Hey - has anyone had a suite review before? What did you think of it?

From ACS?

Yeah.

Which ACS program are you looking at? I’m curious what others think about the SR. I think the value greatly depends on how much you engage with ACS and go through your pain points.

I am independent consultant that has worked with a handful of customers that adopted ACS. The SuiteReview process is an in depth analysis of your configuration and your business processes on NetSuite. While it depends on the caliber of the ACS team you get, my clients have found them useful and have followed the recommendations. The purpose is to identify the source of the main pain points that uses have with the system and then to plan to resolve them. Usually this is configuration changes, scripting, workflows, or suggested apps to bridge the functionality gap. It is like connecting your car to a diagnostic app. You get the error codes and then get guidance on how to fix it. You always retain the choice of fixing it or not.

Well this is our issue. Our suite review was utterly dreadful. We’re in the process of negotiating to get hours back as we think ACS has been dreadful for us, and we think a lot of our issues should have come up in a suite review. Example, they spent 9 months on our request of purchase order approvals, building custom scripts, only for a solution architect to tell us a few weeks ago that there’s a ready made up for this.

Your situation is all too common. I prefaced what I said with, it depends on what team that you get. Like all things there is a great disparity on the quality of the professional services and experience that you get. My clients were lucky at first and then I found a capable team and requested them for future clients. I probably should not have said that out loud. In general, my clients feel that ACS is a necessary evil, but they can't live without them. They know that the idea of needing ACS largely reflects a gap in their own knowledge of the system (if they have the right people) or a gap in staffing (just not enough people). Regardless, the hardest thing is that they can't find the words to articulate the value proposition to their leadership team so they kind of use wishy washy terms on why ACS is needed and then nobody gets it. Some think of them as the Sys Admin (they shouldn't be that), Help desk (nope), outsource IT department (maybe but not really). I think of them more as on call expertise. They are the "phone a friend" in case of emergency when they are not helping you create scripts, workflows, evaluate fit of SuiteBundles, or try to help a CFO make due on a promise he/she should not have made (part time magician). The good ones know finance process very well, know the software very well, and can articulate how you can bend the arc of your organization towards NetSuite for better outcomes.

hi @Matt. @NetSuite_Sherpa hit most of the high points

Thanks - yeah it does seem that we drew the short straw with the team they provided. Just to provide some detail on the suite review - for their ‘findings’ they pasted our spreadsheet of things we wanted them to fix for us this year into the review. For their recommendations, no exaggeration, it was literally just ‘complete high priority cases’ and ‘provide report/search assistance’. That’s why we’re feeling a bit aggrieved that when we ask around, the general consensus is that a suite review really deep digs into your solution and tells you what you could do better, what should be fixed and how we can do it. Not just throw our own list of requirements back at us and charge us 17 hours for it.

ugh