When an organization is planning to procure a new business system, each potential solution and solution provider come with specific service features and usage parameters. Therefore, it is crucial to consider whether these features and parameters will meet both the current and the future needs of the organization. If rapid business growth is expected, the organization must choose a system that can scale as the business scales and change as the business changes. If the system is unable to do this, it will end up stifling growth instead.

Here are three areas in which it is common for companies to surpass the capacity of their business solution during periods of growth:

1. Monthly Transaction Line Volume

Businesses that experience high peaks of growth or high growth in general can experience a strain on their business systems’ capacity to respond, leading to delayed processes such as turning sales orders into invoices. This can lead to failure to recognize revenue for the month as well as lost profits. If the systems are unable to keep up with the order volume, this will lead to back-end system delays as well as worsened customer experience. To avoid these problems, the system should be customized to show relevant dashboards and give relevant reports to help key users see and understand at what point they are approaching the limits that once hit, will affect business performance.

2. Number of users

It is important to compare the number of users a solution can support with the needs of your organization. If the system cannot support the number of users it needs to, it will impact the responsiveness by leading to significant delays in navigating the system, e.g., loading pages and reports, which in turn leads to inconsistent usability and delays in processing. Therefore, it is important to choose a solution that cannot only support your current number of users, but that has the capacity to add more users in the future as the business grows. A user visibility report lets you review the licenses and see when the user threshold is being approached.

3. Concurrency limits

Problems may arise if the business system is trying to route too many concurrent web services processes simultaneously. Running too many operations, file import jobs and scripts at the same time affects the system performance. The base level and maximum level concurrency amounts are normally decided by the service levels. Therefore, the service levels dictate the rate at which the system is able to process simultaneous operations, e.g., data import and data export. If the concurrency limit cannot be increased, business operations become delayed across the whole system which impacts efficiency and productivity. To avoid these issues, businesses should add applications checks to their business solutions, such as summary details, page load time, process monitoring, web services analysis and other metrics that enable troubleshooting.

NetSuite - a future-proof solution

NetSuite is a cloud-based business platform that is designed to support growth. It is a future-proof solution that is customized to meet your needs and that scales as your business does. It is a great investment for organizations that want to expand or grow internationally, as operations in different subsidiaries are monitored from the same platform. Financial data from all entities in the organization is reliably stored and easily accessible in one place, resulting in a comprehensive overview of the organization. As your organization grows and changes, NetSuite scales to support you and the capacity in areas like monthly transaction line volume, number of users, and concurrency scales accordingly. This means your organization can push forward and keep growing without worrying about outgrowing the system.

As a solution provider, Staria is there to provide support throughout every step of our customers’ growth journeys. Our services are designed to offer the right support during each different growth stage, and rather than offering standard solutions we strive to create new and better ways to support our customers. Staria has developed three complimentary NetSuite SuiteApps to help out customers get the most out of their NetSuite investment. These consist of: INFlow SuiteApp, for automating the purchase invoicing process; Localizations SuiteApps, for complying with local requirements at new markets; and Staria Banking, for automating payment transactions. We also provide other support systems such as Staria BI & PlanningFloQast and Acubiz.

Many of Staria’s customers are growth companies, and several are international unicorns. Check out their stories and read about how they have benefited from implementing NetSuite.