reorder?
- Do you have blanket purchase orders or contract purchase orders with your vendors? (Adv Proc)
- Do you have a warehouse where you’ll want barcode scanners for your pickers? If so, how many warehouses or locations? What details would you need tracked? (WMS)
- Do you use any 3pls? If so how would you envision connecting with them, if at all?
- Who do you use for shipping? (LTL, Fedex, USPS, UPS, etc). Please describe.
- Do you manage amortizations and allocations?
- Are you managing fixed assets today? If so how many?
- Do you have any regulatory requirements? (i.e. … FDA, 21CFR, Automotive – PPAP, HIPPA)
- Do you have a detailed annual budget by department? Is it a manual time consuming process? Do you look at what if scenarios with your budgets? Is this an area of need for a new system?
- Who do you use for payroll? How do you track your time and attendance?
- What platform do you use to manage your HR? Is this something you’d also want your ERP to manage?
Please include if you do in house manufacturing of your product
- What is your manufacturing mode? Make to stock, Make to order, Engineer to Order? Do you have a set BOM or recipe, or do they frequently change?
- Are your BOMs static or are there different options, sizes or variations? How many SKUS would you have if you applied all the options and rules?
- Do you track production through each work station/ routing step? Aka. Do you track WIP?
- Do you track purchases, expenses, and production to a specific project build? If so please describe.
- Do you track labor at each work station? Do you have barcodes at each work station? Do you do Capacity Planning and scheduling based on capacity? (WIP)
- Do you have a quality system in place today or is it manual? What would you want to see here out of an ERP?
- Do you track work orders against an overall job or project (ex. Long build times where you are tracking the build as a project and multiple work orders roll up to that project (along with time, labour, engineering time etc)?