This article is relevant if you need an alternative to how NetSuite supplies item/product lookup.

Background

For a client in the do-it-yourself swimming pool industry, the nature of the products they sell is highly configurable and complex. To help their customers understand the products they need, sales consultants have telephone calls to listen to their customers’ ambitions. During the phone calls, the need to quickly key on and look up information to find related parts drives the sales leadership to help their customers to make a buying commitment.

As we listened carefully to our client’s desires, they were open to solutions outside of NetSuite’s conventional approaches. In the background, the client was highly impressed by our firm’s “Prolecto Ticket Manager” which our Firm built on top of native NetSuite Support Cases. Readers will be interested in my 2022 article, Take Control: Watch How NetSuite can be Amazingly High-Performance!.

We thus worked with the client to design a product lookup application taking advantage of HTML5 capacities that are uncommonly utilized in the NetSuite community.

NetSuite Drive Product Lookup Application

The application is a relatively simple lookup tool. Its ability to quickly qualify parts via search and hunt for related items based on the high number of item attributes makes it unique.  As soon as we are willing to not be constrained by the NetSuite user interface, we can leverage the power of the NetSuite platform to create applications that do not require migrating data or buying more tools. In this application, and the accompanying video (4:45) demonstration below, the application sports the following:

1. Faceted Search: with all the different attributes, we augmented traditional search techniques with a navigation system that allows users to narrow search results by applying multiple filters based on faceted (dimensional) item classification.
2. Keyword Search: yes, NetSuite has built-in keyword search. But because we are in control, we can have keywords be on any data element allowing us to tune the application for our desired experience.
3. Cached Data: The items database with related vendor information records makes for a relatively large product catalog. The entire catalog is loaded and stored in the new HTML5 IndexedDB system built-in to all modern browsers. This controllable cached data store allows us to load the website immediately and go to work.
4. Bootstrap-Driven User Experience: to create a highly responsive modern web experience, many in the web community turn to the Bootstrap library to craft their apps. Just like the fast iPad Ordering app discussed in 2021, we used the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern to create a very fast and responsive application.
5. Multi-thread Data Loads: to increase the load times, we broke our NetSuite API queries into chunks that can be simultaneously loaded and, when ready, reassembled into a coherent, logical structure. That structure is stored in IndexDB whenever the user needs fresh information.

Watch the Item Lookup Application in Action (4:45)

During one of my internal team meetings, Sylvain M., Senior Technical Analyst, produced a demonstration for some show-and-tell.  Many team members were interested in the mechanics of the way the application was built. I edited the video (4:45) to just the elements relevant to this article.

Extensible Client Application Framework

Because we see more and more demand for high-performance web applications that are a joy to use on the NetSuite platform, we created an Extensible Client Framework to reduce the time to get these applications produced.  Like all the accelerator bundles we offer, the framework is license-free for our clients. For some of our clients with software developer types on their team, we show them how they can create blazingly fast applications within NetSuite.

If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you are curious about this application or you have a specific application requirement that needs to break out of the NetSuite-constrained user interface, let’s have a conversation.

Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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