The world is rapidly transitioning towards a more sustainable future powered by renewable energy. As businesses in the green energy sector scale up to meet soaring demand, they need robust and flexible enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to optimize operations, drive efficiency, and support rapid business growth. This is where NetSuite ERP shines as the ideal software platform to power green energy companies to new heights of success.
NetSuite is a comprehensive, cloud-based ERP system that unifies all key business processes – from accounting and financial management to inventory, supply chain, CRM and more – into a single integrated platform. For fast-growing renewable energy businesses, NetSuite provides the agility, automation, and real-time visibility needed to make smart decisions, adapt quickly to change, and scale the business smoothly.
At its core, NetSuite was built as a true cloud solution from day one. This means energy companies can avoid the high upfront costs, complexities and limitations of traditional on-premise ERP installations. NetSuite is accessible anytime, anywhere via a simple web browser interface, enabling seamless remote work and productivity on-the-go for distributed energy teams. Automatic software updates ensure companies are always current with the latest features, capabilities and security improvements.
But beyond just providing a flexible and scalable modern ERP foundation, NetSuite offers specific functionality and pre-built tools tailored for the unique needs of green energy businesses:
Robust Financial Management for Complex Energy Business Models
Energy businesses, whether solar installers or wind farm operators, have complicated financial needs spanning project accounting, recurring billing schedules, revenue recognition rules, multi-entity consolidation, joint venture structures, and more. NetSuite streamlines and simplifies energy financials with its powerful and dynamic general ledger, flexible reporting tools, and automated billing capabilities.
Its advanced project accounting features allow detailed capturing of all associated costs, billings and recognized revenues to provide complete and real-time visibility into individual project statuses and profitability. Automated percent complete revenue recognition, amortization schedules, and GAAP-compliant recurring billing funcationality help handle complex revenue scenarios. Multi-company, multi-currency and multi-tax capabilities enable simplified roll-up, consolidation and reporting across subsidiaries and geographies.
With a unified financial core, NetSuite gives energy CFOs and finance teams complete real-time visibility into financial performance metrics, accelerates period-end closes, and ensures a perpetual state of audit-readiness. Built-in planning, budgeting and forecasting tools enable more accurate, agile plans powered by real-time actuals and multi-dimensional analysis.
Optimizing Energy Project Delivery and Service Operations
Green energy companies are constantly managing a dynamic mix of project implementations and ongoing services, from initial solar and wind installs to regular maintenance, repairs and upgrades. NetSuite offers versatile project and case management functionality to efficiently manage the complete lifecycle while maximizing resource utilization, team collaboration, and service quality.
Using NetSuite, energy project managers can collaboratively track and monitor all project activities, deliverables, schedules, and costs in real-time to proactively avoid potential delays or cost overruns. Interactive Gantt charts provide clear visual representations of timelines and dependencies. Real-time information on specific tasks, milestones and budget consumption keep projects on track. Automated alerts and approval workflows help identify any project issues before they escalate.
Meanwhile, the case management system automates the logging, assignment, escalation, tracking and resolution of all inbound energy service issues and requests. Service managers gain complete visibility into open cases, aging, workloads, and KPIs to optimize service delivery. Root cause analysis identifies persistent problem areas for proactive prevention. Mobile field service access empowers techs with the customer data, asset records and knowledge base to resolve issues onsite in real-time.
By managing projects and services cohesively in NetSuite, energy companies can enhance operational efficiency, service quality, and customer satisfaction while minimizing revenue leakage and unnecessary costs. Real-time metrics and KPIs provide the granular insights to continuously optimize projects and services.
Driving Lean, Responsive Renewable Energy Supply Chains
Supply chains for green energy components like wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and cabling are inherently complex, with long lead times, extensive regulatory requirements, limited suppliers and intricate reverse logistics considerations for reuse/recycling. NetSuite provides robust supply chain management tools to streamline and optimize end-to-end procurement, manufacturing, logistics, reverse logistics and more.
Powerful demand planning features accurately forecast customer needs while considering key supply constraints and lead times. Intelligent inventory management optimizes stock levels across locations and improves turns while automated replenishment prevents shortages. Vendor management tools track supplier performance and regulatory compliance. Lot and serial tracking ensures complete traceability and auditability.
Automating the complete procure-to-pay process with online vendor portals, purchase requisitions, auto-POs, and three-way invoice matching accelerates procurement cycles while improving accuracy. Optimizing fulfillment with consolidated shipments and dynamic route planning enhances logistics efficiencies and expedites critical parts to projects. Wireless barcode scanning and system-directed put-away improve precision in warehouse and yard operations.
Robust returns management capabilities automates the processing of warranty claims, RMAs, parts receipt/inspection, credits, repairs, refurbishments, recycling, disposal and revenue recovery to streamline reverse supply chain logistics flows. Capturing detailed supply chain cost and performance metrics provide the insights to negotiate better supplier terms, avoid excess inventory and emergency expedites, and reduce overall COGS.
By unifying all supply chain data and workflows within NetSuite, renewable energy companies can break down information silos, improve coordination, and enable more precise orchestration to fulfill project and service supply needs more efficiently, cost-effectively and sustainably.
Supporting Exponential Green Energy Sales Growth at Scale
The sales opportunities for green energy products and services are growing exponentially as adoption accelerates globally. Energy companies need scalable, integrated CRM tools to fully capitalize on the surging demand. NetSuite CRM provides a complete 360-degree view of every customer touchpoint and interaction across the entire customer journey.
Lead and opportunity management capabilities help methodically track and advance all potential deals across long, complex energy sales cycles. Sophisticated renewals management maximizes recurring service contract revenue. Upsell/cross-sell recommendations help grow deal sizes and share of wallet. Mobile CRM access empowers energy reps in the field with real-time customer data and sales insights to progress deals and build relationships anywhere. Advanced planning and forecasting features accurately predict bookings.
CPQ functionality quickly configures, prices and quotes intricate energy system and service contracts, while advanced ecommerce storefronts allow customers to seamlessly self-research and purchase – together accelerating sales cycles. Partner relationship management optimizes and expands indirect sales through installer/reseller networks. Flexible subscription-based billing and revenue recognition seamlessly handles a growing volume and variety of recurring revenue streams.
Deep real-time integration with ERP processes like accounting, inventory availability, order fulfillment and service delivery ensures perfect energy orders and a holistic customer experience. Incentive compensation management motivates sales teams to achieve peak performance. Intuitive sales analytics with real-time pipeline tracking and KPIs allow leadership to continually optimize sales strategy, planning and execution.
Armed with NetSuite CRM, green energy sellers can efficiently identify and cultivate customers, personalize interactions at scale, and rapidly grow sales. Delivering a seamless, unified customer experience across all touchpoints and channels builds brand loyalty and maximizes long-term customer lifetime value.
Ensuring Proactive Green Energy Regulatory Compliance
The green energy industry is subject to stringent and constantly evolving regulations, incentive programs and reporting requirements that vary across jurisdictions. Companies must meticulously track compliance to avoid penalties, legal liabilities and reputational damage. NetSuite provides robust compliance management tools to ensure energy companies meet all obligations thoroughly and efficiently.
Pre-built compliance and regulatory reporting capabilities streamline the generation and filing of all mandatory energy industry reports and disclosures to government agencies and regulators. Secure audit trails and tight access controls ensure data integrity and separation of duties. Advanced compliance dashboards proactively monitor the status of all compliance tasks and deliverables and alert to any issues.
Embedded quality management workflows enforce QA checks and multi-step approvals across energy supply chains and service processes to meet standards and specs. Health and safety features track all related incidents, insurance claims, personnel certifications, training and compliance activities. Built-in document management organizes and secures all supporting compliance documentation and evidence.
Leveraging NetSuite’s automated compliance management functions, renewable energy organizations can offload the administrative burden and costs of compliance while providing the visibility and documentation to build trust with customers, partners, investors, regulators and other stakeholders.
Tracking and Improving Energy Sustainability Metrics
Quantifying and demonstrating sustainability progress and impacts to investors, regulators and the public is an increasingly important imperative for green energy companies. NetSuite makes environmental, social and governance (ESG) tracking and reporting an automated, integral part of day-to-day business processes.
Customizable tagging frameworks allow easy coding of key financial transactions, fixed asset records, projects, supply chain activities and service delivery with relevant sustainability categories for detailed impact analysis and reporting. With tags, managers can track and report a complete view of clean energy capacity added, carbon emissions reduced, water conserved, LEED certifications achieved, green jobs created and more – by individual project, customer site, facility or company-wide.
Interactive dashboards and data visualizations provide at-a-glance views of progress towards sustainability targets and metrics. Advanced multi-dimensional analysis like period-over-period trend reporting and drill-down roll-ups enable deeper sustainability insights. Automated alerts flag any unexpected increases in energy consumption or emissions metrics by source for proactive investigation and remediation.
With ESG measurement natively integrated into daily operations, NetSuite enables energy companies to produce complete, audit-ready sustainability reports and disclosures for diverse stakeholders on-demand. Data-driven charts and visualizations powerfully communicate green energy achievements and impacts to build credibility and brand value.
Case Studies: NetSuite Powers Green Energy Innovators to Thrive
Forward-thinking renewable energy companies across the industry spectrum are increasingly running their business on NetSuite to enable their next stage of growth and success:
– Apex Clean Energy, a leading utility-scale wind, solar and storage developer, deployed NetSuite to support its exponential 700% growth while streamlining project management across an intricate lifecycle from early-stage origination through financing, construction and long-term operation.
– Saturn Power, an independent clean energy project developer, owner and operator, extensively automated core processes in NetSuite to efficiently handle high-volume financial transactions across its expanding portfolio of hundreds of distributed solar and wind projects.
– Elevation, a top residential solar installer, leveraged NetSuite CRM to scale its sales operations nationally by automating lead-to-installation workflows, while the integrated ERP backbone supported a 5X increase in installation volume with improved margins.
– Borrego, a major commercial solar EPC, unified its multiple energy-related subsidiaries on NetSuite while heavily customizing workflows to accommodate a wide variety of specialized utility-scale project scenarios, enabling a 300% increase in overall revenue without additional overhead.
– OneEnergy Renewables, an innovative clean energy infrastructure developer, customized NetSuite processes to handle highly unique deal structures, complex multi-tier investor waterfall calculations, variable state renewable energy credit schemes, and intricate long-tail customer billing schedules.
By consolidating onto the NetSuite platform, these diverse renewable energy companies achieved operational efficiencies, financial visibility, process controls and business agility not possible with fragmented point solutions or spreadsheets. Equipped with an integrated, flexible and scalable system of record, they can focus time and resources on advancing their clean energy missions and accelerating growth.
Empowering the Clean Energy Future with NetSuite
As adoption of renewable energy reaches an exponential inflection point globally, there has never been a better time for green energy companies to harness an ERP platform purpose-built to power rapid growth. NetSuite provides comprehensive and tailored solutions to solve the industry’s most pressing financial management, operational optimization, supply chain orchestration, regulatory compliance, and ESG reporting challenges – today and tomorrow.
From the CFO focused on ensuring healthy cash flows to the project manager juggling resources and schedules, and from the warehouse manager balancing availability with costs to the CEO making strategic growth decisions, NetSuite empowers every energy stakeholder with the process automation, data-driven insights and business agility they need to succeed.
Equipping more green energy businesses with the tools to operate with maximum efficiency and agility ultimately helps accelerate the entire planet’s critical transition to a cleaner, more sustainable and energy-independent future. As the renewable energy revolution unfolds, NetSuite stands ready to help innovative companies lead the charge in combating climate change and building a brighter world powered by green energy.
Renewable energy companies evaluating ERP systems should prioritize solutions like NetSuite that are built in the cloud, offer a unified data platform, provide industry-specific functionality, and most importantly – are proven to deliver rapid time-to-value at scale. In the dynamic market landscape, adaptability is essential. Green energy leaders need agile tools that can evolve as their business changes.
Adopting an ERP platform is a strategic investment. Renewable energy decision-makers should consider the breadth of solutions, depth of industry expertise, financial stability and committed focus of potential ERP partners for the long-term. NetSuite has a proven track record of successful clean energy deployments and an extensive ecosystem of experienced implementation partners to mitigate risk.
As green energy companies mature, their business requirements will inevitably increase in complexity. Selecting an ERP system that has the flexibility to support both current and future needs is critical to avoid costly re-implementations or integrations down the line. NetSuite’s robust and expanding platform can scale and adapt as sustainable energy enterprises expand to new markets, offerings, and business models.
For renewable energy organizations on a rapid growth trajectory, the opportunity costs of ad-hoc manual processes and fragmented systems are simply too high. Moving to a world-class ERP solution to automate operations, optimize performance and better serve customers is imperative to compete at scale. The clean energy companies that can innovate and execute faster will be poised to lead the imminent global energy transition.
Embracing digital transformation with a unified, best-in-class ERP platform is no longer a nice-to-have for green energy leaders, but a must-have to survive and thrive. As more renewable energy visionaries run on NetSuite, they can drive their business faster, make better decisions, and shape a flourishing future for both their companies and the planet. The time to power our clean energy future is now.
NetSuite ERP is a cloud-based solution that integrates all essential business processes, such as accounting, supply chain management, CRM, and project management, into one unified platform. Its scalability, automation, and real-time visibility help renewable energy companies optimize operations, manage complex financials, and scale efficiently to meet growing demand.
NetSuite simplifies financial management with advanced tools for project accounting, recurring billing, multi-entity consolidation, and revenue recognition. It provides real-time financial visibility, accelerates period-end closes, and ensures compliance with standards like GAAP while enabling efficient budgeting and forecasting.
Yes, NetSuite offers robust project management capabilities, including real-time tracking of tasks, milestones, budgets, and timelines. Interactive Gantt charts, automated alerts, and approval workflows help project managers identify and resolve issues proactively, ensuring projects stay on schedule and within budget.
NetSuite enhances supply chain efficiency through demand planning, inventory optimization, vendor management, and automation of procurement processes. It also supports lot and serial tracking, reverse logistics, and regulatory compliance, enabling seamless coordination across complex supply chains.
NetSuite CRM provides tools for lead management, opportunity tracking, and customer relationship building. Features like CPQ, renewals management, and partner relationship management streamline the sales process, while advanced forecasting and mobile access empower sales teams to close deals effectively.
NetSuite includes pre-built compliance reporting, secure audit trails, and advanced dashboards for monitoring regulatory tasks. It supports QA checks, health and safety tracking, and document management, ensuring adherence to industry standards and minimizing compliance risks.
NetSuite integrates ESG tracking into daily operations using customizable tags for transactions, projects, and assets. This enables detailed reporting on metrics like carbon emissions reduced, clean energy capacity added, and water conservation, helping companies meet sustainability goals and communicate progress to stakeholders.
Yes, NetSuite’s cloud-based infrastructure and scalable features make it an excellent choice for startups. It minimizes upfront costs, provides automation to reduce manual tasks, and offers the flexibility to adapt as the business grows.
As a true cloud solution, NetSuite is accessible from anywhere via a web browser. This allows distributed teams to collaborate seamlessly, access real-time data, and maintain productivity regardless of location.
Yes, companies like Apex Clean Energy, Saturn Power, and Borrego have achieved significant growth and operational efficiencies with NetSuite. For example, Apex Clean Energy managed a 700% growth, while Borrego unified its subsidiaries and increased revenue by 300% without additional overhead.
