This article is relevant for NetSuite-driven organizations in the soft-goods industry that work with Item Matrix items and are seeking an alternative grid-based order manager.
Background
In the soft-goods and apparel industries, products are typically seen as single items that vary by size, color, style, and other variants. NetSuite’s matrix item is popular for modeling these product dimensions using a parent item (e.g., the shirt) and child items (all the combinations of size, color, or style). Merchandisers usually consider the shirt first, then all the variants needed for purchasing or supplying a customer.
NetSuite’s order line manager handles each unique combination of size, color, and style as a separate line item. This means ordering a combination of all these dimensions requires managing many line items conceptually as a group. But there really is no group management capacity for this challenge in the basic line editor.
To help merchandisers with this, NetSuite offers a Grid Order Management add-in, which pivots dimensions like Size against Color and Style. If NetSuite’s add-in Grid Order tool meets your needs, great. But what if you need a different ordering approach?
Introducing a Custom NetSuite Grid Order Manager
David J., a Business Analyst in our Operations Practice, collaborated with one of our soft-goods clients to address their cumbersome ordering concerns. After thoroughly exploring NetSuite’s provided tools and leveraging our firm’s expertise in solving similar challenges, David guided the client in a new direction.
As an alternative to NetSuite’s Grid Order Management, we harnessed the power of the NetSuite platform to gain control and produce a user experience tailored to the client’s specific needs.
I often refer to this as radical innovation because we responsibly step outside NetSuite’s prescribed user interface constraints. NetSuite’s user interface is browser-based, offering us a complete universe to create applications and user experiences if we are willing.
In this case, we pop a window to display all the lines in a grid in sales order edit mode, effectively pivoting the line items across dimensions. Size is the most common dimension across every apparel item, so we turn these into columns and expose the other dimensions through drop-downs. Since the price is consistent regardless of size, anchoring on common information that does not vary for the product is easy.
The user interface is friendly and intuitive and can be refined in any way our imagination takes us. Click on the image to see it in full screen.
Watch a Demonstration of the Custom NetSuite Grid Order Entry
I interviewed David to delve into his accomplishments and appreciate his leadership. Watch the (5:05) video to see the editor in action:
Other NetSuite High-Performance Alternative Enhancements
This innovation showcases our Firm’s ability to take control and create satisfactory solutions. As we work with our clients, we see a growing sentiment among organizations to engage with NetSuite through a more customized user interface. Recognizing this need, and with our extensive expertise in technology adaptation and integration, we developed an “Extensible Client Framework (ECF).” This framework enables the creation of high-performance applications that seamlessly overlay NetSuite’s existing structure, all without additional hosting or licensing fees.
In previous articles, I discuss how our Firm offers high-performance alternatives to NetSuite’s prescribed approaches for platform enhancements:
- 2018: A pre-ECF approach to an alternative sales order user interface
- 2022: Take Control: Watch How NetSuite can be Amazingly High-Performance!
- 2022: Unleash NetSuite’s User Interface by Innovating via the Platform
- 2023: High Performance NetSuite Item Lookup
- 2023: Revamping NetSuite Cases: a High-Performance, User-Friendly Experience
- 2023: Get High Performance NetSuite Task and Resource Assignments
Solve Your NetSuite Grid Order Challenge
Our approach to solving client challenges leverages all our previous accomplishments. With over 15 years of experience and working with hundreds of NetSuite-based companies, we have organized these algorithms into our Labs initiative. These tools, offered without a license charge, serve as templates to accelerate the time it takes to realize a solution. These templates represent our commitment to ethically supporting our client’s ambitions and helping them derive greater value from their NetSuite investment.
If you found this article relevant, feel free to sign up for notifications to new articles as I post them. If you are ready to take control over your NetSuite ordering challenge, let’s have a conversation.
