NetSuite Inventory Management: Inventory Planning Best Practices That Scale

Modern inventory management processes are rapidly transforming, thanks to advanced software solutions that give businesses unparalleled supply chain visibility, flexibility, and data. Now, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, which allow businesses to manage and integrate core parts of their business in one centralized platform, are becoming more critical (and sophisticated). One leading option is NetSuite inventory management, Oracle’s supply chain ERP.

The ERP market is rapidly growing in value, and estimated to balloon in value to be worth more than $65 billion in the next few years alone. This shows just how much growth is happening in this space and how many ERP options there are. In this article, we’ll discuss what you need to know about NetSuite’s ERP solution, what makes it different, and best practices when using it to help you scale your business.

What is NetSuite Inventory Management?

The NetSuite inventory management ERP helps businesses efficiently track, control, and optimize inventory across multiple locations in real time. Aside from inventory monitoring, it integrates sales, purchases, and financial data, giving you enhanced visibility and control over the movement, value, and availability of your stock. 

There are a variety of solutions that exist under the NetSuite banner, including a CRM, HR solution, ERP, and analytics engine. Like Microsoft, Oracle sells the components of NetSuite under a license, so you can easily combine multiple solutions to suit your needs.

For inventory planning, there’s NetSuite Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), which has an array of robust inventory-centric features aimed at maximizing your overall inventory posture. 

However, there are some significant gaps, and many supply chain managers will need to supplement NetSuite with third-party solutions. 

For example, when you plug in StockIQ, you gain additional capabilities like automated inventory parameter calculations (e.g., safety stock, inventory forecasts, seasonal demand forecasts, replenishment, etc.) based on a convergence of real-time and historical data (as well as physical receipt and order inputs).

Key Features of NetSuite Inventory Management

The NetSuite inventory management ERP has several key features which help businesses excel (and scale) in the modern supply chain, such as:

• Real-time inventory visibility: See up-to-date stock levels across all locations, including warehouses, retail stores, and in-transit items with the Item 360 Dashboard. You can also track inventory by lot, serial number, bin, or location. This visibility helps decision-makers avoid inventory distortion (like stockouts and overstocking) which costs businesses $1.7 trillion annually. 
• Automated replenishment: Dynamically manage reorder points, preferred stock levels, and lead time using demand-based replenishment optimization. These features help improve efficiency (by reducing manual replenishment tasks) and prevent lost sales (by ensuring in-demand items are always available). 
• Cycle counting: NetSuite Smart Count improves the efficiency and accuracy of inventory planning by automating inventory counts without freezing transactions in the entire location.
• Traceability: Several NetSuite features help with inventory traceability, which is critical for quickly identifying and solving inventory problems (like defects or recalls), quality control, and inventory accuracy. For example, you can trace inventory using lot and serial tracing. You can also define fulfillment strategies (such as first expiring, first out), minimizing waste and ensuring inventory is used efficiently. 

Leveraging NetSuite’s Inventory Planning Features to Consistently Scale

It’s not enough to only know what’s on your shelves today – excellent supply chain management requires you to plan for the future. Why? As your business grows, it becomes more complex, and the cost of missteps increases dramatically. And while ERPs are common, studies show that more than 40% of businesses still rely on manual methods for inventory management, while 26% use spreadsheets as their primary tool. At scale, these methods can crack. On the other hand, the right ERP supports scalable inventory planning, which is essential for fueling sustainable growth. 

With that in mind, here’s a complete overview of NetSuites’ inventory management features.

1. Inventory Replenishment

The UI for NetSuite’s inventory replenishment is relatively user-friendly. You can choose a location (for multi-site facilities), sort by vendors, and create reorder points and time-phased item purchases directly from the interface. It’s straightforward, no-nonsense, and relatively bare-bones, which we think is appropriate for this type of solution.

How StockIQ Enhances NetSuite’s Inventory Replenishment

While NetSuite comes packed with intelligent inventory planning capabilities, in many aspects, its replenishment processes are lacking. This is one of the major areas StockIQ picks up the slack. 

• Automatic order generation: StockIQ saves you time and helps keep things organized by generating a schedule (across every item, location, sublocation, and bin) for your entire day — every day. Then, when the day-to-order comes, you can instantly order the right stock at the right time and place.
• Supplier minimums: Using our deep learning intelligence, StockIQ can automatically handle elements of supplier operations, like MOQs at the group, item, and product-line level.
• Order targeting: StockIQ’s Order Wizard makes order targeting easy and automatic. How? You can easily meet order targets and agreements by tracking targets across weight, MOQs, pricebreaks, containers, and more. 
• Container loading: In addition to inventory, StockIQ helps you track containers and shipping parameters to ensure that every truck has the right products at the right time.
• Transfer allocation: Sometimes, customers beat your demand forecasts. It happens. Our transfer allocation solution can help you get the right products to the right people – even during peak demand. 
• Real-world schedule adjustments: The real-world isn’t always perfect. Order cycle intervals, holidays, and supplier delivery hiccups can all throw your inventory requirements off. We help you adjust. Our solution leverages special smoothing logic to ensure that you can handle every real-world wrench with purpose and agility.

2. Inventory Count Features

NetSuite’s Inventory Count gives you end-to-end cycle counting capabilities, which provides advanced inventory tracking that lets you create periodic counts for manually-driven inventory insights. This is critical because, while AI inventory planning is incredibly accurate, it’s not perfect. You’ll still need to do manual, ad-hoc counts to ensure inventory levels and safety stock numbers are accurate.

You can also use this feature to categorize items based on volume and sales, which you can then feed back into an automated “prompt” system that alerts staff to do a manual count on specific items. Think of this feature as a fail-safe. It prevents AI frictions from causing stock issues, and it gives you a manual layer of protection that adds security and ease-of-mind.

How StockIQ Enhances NetSuite’s Cycle Counting

• World-class stock out analysis: At StockIQ, we don’t just fix and prevent stock-outs; we give you the insights you need to determine why they’re happening in the first place. Throw the Band-Aids out of the window. With our stock out analysis, you won’t need them anymore.
• Excess identification: StockIQ automatically load-balances excess inventory to minimize its impact across locations.
• Dead inventory detection: Sometimes, you’ll need to deal with excess, dead inventory that’s nearly impossible to move. StockIQ helps you get that inventory off-the-books to make room for the inventory that works.
• Turns: StockIQ monitors turns regularly to ensure your inventory is up-to-snuff.
• Expiration analysis: StockIQ also generates expiration forecasts against your shelf-life and dated items.

3. Warehousing Features

Supply chain management grows more complex with each new facility. For supply chain managers handling multiple locations, accurately tracking and controlling inventory can quickly become incredibly complicated.

NetSuite comes to the rescue with its fine-tuned inventory tracking capabilities. You can track inventory across a variety of locations — which can be hierarchical — and then split each of those physical locations into sub-locations. Finally, you can split sub-locations down into bins, which gives you a much more granular and fine-toothed method of tracking. You can see each location, which is then broken down into sub-locations like cross docks, damaged goods, and QA.

How StockIQ Enhances NetSuite’s Warehousing

• Full MRP engine: Our world-class MRP engine can help you understand dependencies between assemblies and components, and minimize the impact of lead time against your full production cycle.
• Demand forecasting: StockIQ’s demand forecasting is hierarchical, allowing you to predict demand across locations, sub-locations, and bins. 
• ABC stratification: You need to measure risk, requirements, and needs across your entire inventory pipeline. We make it easy. StockIQ’s ABC stratification engine helps you understand the full context of your inventory, including how to manage that inventory across each location.
• Inventory balancing: StockIQ monitors inventory across your facilities and balances them based on need and requirements. When we identify a balancing issue, we’ll suggest grouped transfers to help you rebalance that inventory rapidly.

4. End-to-End Traceability

NetSuite doesn’t only offer grand-scale inventory management based on location; you can drill-down into each specific item to track lots or serial numbers. Meanwhile, at the inventory-level view, you can see a variety of details (e.g., internal IDs, serial numbers, codes, display names, item names, unit types, etc.) Again, this is another layer of visibility and traceability that helps you build more holistic inventory ecosystems built on economies of scale, automation, and accuracy.

How StockIQ Enhances NetSuite’s Traceability

• Category-level detail & item-level detail: Our demand forecasting engine is intelligent, granular, and scalable. We can help you understand the full context of your demand, while still giving you the ability to drill-down to the category and item-level detail to see specifics.

What’s New with NetSuite Inventory Management?

NetSuite delivers two product releases a year, via automatic updates. Whether you’re new to NetSuite, you’re looking to switch ERPs, or want to enhance your usage, here are some of the key enhancements that are on the horizon you should know about:

• Embedded AI across the suite: Like many ERPs, NetSuite is starting to tap into the power of AI, and is embedding AI tools across the platform. For example, NetSuite Narrative Reporting can create AI-generated narratives and explanations from financial and transactional data, greatly reducing the manual work required to prepare reports.
• New financial & operations tools: A new feature called SuiteProcurement facilitates easy, transparent procurement, by automatically creating a purchase request, routing approvals, generating a purchase order and sending it to the vendor.
• Customer & employee engagement tools: The future of both customer and employee engagement is increasingly becoming data-driven. For example, NetSuite Customer 360 gives you charts and metrics to help you quickly get up to speed on a customer’s status, relationship history, and recent transactions and activities.

Other new features which are relevant for supply chain management include improved billing functionality, field service management tools, and the NetSuite Manufacturing Scheduler SuiteApp, which helps planners allocate production across multiple work centers.

How to Scale with NetSuite Inventory Management

While NetSuite has robust features, how you use them matters. Here are some best practices to keep in mind to scale your operations while using NetSuite:

1. Use real-time data as your planning foundation: Relying on outdated or siloed insights is detrimental in today’s supply chain. NetSuite’s real-time dashboards and reports ensure you’re always working with the most current numbers, helping you make speedy, informed decisions.
2. Automate replenishment to reduce manual work: Manual reordering can become taxing as you scale. Use NetSuite’s automated replenishment features (like reorder points, preferred stock levels, and safety stock buffers) to ensure items are restocked based on actual demand and lead times.
3. Plan at the location level: NetSuite supports multi-location inventory tracking so you can tailor forecasts and reorder points to each site’s unique demand and movement patterns.
4. Integrate inventory with finance and procurement: A scalable strategy connects inventory planning with financial forecasts and procurement schedules to optimize operations. In NetSuite, you can use a combination of features and integration to get a complete view of your operations – including budgeting, cash flow, and supplier behavior. 
5. Document processes and standardize workflows: Growth brings in new people and moving parts. Document your inventory planning processes and use NetSuite’s workflow tools to automate approvals, inventory adjustments, and purchase orders, keeping everything efficient and consistent. 

NetSuite + StockIQ: Building A Smart, Effective, & Holistic Inventory Solution

Are you interested in learning more about how StockIQ and NetSuite can help you take control of your inventory? Contact us to learn more about StockIQ or to try out a demo in your NetSuite environment.