We built a tool in NetSuite where a user can project next year’s revenue based on the current year’s sales figures from real-time data. This tool replaced an existing 6-month manual process. The tool allows business to simulate price changes, cancellation rates, and other assumptions to come up with the future year revenue forecast real-time, thus averting the risk of having to do the entire manual process again if the forecast does not meet revenue goals. We will share how we started the process from a concept note shared at an internal forum to a hackathon to create a prototype for user acceptance to the development of the final concept, and how we used agile scrum to bring our stakeholders together and results in terms of customer satisfaction, dollars saved, and process simplification.

The story that we are sharing is about how we replaced an existing manual and risky workflow of revenue forecasting with a newer semi-automated system within NetSuite using production real-time data.

Our Document Sales & Servicing scrum team at CUNA Mutual Group was able to automate an existing manual workflow for revenue forecasting using NetSuite cloud. Revenue forecasting is a process by which we look at annual sales and project revenue for the upcoming year. The forecasting must be completed two weeks prior to January 1st of the upcoming year. This process is key to business operations. The existing workflow involved a dedicated IT person working closely with business to supply existing data and update new data over a three to four-month period. The existing workflow was constrained in the sense that every step of the process had to be correct for the next step to begin. In addition, there was a risk of having to redo all the steps if the revenue forecast did not meet the goal for the upcoming year. The existing process was tedious and often relied on outdated sales and revenue figures. This has now been replaced with a semi-automated system that is fed by real-time production data.
We will share timelines, thought processes, constraints, and stakeholder involvement in the process and final benefits that were realized because of this automation. In addition, we will also share the NetSuite functionality we used to create this tool that is beneficial to the NetSuite developer community, i.e., Custom Records, UI, Map/Reduce, Scheduled Script and many other native NetSuite features from jQuery and other JavaScript libraries to achieve this. We will share any pitfalls, our timeline, best practices we followed, future enhancements to this tool, and end-user tips for utilizing the new tool.