Well here it is six months after I wrote the first article about ENKI's search for a CRM system, and we finally did choose one and started our implementation.  After a lot of looking around and testing, we ended up choosing NetSuite, a SaaS service.  It wasn't an easy choice: I was quite certain that none of the systems I looked at would meet 100% of our needs, but NetSuite with its full spectrum of features (from web store to CRM to accounting) together with script-based customization, seemed like it would fit the bill best.  I haven't changed that opinion after 5 months of using it, but I'm also not completely happy with our purchase.  Read on...

After living with NetSuite for 5 months, in which we moved our accounting records for 2007 to it, switched to using it for sales automation, and have started to use it for support automation, I have to say that I'm very impressed with what it can do out of the box.  If you've read this site carefully, you will know that I worked there earlier in its history, but even though I was in charge of the development department, I never had a chance to experience the full range of its capabilities.  In most cases, whatever I want to do is much easier than QuickBooks, and offers more capability.  Reports, for example, offer a great deal more customizability, and the ability to monetize almost any interaction with the customer is incredible.

However, it hasn't been a honeymoon.  Like most lower-end ERP and CRM products, NetSuite has a built-in business process for everything, which unfortunately doesn't match the processes my business needs to succeed.   Or, it has no process at all and you're stuck with having to remember how to do something right.  Unlike Fortune-500 ERP and CRM systems, Netsuite isn't built on general purpose software frameworks that support the underlying essential "atomic" elements of business process automation such as event handling, event scheduling, and conditional event flow. This leads to trouble in getting it to do what you want, even with it's scripting customization capability.

There are two main areas that I am concerned with.  The first is billing: we bill our customers on a pay-as-you-go basis for services rendered and resources consumed each month.  This neither fits into NetSuite's memorized transactions or their Advanced Billing(available on an upcharge) models, since the billing is recurring, but always different.  The way around it is for us to write custom software in NetSuite's Javascript customization language that calculates the customer's bill and creates an invoice using NetSuite's web services access.  This is in process, and I have hope that it will work out.  For now I stay up late at the end of each month doing billing manually!

The second area is our support process.  We offer a variety of service level agreements (SLAs) to our customers, some of which have guaranteed response times of as little as two hours.  During that time, the system has to capture the customer's request, notify a responsible on-duty support engineer, and find an alternate if there is no acknowledgement.  However, NetSuite's capabilities for measuring elapsed time and acting on time-based settings is only accurate to hours, not minutes, and they only check the status of time-based tasks every half hour.  The result is that the process I described above, under worst-case conditions, can take up to 1 1/2 hours to notify an alternate support engineer, which could cause us to miss our guaranteed response window.   Worse yet, there are bugs in NetSuite that keep the case escalation from working as documented so we don't reliably receive email notification that our cell phones can react to and start beeping for attention. So for now, we at ENKI can't take any time away from our cell phones, and have to check them constantly for customer support cases.

Also, some critical functionality we need to access and respond to cases with our cell phones via email is not part of the product.  I've written some JavaScript to work around this, but there are more bugs that keep that from working as expected.  With NetSuite's poor record on fixing bugs that might be critical to only a small segment of their customer base (according to posts on their users' group bulletin board), I despair of any quick resolution.  These problems are so severe that with ENKI's continued growth, we may need to replace NetSuite just to be able to deliver our core value proposition to our customers.  This would be a shame, since in general I really like the service - and I don't have time for another migration and implementation. 

We've also had heart-stopping excitement from time to time in other areas.  A few days before Christmas, I wanted to use a NetSuite Campaign to send my customers a Christmas thank-you card.  Unfortunately, I missed un-setting the "new customers are unsubscribed to campaigns by default" checkbox when I set our implementation up, and now I can't mail my customers, and I can't change the setting for existing customers due to NetSuite's ill-considered anti-spam policies.  I had to export the list to excel, and then use a third-party mail program.  The cards went out on time.  I just didn't get any sleep.

Since our implementation, one of our partners has suggested Enterprise Wizard as a solution to our problems.  A quick tour through that service showed me that they're focused on implementing their customers' unique business processes through an easy graphical editor.  This would be perfect for us, but it's missing NetSuite's financial aspects and its webstore, which I've started to use to sell our off-the-shelf virtual private server products.  Writing an accounting system in Enterprise Wizard isn't my idea of fun!

This experience has shown me that even with today's Software-as-a-Service ERP and CRM applications, automating your company's processes is still a difficult, expensive, and frustrating process - as it was 10 years ago.  When it starts working, however, the benefits can be incredible, saving you money on staffing and allowing big-company marketing, sales, and support services that you couldn't achieve any other way. 

Some learnings I take away from this humbling experience so far include:

1. Don't be in a hurry.  Sticking with what you have a little longer is always better than switching systems if you feel under pressure.  The switch itself is a lot of work, and working around an incomplete evaluation is expensive or could even cause your roll-out to fail.
2. No system will do everything you want, or if it does, it's oriented for a budget that SMBs can't afford.
3. Ask your vendors and customers how they solve the problems you're considering buying this software or service to address.  Use networking opportunities as well, such as online groups, professional groups, and associations.
4. If you get a system that does 90% of what you need, be prepared to hire consultants for extensive programming to achieve the last 10%, or spend some time learning today's web2.0 technologies to do it yourself.
5. Be creative.  If it turns out the system doesn't do something you need, there's usually a workaround if it allows you to export data or access it remotely via web services.  You may be able to change your business processes to match those of the system as well.
6. Implement as much of your needs as you can in your test drive or trial of the product before buying.  However, don't let a vendor charge you for any sort of testing or application consulting prior to purchase: it sets a bad precendent for your future relationship.
7. Pick your implementation partners well, or hire your own programmer for customization.  It doesn't make any sense to implement a customization five times because your partner doesn't understand your business.
8. Document your actual and/or desired business processes prior to buying.  This will help you with your evaluation, and you may be able to extract a money-back guarantee from the system vendor's sales staff that they can meet these requirements.  This is not easy - but you'll need to do it sooner or later anyway if you are going to hire consultants to customize your system for you, or if you want to go for SAS70 or ISO certification.

As usual, I'd love to hear from you about your experiences, or advice!

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