Introduction
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse is a powerful business intelligence solution designed to provide comprehensive insights and analytics for organizations operating on the NetSuite platform. By seamlessly integrating with NetSuite’s robust suite of cloud-based business management applications, Analytics Warehouse empowers businesses to unlock the full potential of their data and make informed, data-driven decisions.
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, companies face the challenge of managing and leveraging vast amounts of data generated across various systems and departments. The ability to transform this data into actionable intelligence is essential for gaining a competitive edge and driving growth. NetSuite Analytics Warehouse addresses this need by offering a centralized, scalable, and user-friendly platform for analyzing and visualizing data from multiple sources.
With NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, organizations can consolidate and harmonize their disparate data sources, including financial data, customer information, sales figures, supply chain data, and more. By bringing these data sets together, businesses can gain a comprehensive view of their operations and uncover valuable insights that can drive strategic decision-making.
The Analytics Warehouse platform provides powerful data modeling capabilities, allowing users to create customized data models tailored to their unique business requirements. This flexibility enables businesses to organize and structure data in a way that aligns with their specific reporting and analysis needs. Additionally, Analytics Warehouse supports data transformation and enrichment, enabling users to clean, aggregate, and enhance their data to ensure accuracy and relevance.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse goes beyond traditional reporting and offers advanced analytics functionalities, including ad-hoc querying, data exploration, and predictive modeling. Users can easily create interactive dashboards and reports, visualize data through charts and graphs, and drill down into specific data points to gain deeper insights. The intuitive user interface and self-service capabilities empower business users to explore data independently, reducing reliance on IT or data analysts.
Furthermore, Analytics Warehouse leverages machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence capabilities to uncover hidden patterns and trends within the data. These predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities enable businesses to identify opportunities, detect anomalies, and make data-backed recommendations for optimizing operations, improving customer experiences, and maximizing profitability.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse offers seamless integration with the broader NetSuite ecosystem, ensuring real-time data synchronization and enabling users to access up-to-date information at any time. This integration allows businesses to gain a holistic view of their entire organization, with the ability to drill down into granular details or zoom out for a comprehensive overview.
In summary, NetSuite Analytics Warehouse provides a robust and scalable solution for organizations seeking to unlock the power of their data. By consolidating, modeling, and analyzing data from multiple sources, businesses can gain valuable insights, make informed decisions, and drive growth in today’s competitive business landscape.
Common Customer Data Challenges
- Managing large amounts of data within excel.
- Inability to run historical point in time comparative analysis.
- Large amounts of historical data outside of NetSuite
- Unable to analyze all company data in one system.
What is the business impact?
- Analyze company data on a single-source, secure platform (CRM, FIN, OPS)
- Historical, current, forecast data identifies trends to drive insightful, collaborative decisions.
- Data automation, efficiency.
And in terms of the business impact, we have a single secure platform, an Oracle product that incorporates two key components: the Autonomous Data Warehouse and the Oracle Analytics Cloud. This tool ensures the utmost data security, comparable to that of NetSuite. When data is transferred into NSAW, you have the ability to establish similar security parameters.
NetSuite Analytics Stairway
Key Features of NSAW Comparison
When comparing Workbooks and NetSuite Advanced Analytics for Workbooks (NSAW) in terms of their features, there are significant differences. At a technical level, they are built on completely different schemas. Workbooks are based on the relation schema, also known as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), which is optimized for transactional schemas. On the other hand, NSAW is based on the Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) schema, specifically the star-based schema, which is designed for analytical processing. This distinction allows NSAW to provide more advanced analytics capabilities and faster processing.
NSAW offers export capabilities, enabling users to export their data to Word or PowerPoint. Additionally, it provides the ability to connect to non-NetSuite data or legacy data. This feature is particularly useful for customers migrating from non-NetSuite or legacy systems to NetSuite, as they can import their existing data into the warehouse for analysis.
A key advantage of NSAW is the ability to grant access to non-NetSuite users. Traditionally, C-level, or executive-level users who don’t engage in transactional activities but require access to reports and dashboards needed to have a NetSuite backend license. However, NSAW eliminates this requirement, allowing organizations to deploy dashboards and reports to these users without the need for a backend NetSuite license.
In terms of pricing, SuiteAnalytics Workbook is included as part of the NetSuite backend at no additional cost. However, NSAW requires a separate licensing consideration, as it is an add-on that customers need to purchase.
Lastly, NSAW offers a wider range of visualizations compared to SuiteAnalytics Workbooks. NSAW provides more than 40 visualizations, with the collection continually expanding. In contrast, SuiteAnalytics Workbooks only offer a basic set of five visualizations.
Faster Time to Value and Streamlined Integration
The primary objective of NetSuite Warehouse is to deliver a faster time to value for our customers while addressing common challenges encountered in Business Intelligence (BI) projects. One of the main reasons BI projects often fail is due to difficulties in data integration, particularly the Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process. Creating star schemas, mapping data, and establishing joins can be complex tasks. NetSuite Warehouse offers a simplified approach to data integration, making the process much easier.
When it comes to NetSuite data, the integration is pre-built, eliminating the need for concern about the ETL process. We retrieve the relevant data, excluding technical and non-relevant fields, and import only the fields that are essential for analytics. The entire pipeline for NetSuite data is managed by us.
In fact, NetSuite fully manages the data pipeline for NetSuite data. What does this mean for customers? Suppose you subscribe to NetSuite Warehouse, but your data doesn’t appear in the warehouse. Instead of relying on your own engineers and architects to resolve the issue, you can simply contact NetSuite support and inquire about your missing data.
In this sense, when it comes to NetSuite data, it’s akin to data-as-a-service. Oracle NetSuite guarantees that your data will be present, consistently available, and accurate. They handle the entire data integration process from the NetSuite backend perspective.
For other data sources, connectors that allow you to import data from third-party systems are provided. If you encounter any issues, you can still reach out to NetSuite support. They will assess the connector’s functionality and assist you in determining if the issue lies with the connector or the data source itself. Connector support is included as part of the offer.
NetSuite Warehouse also addresses the second major reason why BI projects often fail: data management. As data rapidly expands, it becomes prone to errors and failures. However, with NetSuite Warehouse, data management concerns are alleviated. We take care of the necessary mechanisms to ensure smooth data management, allowing you to focus on analyzing the data rather than worrying about its integrity.
In summary, NetSuite Warehouse offers a streamlined integration process, providing a faster time to value for customers. By managing data integration and data management, this solution addresses the key challenges faced in BI projects, enabling organizations to harness the power of analytics effectively.
Setup
- Start by accessing the Company section in your NetSuite account.
- Look for the option to Enable Features. This is the same procedure you would typically follow to enable any other add-on module.
After selecting Analytics, the module will be enabled, granting you access to the NetSuite Warehouse functionality.
By following these steps, you can easily enable the NetSuite Warehouse module and begin leveraging its capabilities for advanced analytics within your NetSuite account.
- Once you select Enable Features, you will be directed to a screen that displays a list of available features.
- Locate and select the Analytics feature from the list.
- After selecting Analytics, the module will be enabled, granting you access to the NetSuite Warehouse functionality.
By following these steps, you can easily enable the NetSuite Warehouse module and begin leveraging its capabilities for advanced analytics within your NetSuite account. Once the feature is enabled, it typically takes approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour for the instance to set up. Once the instance is ready, you can proceed with the configuration process.
It is important to note that in order to see the Warehouse option, the feature must be subscribed to by the customer. After the customer has signed up for the license and you have enabled the module, they will be able to view the Warehouse option.
Once the instance is ready, you can proceed with the configuration process. Within the Configuration screen, there are two key activities that need to be performed. The first activity is setting up users.
Users can be easily set up for the NetSuite Warehouse module using the familiar user interface. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Within the Configuration screen, locate the user setup section.
- On the left side of the screen, you will see a list of users that are already set up in NetSuite.
- Select the desired users from the list by clicking on them.
- After selecting the users, move them to the right-hand side of the screen.
- Once you have moved all the desired users to the right-hand side, click on the “Apply” button.
- By clicking “Apply,” the selected users will be created on the Warehouse side, granting them access to the module.
The process of setting up users is straightforward and can be completed within the NetSuite Warehouse Configuration screen. This allows for easy and efficient user management, ensuring the right individuals have the necessary access to leverage the capabilities of the module.
Another option within the NetSuite Warehouse module is to create external users. These users are not part of your NetSuite system but need access to the dashboards and reports within the warehouse. Here’s how you can create external users:
- Within the Configuration screen, navigate to the user setup section.
- Look for the option to create external users.
- Click on the “Create External User” button.
- Provide the name and email address of the user you wish to create.
- Once you have entered the required information, click on “Create User.”
With this simple process, the user is created in the warehouse, and they will receive access to the dashboards and reports.
Additionally, you have the option to designate external users as NetSuite admin-only users. This means that they will only have administrative privileges within the NetSuite system itself. This allows you to separate the roles and permissions between NetSuite administration and warehouse access, providing more control and security.
By offering the capability to create external users, the NetSuite Warehouse module enables you to extend access to relevant stakeholders who may not be part of your NetSuite system, empowering them to utilize the warehouse’s valuable analytics features.
The second major activity in configuring the NetSuite Warehouse module is deciding what data you want to include. Here’s how you can customize your data selection:
- At the top of the configuration screen, you will find options to specify the initial extract date and the subsidiary from which you want to transfer data.
- Next, you can enable specific subject areas based on the data you want to bring into the warehouse. For example, you can choose to include data from sales, inventory, manufacturing, and purchasing, while excluding financials if you don’t need analytics for that area.
- Once you have selected the desired data, it will become available in the warehouse for analysis.
By default, data is automatically transferred once a day at a scheduled time, which is 4:00 PM PST. However, customers have the flexibility to configure this transfer time according to their business needs. They can choose a time that aligns with non-business hours, late at night, or early morning when system usage is low.
In addition to the scheduled transfer, customers can also perform ad-hoc transfers on an as-needed basis. This feature allows them to manually trigger data transfer instantly. Ad-hoc transfers are useful in emergency situations or when there is a request for the latest data for a specific report.
It’s important to note that running an ad-hoc transfer very close to the scheduled transfer time may result in a message indicating that it’s too close to the scheduled transfer. However, running it at any other time should work without any issues.
Once the configuration is complete, you will have a URL provided. By clicking on the URL, you will access the Warehouse launch page. This launch page presents the pre-built content, including dashboards and key metrics mentioned earlier by Mark. These visualizations and pre-built content are available to all customers who have the appropriate backend data.
The Warehouse launch page serves as the starting point for customers to explore and interact with the pre-built content and gain valuable insights from their data.