NetSuite for Project Management: Delivering Projects on Time and Budget

If you’ve ever worked on a project, whether it was rolling out a new product, implementing new software, or running a marketing campaign, you know how challenging it can be to keep everything on track. There are so many moving pieces to coordinate – teams, resources, tasks, timelines, budgets…the list goes on.

It’s no wonder so many projects end up going over deadline and over budget. Some studies have found that as many as 70% of projects fail due to missed deadlines, blown budgets, or lack of resources. That’s a pretty shocking statistic when you consider how much rides on successful project execution for businesses today.

I’ve certainly been there – staring at a million tasks and priorities, trying to figure out who is doing what by when, where the budget stands, if we have enough people allocated, and on and on. Making sure a complex project comes together seamlessly is enough to give any project manager grey hairs.

That’s why I’m such a big fan of NetSuite’s robust project management module. NetSuite is a leading cloud ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution that provides an incredibly powerful, yet user-friendly platform for managing every stage of the project lifecycle. With NetSuite as your project command center, you can kiss those project management headaches goodbye.

In this article, I’ll walk through all the ways NetSuite’s project management tools can help keep your projects running like a well-oiled machine – from planning and scheduling to resource and budget management to tracking and reporting. No more missed deadlines, blown budgets, or dropped balls. Let’s get those projects across the finish line on time and on budget!

Project Planning & Scheduling Made Easy We all know that flawless execution starts with a solid plan and schedule. With NetSuite’s intuitive project planning tools, you can easily map out your entire project plan – defining tasks, setting milestones, and establishing dependencies. The visual timeline views let you see everything at a glance so you can identify any potential scheduling conflicts or resource constraints right from the get-go.

One of my favorite things about the scheduling tools is the ability to create reusable project templates. These templates let you bake in best practices, formalize your processes, and capture everything you’ve learned from past projects. That way, you get a running start for every new project instead of reinventing the wheel each time.

You can also use templates to plan out different project methodologies or phases. For example, you could have one template for kicking off a new software implementation and another for rolling out a marketing campaign. Simple but powerful!

The Right Resources for the Right Tasks Of course, the best-laid plans won’t get you very far if you don’t have the resources lined up to execute on them. That’s why resource management is a core strength of NetSuite’s project management tools.

NetSuite gives you a complete view into resource capacities, capabilities, schedules, and allocation across all your projects. You can define employee roles and skill sets, see who is available when, and sufficiently staff up each of your projects. This centralized resource hub makes it easy to locate the right people for the right tasks and balance workloads accordingly.

No more overallocation headaches or scrambling to find someone with a specific skillset. You’ll have all the resource management information you need right at your fingertips.

Seamless Task Tracking & Team Collaboration
Once you have your plan and peopled lined up, it’s time to start executing. NetSuite’s task management and collaboration tools will be your new best friends for keeping everyone marching toward the same milestones.

Within the solution, you can easily create tasks, assign them to specific team members, set due dates, and monitor status in real-time. Team members can log their time directly against tasks to build a clean audit trail. They can also attach documents, provide updates, and surface dependencies or risks.

Project managers get a comprehensive dashboard to view all tasks, see what’s complete or running behind, assess resource workloads, and identify potential delays before they impact the timeline. At-a-glance traffic light indicators let you spot potential problem areas so you can take action to get things back on track.

The built-in team collaboration tools are also a huge plus for boosting productivity and keeping everyone aligned. No more endless email threads or scattered comments in different tools. With NetSuite, all your project communication happens in a central hub. You can @mention colleagues, provide real-time updates, share files, and even create discussion threads around specific tasks, issues, or deliverables.

Say Goodbye to Spreadsheet Accounting Nightmares Let’s talk budget. How many times have you found yourself driving blind when it comes to tracking project financials? Pulling numbers from all over the place into spreadsheets, trying to consolidate spending data, juggling invoices, the whole nightmare. NetSuite saves you from getting lost in that accounting black hole.

Since NetSuite is an integrated cloud ERP system, the project management module seamlessly unifies all your project financial data in one place. No more digging through documents or checking multiple sources to understand your budget status.

With NetSuite’s powerful project accounting capabilities, you can set budgets upfront, map out costs for labor, materials, expenses, track actuals against your budget, monitor profitability, manage billing and revenue recognition, and run any reports you need. It puts complete visibility into your project financials right at your program managers’ fingertips.