NetSuite Goes More Global With OneWorld ERPNetSuite Goes More Global With OneWorld ERP

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You can never be too global, particularly if the name of your product is "OneWorld." That's why software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor NetSuite has amped up tax compliance and language support with the latest release of its OneWorld ERP suite while also improving financial consolidation, inventory management, and analytics functionality.

OneWorld was already global in that it supported 190 currencies and 15 languages, but with OneWorld 2011, announced on Wednesday, NetSuite expanded to 40 the number of tax and audit compliance jurisdictions supported out of the box, up from seven previously. That means OneWorld is now capable of delivering highly formatted tax and audit reports to authorities in that many more jurisdictions. If you're doing business in Europe or Singapore, for example, these canned reports make it a simple matter to export the general ledger to tax authorities in standard electronic formats. NetSuite also added Dutch and French Canadian language support, bringing the total number of languages supported to 17.

"NetSuite OneWorld meets the broadest set of requirements, in terms of languages, currencies, tax reporting, and local accounting regulations, of any cloud-based ERP solution," said Paul Turner, NetSuite's senior director of product marketing, in an interview with information.

That's not a tough claim to make considering that SAP's SaaS-based Business ByDesign suite is fairly new and that Workday has not aspired to global coverage. Otherwise, NetSuite's global-footprint competitors are mostly on-premises for now, though Microsoft has announced its intention to take Dynamics ERP into the cloud.

[ Want more on NetSuite? Read NetSuite Teams With Informatica To Sync ERP. ]

Other upgrades delivered through OneWorld 2011 include financial consolidation advances such as automation of inter-company eliminations and self-service drill down so analysts can see related elimination journal entries posted to intercompany accounts. Period-close capabilities have also been enhanced so managers can lock accounting modules on a subsidiary-by-subsidiary basis, improving control and accountability during close periods.

NetSuite OneWorld 2011 provides manufacturing and wholesale distribution companies new Standard Costing functionality that makes it easy to spot production and procurement cost-saving opportunities. A new vendor bill approval routing feature helps companies reconcile invoices against purchase orders, reducing the risk of over-billing. In addition, a new Fixed Asset Management module tracks depreciating and non-depreciating assets. The module offers standard depreciation methods or you can add custom methods to handle assets ranging from laptops to vehicles, with reports said to be available on fixed assets by location, subsidiary, asset types, and more.

In an improvement in analytic reporting, OneWorld 2011 delivers real-time OLAP-style multi-dimensional analytics. These Pivot analytics let business users slice and dice every dimension and metric available to support root-cause analysis. Also in the analytic vein, the suite's CRM app gains Product Affinity analytics said to drive more effective up-sell and cross-sell promotional, advertising and sales campaigns.

In a final upgrade aimed at keeping OneWorld (and other NetSuite apps) in sync with the latest Web development approaches, NetSuite's SuiteCloud development platform now provides a REST application programming interface. NetSuite said this will make it easier for developers to build mobile apps and Web-based integrations with NetSuite.

In a separate announcement on Wednesday, NetSuite announced a partnership with CA through which it will use that vendor's Arcot WebFort authentication system to support a range of authentication methods. NetSuite says the partnership will enhance its two-factor authentication capabilities, an approach some customers insist on when working with cloud-based applications.