Findings:
- Customers are able to report on actuals that tie to their source NetSuite GL.
- Customers own and resolve data kickouts during the data load process.
- IT is not involved, takes a hands off approach
- 1-2 finance people are the only users who have access to the system
- Reporting is possible through the canned reports but mostly through Smartview / Excel. These are manually updated and distributed.
Not so good findings:
- 1 finance user is manually updating all the reports and distributing them via email to the users
- Clients have smartview retrievals taking from 8 minutes to 45 minutes to return data. These long times were due to database design (too many dynamic calcs running on top of each other) and using HSGet value formulas instead of defining retrieve ranges (due to the creator having had experience with HFM).
- Previous years budget data had been lost. The client did not understand the correct procedure for rolling the year. Backup restore process not understood. Only yesterday’s snapshot data would be available for restore.
- While some of the customers might have known the existence of a non-prod environment, they have no idea who / how to get the environment refreshed from production, how to migrate objects across environments, or even the proper role of a test environment.
Common deliverables from NSPB assessment engagements:
- All reports return data in under 10 seconds
- Backups implemented and pulled down to local servers
- Daily snapshot is pulled down to local windows servers and kept with a moving 20 day history
- Daily backups of data for budget and forecast are pulled down to local windows servers and kept with a moving 20 day history. This allows finance to check and restore data piecemeal instead of restoring the entire database.
- All statistical calculations validated with a proof template provided to document the logic for the business. Additional stats are also created per the clients direction
- Admin Guide
- Includes direction on how to properly use a test environment. Steps to populate test with production objects / data. How to migrate objects from the test environment (business rules, web forms) from test to production.
- All substitution variable usages documented and when they are to be updated
- Batch automation code listing of processes performing the backing up of data and snapshots
- Excel smartview vba reporting workbook which creates reports for all business units and copies them to a network drive share while also emailing the reports to the specified users by business unit. These users do not need to log into the NSPB system to access the reports.
- Business rules which will perform mass updates to revenue and expense accounts / drivers based upon client direction (increase revenue rate by 10% for limited set of products / regions, decrease expenses for specific customers, etc)
- Security matrix design (10% of customers) / implemented to allow additional users access to the NSPB system without exposing salary information
hj