Beyond Go-Live: Why a Managed Services Approach is the Key to Sustainable NetSuite Success

Many mid-market companies invest heavily in NetSuite, only to see its potential stall after Go-Live. Teams resort to manual workarounds, reports become unreliable, and rigid customizations make even small changes risky. This slows cash flow, distorts forecasts, and increases audit risk.

When the main focus is on smart configuration, AI-driven assessments, and an ongoing managed-services mindset, you can transform NetSuite from a cost center into a powerful growth engine.

Start with the fundamentals: Stop fighting bad data

Most NetSuite issues begin with poor data inputs, like duplicate customers or inconsistent item names. These upstream problems cascade into invoicing errors, delayed shipments, and wasted time on monthly reconciliation.

Practical first moves:

• Enforce data quality at the source with mandatory fields, standardized dropdowns, and automated duplicate detection.
• Prevent bad imports with simple validation rules and automations for CSV files.
• Establish a single source of truth for naming conventions and master data, and integrate it into onboarding and governance.

These low-investment, high-return changes are the fastest way to reduce exceptions and cut the time finance spends on manual cleanup.

Rationalize workflows before you refactor code

Custom scripts and endless saved searches are often symptoms of a flawed business process, not the solution. Before you rewrite code, fix the workflow itself.

A disciplined approach:

• Map key end-to-end processes like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay to find duplicate hand-offs and hidden approvals.
• Consolidate redundant workflows and retire unused searches.
• Deliver role-specific homepages and dashboards so users get the data they need without digging through spreadsheets.

This approach reduces technical risk and boosts user adoption, as daily tasks become fully integrated within NetSuite.

Fix the money flows: Automate cash management

Cash is king. When configured correctly, NetSuite’s native capabilities can significantly improve working capital and speed up your month-end close.

Key configurations to prioritize:

• Enable bank feeds and automated reconciliation to eliminate manual statement imports.
• Implement dunning automation and a customer payment portal to accelerate collections.
• Use electronic bank payments and approval workflows to reduce fraud risk.

These changes provide leadership with a daily view of cash, shorten your days sales outstanding (DSO), and reduce time spent on closing, delivering visible impacts within the first 30–60 days.

Make reporting trustworthy: Rebuild the executive layer

When NetSuite is full of bad searches and outdated dashboards, executives default to gut-based decisions. The solution is a reliable, certified reporting layer.

Steps to restore trust:

• Rebuild and certify critical saved searches, then control who can edit them.
• Create executive dashboards that show action-oriented KPIs, not just long lists of numbers.
• Review and retire reports that no longer measure what matters.

When executives trust their dashboards, forecasting accuracy improves and strategy conversations become fact-driven.

Address technical debt with programmatic analysis

Years of custom scripts can hide brittle dependencies and unexpected costs. Use automated tools to analyze your code and catalog technical debt before it becomes an emergency.

What this looks like:

• Programmatic code scans to reveal unused or risky scripts and map dependencies.
• Prioritized remediation plans that group low-risk quick wins and higher-impact refactors.
• Documentation and ownership for every customization to reduce tribal knowledge risk.

Lowering technical debt accelerates future changes and reduces the fear of “touching” core workflows.

Leverage AI where it multiplies human effort

AI isn’t magic, but when applied to high-volume manual tasks, it delivers a fast return. Think Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for invoices, AI-assisted code analysis, and structured discovery that finds the highest-opportunity automations.

Practical AI applications:

• Automated document ingestion to convert vendor invoices and order PDFs into NetSuite transactions without manual data entry.
• AI-assisted discovery that quantifies manual effort and exception rates to produce a prioritized roadmap.
• Conversational support bots that reduce ticket volume by answering common user questions.

When combined with a disciplined plan, these tools shift work from people to reliable, auditable automations.

Measure what matters and align incentives

Optimization without measurement is guesswork. Track the levers that impact your profit and loss (P&L): DSO, order-to-invoice time, support tickets per user, month-end close duration, and the percentage of automated versus manual transactions.

Set a cadence:

• Weekly tactical metrics for your Operations and Finance teams.
• Monthly executive KPIs for the CFO and CEO.
• Quarterly reviews for stakeholders to demonstrate Return on Investment (ROI).

These KPIs should guide your optimization efforts and tie directly to the business outcomes your board cares about.

Choose the right engagement model

Not all problems require a full re-implementation. Your path forward usually includes three options:

• Fast (30 days): A health check to capture quick wins like fixed searches, validation rules, and dashboards.
• Strategic (60–90 days): A structured AI assessment that identifies automation opportunities and produces a prioritized roadmap.
• Ongoing: Transition to continuous optimization and managed services for proactive monitoring and governance.

Final thought: Make optimization continuous

NetSuite is a living asset. Treating it as a “set-it-and-forget-it” project guarantees creeping inefficiency and risk. High-performing companies integrate continuous optimization into their operating rhythm with predictable health checks, prioritized fixes, and incremental automation. The result is measurable: faster cash conversion, fewer surprises during audits, and an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that actively enables growth.

If you’re ready to move from firefighting to foresight, a structured health check followed by a prioritized AI assessment is the fastest way to start seeing results. Would you like a copy of our 90-day playbook or a short health check for your NetSuite instance? 

To learn more about Trajectory’s Managed Services offering, visit our website here.