There were many exciting new developments and announcements unveiled at SuiteWorld 18. Here are a few highlights from our team who attended this year’s event.
Meetings with NetSuite leadership team
During the event, Annexa participated in several one-on-one meetings with NetSuite product development teams. Annexa played a key role in providing localised feedback for the ANZ region. This fuelled Annexa with more connections and the latest in innovation directly from the NetSuite development team.
The team were fortunate to meet with several senior executives from NetSuite including SVP of Sales and Marketing, Jason Maynard and Group Vice President of Product Management, Craig Sullivan. Discussions centred around common challenges clients have with their NetSuite rollout and how we can overcome these with future product development & innovation. The common theme throughout discussions was that Annexa are doing great things and are a world leading NetSuite Solution Provider within the commerce integration space.
Commerce leaders
As ANZ’s only certified Commerce Agency Program partners, and Australian Commerce experts, Annexa met with the SuiteCommerce product teams to discuss the exciting new cloud POS (SuiteCommerce InStore) and SuiteCommerce eCommerce applications. A key focus was to provide feedback on potential product enhancements on behalf of the Australia and New Zealand region to benefit the market. The team also discussed the Suite Payments roadmap strategy to support both SCA & SCIS applications.
Annexa clients shine on stage
We were excited to have Annexa clients participate in various keynote and breakout sessions over the event.
Norm Duce, Executive Manager of REA Group, spoke on the key breakout session panel: Going Global, the NetSuite guide to doing business around the world. Norm was asked about key learning’s from the ERP implementation process that would assist other companies in making the transition to NetSuite. He said to achieve success through the NetSuite platform, it’s important to build a strong relationship with an experienced NetSuite partner. “Working very closely with Annexa has been excellent, they are an integral component of our NetSuite delivery team. “A cloud based ERP solution is definitely the way to go,” he concluded.
On Day 4, long term Annexa customer, Aesop featured in the keynote. Troy Smith, CIO at Aesop, spoke with Jason Maynard about their NetSuite journey. Troy discussed the 320 Aesop retail stores that are spread around 70 cities around the globe and was asked how they maintain brand integrity as they expand into different locations. “We don’t want to focus on backend systems and stuff that doesn’t impact the customer. We want the rollout of NetSuite across the organisation to be smooth and very easy so we can focus on what matters, which is our customers and getting our stores right.”
“We have a core model of NetSuite that we roll out and then as we go into each market we localise it to each market. We’ve got NetSuite deployed in 22 countries, 6 languages and 21 countries.”
Troy was asked about the biggest challenges faced as a company going global and what other companies should know before expanding globally and his response was the localisation in difficult countries such as Japan or Korea or Italy.
“To be able to have a platform where the compliance or security issues are already handled for us or the infrastructure that we don’t have to worry about, it makes the deployments really quick scalable and easy.”
Troy stated that from a cultural perspective, having the multi-language functionality really helps, with Japan as a great example as Aesop couldn’t have deployed the system in English.
And… What is a Vegas trip without some fun?
With several Annexa clients present at the event, Annexa hosted a few events to get amongst the Las Vegas atmosphere. The team enjoyed a game of golf at internationally renowned course, Bears Best Golf Course on the last day of the event.
SuiteWorld 2018 was another fantastic event with more announcements and new features than ever before! This year’s SuiteWorld theme READY SET GROW provided a platform for the international NetSuite community to showcase the latest in cloud solutions and for NetSuite to unveil the latest product announcements all geared towards growth.
Stay tuned for the next post which will cover our insights from a NetSuite product and solution perspective.
Annexa is a leading NetSuite partner with extensive experience designing and implementing comprehensive and customised business systems, including payroll solutions, financial management, warehouse management and ecommerce solutions.
