NSAW Aims to Make Your Analytics Easier – and More Comprehensive

Myers-Holum, Inc. (MHI) participated extensively in the NetSuite Analytics Warehouse (NSAW) beta program, providing feedback to the NSAW product team on analytic content and the NSAW feature set. With significant expertise in the underlying Oracle Cloud technologies: ADW and OAC, MHI was in a unique position to provide input on NSAW. We sat down with Knute Holum, EVP at MHI to get the full story on the newly available NetSuite Analytics Warehouse.

Backgrounder: What is NSAW?

NSAW is built with Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) and delivers financial and operational metrics across the enterprise. NSAW pulls data in at automated intervals, takes snapshots and analyzes NetSuite data along with data from other systems. NSAW connects the data across Oracle NetSuite ERP, ADW and OAC for a truly 360-degree view of your enterprise data. To see NSAW in action, make sure to attend the MHI demo on October 20, 11 PDT at SuiteWorld in Vegas or view the MHI demo virtually on SuiteWorld On Air.

What is generating all the excitement about NSAW?

Knute Holum - Many of our customers tell us that they really need a reliable system for advanced analytics and business intelligence. They want a BI tool that can pull data automatically from NetSuite and combine it with data from other cloud and on-premise business applications.

Connecting all the dots across an enterprise is critical for gaining a wholistic view of the business, and NSAW offers this. It’s the only tool built specifically for NetSuite, and it eliminates the need for error-prone personal spreadsheets, custom-built NetSuite data extraction, and third-party BI tools. Our customers are looking to run roll-up reports across their NetSuite ERP and other systems to get a comprehensive picture of procurement, sales, manufacturing and inventory, then be able to drill down to see transactional detail.

How technical do you have to be to use NSAW?

Knute Holum - NSAW is very user friendly; it’s meant for businesspeople and yet it offers a lot of flexibility. You have a workspace that you can use to build an analysis. You put various visualizations on a canvas and then you can have multiple canvases grouped in a project. For example, you might have a sales order analysis, a channel analysis and so forth. That is the metaphor for how you build a visualization project on canvases. Or, say you are building your own KPIs and those KPIs are driving a formula and functions so you can tailor all these to your own specific needs. Applying a filter for the resulting visualizations is simply a drag-and-drop action.

So we get all these beautiful overview visualizations, but if we have detailed questions about specific data, how difficult is it to drill down?

Knute Holum - You can drill down to whatever level you need to for your analysis. You start with your data and then get the big visualization, and then drill back down from there. You can see back to which part of your sales or your inventory, etc., which you need to improve from any particular visualization.

Does NSAW leverage machine learning?

Knute Holum - Yes, machine learning is definitely a big part of the value proposition for NSAW. Many of our clients are going to be interested in predictive analytics to do tasks such as sales and demand forecasting, inventory forecasting, and fraud detection to name a few. There are any number of use cases that are driven by machine learning, which is baked into both the Autonomous Data Warehouse and OAC. This level of capability has typically been available only in enterprise class analytics toolsets. But with NSAW’s bundling of ADW and OAC, machine learning is now available to all NSAW users.

What role does MHI play in customizing NSAW for customers?

Knute Holum - Oracle NetSuite has designated Myers-Holum as the go-to Alliance Partner for adding external NetSuite data sources to NSAW and integrating them with data from NetSuite ERP. We are developing and prepackaging a number of third-party integration use cases that we know will provide the most value add to NSAW in the short term, such as Salesforce and Shopify. These are packaged integrations that we will have available in the next few months. We will continue to add to this list of pre-built, third-party integrations as we encounter the need in the market and for specific client projects. We are bundling up these integrations so that installing them into NSAW and integrating with NetSuite ERP data is quite straightforward during the implementation process.