Oracle NetSuite has announced the EMEA release for its integrated planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution and a suite-wide generative AI text tool.
In an announcement at NetSuite’s SuiteConnect London event, the firm said that NetSuite Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is now available across the EMEA region.
EPM’s predictive algorithms can be used to uncover trends in a business’ data, automate financial reporting or account closures, and produce forecasts rooted in an enterprise’s data.
NetSuite EPM was first announced at SuiteWorld 2023, as a combined solutions package across account management workflows and corporate reporting.
Leaders can also use the product to run modeling with Evan Goldberg, EVP and founder at NetSuite, giving the example of a company using it to examine how a new product might affect their bottom line, or how new staff hires could impact expenses, revenue, or their supply chain.
Solutions contained within NetSuite EPM include:
- Planning and Budgeting
- Account Reconciliation
- Profitability and Cost Management
- Narrative Reporting
- Corporate Tax Reporting
Nicky Tozer, SVP EMEA at NetSuite, noted that in addition to helping firms track their business data using predictive algorithms, Planning and Budgeting can be configured to help companies with sustainability reporting.
“These ESG requirements are creating a lot of challenges for businesses and how they need to report differently on that. There are now 80 countries worldwide who are mandating e-invoicing and that’s creating a lot of challenges for people who are operating outside the UK,” said Tozer.
In correlating data with plans drawn from across a customer’s ecosystem, NetSuite says EPM can help companies build a sustainable business model and make data-driven decisions.
NetSuite customers using the platform for ESG reporting include The Cheeky Panda, an environmental paper products firm. Goldberg said the firm uses NetSuite to prove its products save 400,000 trees per year, alongside NetSuite’s Warehouse Management system.
Analytics and ‘doing more with less’
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, the firm’s AI-integrated cloud data warehouse and data analytics product, has also been a focus of announcements at SuiteConnect London.
Analytics Warehouse is intended to make data management easier, flag anomalous data, and help customers surface insights into their data without the need for a complex understanding of data science.
A new solution titled Analytics Warehouse Multi-Instance Connector allows companies to consolidate data from a range of NetSuite instances into one environment. Goldberg said this will be beneficial for private equity firms, or parent companies of franchises, who can use the tool to see a unified picture across their entire portfolio.
Analytics Warehouse is already available for the UK but has now been expanded to additional countries across EMEA.
Goldberg and Tozer focused on the phrase ‘do more with less’ throughout the plenary session of the event, with Analytics Warehouse said to align directly with this mentality.
“It’s not just about saving on expenses – that’s the ‘do less’ part – it’s about growing, which is the ‘do more’ part,” said Goldberg.
Highlighting a divide among customers right now, Goldberg said some are looking to see what is working and where they can boost areas good for ROI and those focused on what’s not working and what difficult decisions have to be made.
“All of these changes require insight, so you can predict the returns on investments and they also require agility to actually execute this extraction.”
“Automation is increasingly supercharged through AI, that’s really key to scaling your tasks and processes. But scalability also requires collaboration among humans, you have individuals and departments and technology solutions.”
NetSuite Text Enhance
NetSuite also announced today that it is making NetSuite Text Enhance, its generative AI tool that outputs across the NetSuite platform, available in the UK.
The product was premiered at SuiteWorld 2023 for an initial North American release, but has now expanded to the UK. Using NetSuite Text Enhance, customers can quickly fill reports, forms, or emails. The tool is powered by an LLM developed by Cohere and draws on context from a business’ estate to produce text that is as accurate to a user’s needs as possible.
In a demonstration, a user was shown highlighting text in an email and selecting ‘clean up’ to improve the clarity of their text and help localize it for UK customers.
“Your teams can save time on item descriptions, job descriptions, and other types of long-form content,” said Goldberg.
Since it first announced new generative AI features in 2023, NetSuite has emphasized an “AI everywhere” approach but also stressed the importance of grounding all AI outputs in enterprise data.
“Every business has a lot of unstructured data which is humans talking to humans,” said Brian Chess, SVP technology and AI at Oracle NetSuite. Chess pointed out the scope and complexity of using AI to assist with text operations across the entire suite.
“If AI is going to be everywhere, then you don’t bolt on a chatbot with a cute name in the sidebar because that puts the AI just over in the corner. That’s not where it belongs, it needs to be built-in.”
“We can give that LLM the context, so that LLM knows where you are in the application, what you’re doing, and has access to the business data around that text area, which makes it a heck of a lot smarter than something you would just roll for.”
As yet, there is no date for Text Enhance to be made available in territories outside the UK and North America.
In conversation with the assembled press, Chess stated that this is down to an “issue of data sovereignty,” as Text Enhance within the UK will be operated within the UK. Further rollout of the feature will require a territory-by-territory approach.
NetSuite’s intention is for its generative AI to eventually have the capability to process all the languages that NetSuite already reports. For now, AI features like Text Enhance only work for English language tasks.
