The good news is that the video is available, the bad news is that the video doesn’t show any of the demo screen itself.  It only shows the presenter, Jay Grady, Celigo’s Director of Product Marketing, talking through it.  But still, it provides a good description of the product.  Keep an eye out here or Celigo’s product pages for more video demos in the coming weeks.

As always, if you’re running an older version of the SmartClient we strongly encourage you to upgrade.  We’re committed to keeping up with changes in the NetSuite web services API, continuously improving performance, and addressing any shortcomings our (often fanatical) SmartClient customers report.  If you haven’t updated in a few months it’s a good idea!

SmartClient Webinar on NetSuite’s SuiteApp.com

And if you’re not familiar with what the SmartClient can do, or would like a quick refresher, why not check out the SuiteApp.com SmartClient Webinar we co-hosted with NetSuite back in March of 2011?  You’ll have to register as part of the process, but that only takes a moment.  Aside from some technical glitches we had at the outset, the webinar was considered a great success and we received a lot of positive feedback.  In this 40+ minute demonstration you’ll:

• See some general use cases for the SmartClient
• View a live demonstration from a real customer using it to solve real world business process problems
• Understand how it interacts with NetSuite records
• Understand how it makes for a great off-line data entry tool, or near replacement for CSV imports & Mass Updates
• Learn a few things about Celigo along the way

Watch it over coffee one morning, or while you eat lunch at your desk.  It’s well worth it.  For those in a hurry, you can always check out the Celigo YouTube channel for a quick overview or some short “How To” videos.

Thanks!
The Celigo Product Team

SDN Partner of the Year … Again!

And as if that wasn’t enough! Celigo won the SuiteCloud Developer Network (SDN) Partner of the Year Award for the second year in a row!. We’re both proud and humbled to be recognized given the caliber of companies in the NetSuite partner ecosystem, and we could not have done it without you, our customers.

Photo: Celigo Founder & President Jan Arendtsz (3rd from left), accepts Partner of the Year Award from NetSuite Chief Operating Officer Jim McGeever (right) and Guido Harmmans, VP of the SuiteCloud Developer Network.(left)

Hold The Press!!

The press coverage of SuiteWorld was generally very positive, and the live demo of Celigo’s Google Apps integration garnered high praise in various articles and blogs. Our favorite came from Ben Kepes:

“…Roll on a year later and I take my hat off to Celigo – their offering is truly sublime. The depth of the NetSuite generated information they’re exposing directly within Gmail is amazing. I bumped into Google enterprise lead Scott McMullan in San Francisco and discussed Celigo’s offering with him. he concurred with my view that what Celigo are doing is absolutely at the cutting edge of direct, in-UI integrations with Gmail”

Thanks Ben! We’re excited about CloudExtend for Google Apps not only for what it already has and what we were able to demonstrate at SuiteWorld, but for what we plan on introducing as the rest of 2011 unfolds. We’re not done yet, not by a long shot. We’ll keep you posted.

Onward

After the events & awards we returned to our day jobs back at the Celigo ranch (no, it’s not really a ranch) put the SDN award on the shelf next to last year’s, and took stock in what we’d accomplished since Jan started Celigo in his garage in 2005 (true story). But there’s no rest for the weary. It was time to get back to work. And boy did we! The buzz generated a lot of interest in Celigo’s integration products and professional services, and we’re busier than ever bringing to fruition the “Cloud to Cloud” solutions our customers are asking for, as well as those organizations will surely require as they move their core business operations online with NetSuite and so many others.

Onward.

1) Updated Magento Item Export

The Magento item export is now a real-time sync that is triggered every time you save the record.

Supported item types:

• Inventory Item
• Serialized Inventory Item
• Lot Numbered Inventory Item
• NonInventoryItem for Sale
• NonInventoryItem for Resale
• OtherCharge for Sale
• OtherCharge for Resale
• Service for Sale
• Service for Resale

New features:

• Product creation in Magento–the item export now has the ability to create SKUs in Magento as well as update them.
• Product Category sync–you can assign NetSuite items to their corresponding Magento product category from NetSuite
• Attribute field export–the connector now has the ability to import your list of attribute and attribute sets into NetSuite, display them as special fields on your item record, and export these values to Magento.
• Managed update fields–Magento product fields will be managed by their NetSuite counterparts–clearing a field in NetSuite will clear the field in Magento
• Image export–item images from the NetSuite file cabinet are sync’d with the Magento product image gallery, and clearing an image link in NetSuite will remove the image in Magento
• Reverse sync–the item export can be run in reverse and import Magento data into NetSuite. Great for longtime Magento customers who are new to NetSuite

Upcoming enhancements:

• Export Matrix items (parent and child) from NetSuite to Magento
• Reverse sync imports Magento item images into NetSuite File Cabinet
• Multi-currency support in Reverse Sync tier price import

2) New Customer Export

The connector can now export NetSuite customers as new Magento customers.

Features:

• Sync NetSuite customer fields and addresses with Magento in real-time.
• Set the customer group this customer will belong to in Magento from NetSuite, as well as the password the customer will use when they log in to Magento.

Enhancements slated for future release:

• Update customers exported to Magento with data from NetSuite
• Export customers of type “Company” from NetSuite to Magento

3) New Order Export

The connector can now export NetSuite sales orders as new Magento orders in real-time once an order is saved in NetSuite.

Features:

• Export order SKUs, amounts, and shipping method from NetSuite to Magento
• Orders exported to Magento will be attached to the customer’s Magento record as if the order had come from Magento itself
• Orders exported to Magento are fully compatible with the NetSuite-Magento Shipping Sync

Upcoming enhancements:

• Update orders exported to Magento with data from NetSuite
• Override Magento’s shipping cost and tax amount rules with the actual values calculated in NetSuite

The Magento Connector 1.5.0 release is in limited beta right now, and we are looking for customers interested in being beta partners, both new and existing Celigo customers. If you are interested in participating in the beta please contact sales@celigo.com for more information. The Magento Connector 1.5.0 release will be available for the general public a few weeks after the beta period ends; keep checking the Celigo Blog for updates on the beta.

We’d love to hear from you–please leave a comment if you have any questions about the new functionality or you want to request a new feature.

We discussed what other customers do in this situation, and how they keep the count from getting that high. Below are the most common reasons and what you may be able to do about it.

• Long in the Tooth
• Removing Old Searches is Painful
• Lack of Training
• Employee Turnover
• Lack of Process
• Create & Save Permissions Abound

Long in the Tooth

It’s hard to believe, but NetSuite has been around for 13 years now. If you’ve been a NetSuite customer for several years, it’s not at all uncommon to have built up a kind of “search plaque” over time. I started using NetSuite in 2003 as a customer for the company I worked for at the time. Over the years more and more searches got built, but rarely were they removed. We had a few hundred when I left, and I thought *that* was high. It’s a good idea to have a regular review at regular intervals.

Removing Old Searches is Cumbersome

Sadly, NetSuite Saved Search management is cumbersome. It’s nice that you can search for them in a global search, but it’s not easy to make changes in ownership, naming, fields, or deletes in any kind of mass scale. Too bad, because I think this would be extremely helpful for customers. What you can do is use the “Show Inactives” check box in the Saved Search listing to quickly suppress those you or your organization no longer needs. You can always make them active again, and this has the added benefit of removing them from the Web Services tally.

Lack of Training

Let’s face it, we’ve all done it. We need to know something, so we hit the trusty Saved Searches “New” button and start adding criteria. Users that are new to NetSuite likely haven’t spent a lot of time learning about search filters or list views, so rather than building one search with a well thought out set of field filters, they build 8 of them with no standard naming convention. Just a small amount of training & education could go a long way toward improving efficiency for all concerned.

Employee Turnover

People move on. The searches they had remain … sigh … forever. Few go through their list and clean them up, change ownership, or assess whether or not they are still needed.

Lack of Process

I tend to put Saved Searches in two big buckets:

• Bucket #1 is the personal “Ad-Hoc” bucket. These are searches you’ve built for you or a small group, and are just temporary. Bucket #2 is the “Production Level” search. These are searches that are built with an entire department or team in mind, and are used on a regular, recurring basis to run parts of the business. The challenge is that these are typically created by a single person, shared, and end up growing organically. So no one really knows which searches are being used by whom and for what. The result is an ever growing pile of Saved Searches that never go away.
• Bucket #2 is easy to manage though with some rigor and process. A good approach is to make it part of the Administrators or IT department’s management process. You can build the search for them if you’d like, but ultimately they should be the ones that are the search “Owners” and can determine who the audience for that search needs to be. They should almost always be based on dynamic groups, roles, or departments. Using individual employees becomes a management nightmare over time.

Naming conventions help too. Maybe make it part of your NetSuite training or a best practices document for your organization.

Create & Save Permissions Lead to Redundancy

Does everyone need to be able to create new saved searches? I bet not. Is it time to review who can do what? Look at all the searches you’ve got and examine the ownership and “Last Run On” and “Last Run By” data. You can then make anything that’s gotten old or was created by employees no longer with your company inactive so they don’t show up in the search lists. Too often they’re recreating searches that already exist but aren’t available, or you have so many that it’s just easier to build a new one.

Visit the Celigo Help Center SmartClient page to download the latest SmartClient version if you haven’t updated recently.  And if you aren’t yet a subscriber, that’s fine.  You can use the same link to download and install the free 14 day trial.

I recall saying on the SuiteApp webinar that the most interesting part of my job here at Celigo is getting introduced to so many different businesses and business models around the world on a daily basis, and today was no exception.

I chatted with the CEO of AMS On Hold Messaging (www.onholdbusiness.com).  They’re a company that does nothing but sell messaging solutions & related services, and are using the SmartClient to manage & import hundreds of new Leads that come from various external sources on a regular basis in to NetSuite.  In a short phone call, we were able to build out a template that let them import the Lead names & contact info, some custom field values they have, and all of the address information for 400 new entries in minutes.  Very cool to watch.

We created a quick YouTube video on importing Leads that you can see here.  Check it out!

An online retail company specializing in branded apparel, clothing, and equipment, IslandSurf had chosen NetSuite as its business management solution. IslandSurf needed to implement a solution that automated the myriad of manual processes necessary to work with a 3rd party warehouse. They wanted to free up employees’ time to focus on more value-add activities and provide customers with a shorter wait time for orders to be fulfilled.

IslandSurf turned to Celigo for help. Celigo implemented a fully automated, bi-directional integration with IslandSurf’s 3rd party warehouse (AtLast Fulfillment); supporting AtLast Fulfillment’s XML file format. This integration:

• Pushes sales orders to AtLast Fulfillment.
• Imports shipment confirmations into NetSuite.
• Imports Inventory Adjustments into NetSuite.
• Provides multi-location fulfillment routing.

IslandSurf realized numerous benefits from Celigo’s solution – including:

• Order turnaround time decreased by at least 50%.
• Man-hours were reduced by 20%.
• Customer satisfaction increased.

Case Study Details

IslandSurf’s Challenges

IslandSurf had selected NetSuite as its software platform and knew that they could not implement NetSuite without a solid 3PL solution. They required a solution that would automate their 3rd party warehouse processes to better serve their customers and be more efficient.

As it was, IslandSurf spent much time and energy manually doing the following:

• flag orders that need to be sent to AtLast Fulfillment
• export just those orders
• cancel any items on the order that shouldn’t be fulfilled at AtLast Fulfillment
• track and manually update the sales orders once they were fulfilled

Celigo Solution

Celigo’s 3PL solution provides IslandSurf with a fully automated, bi-directional integration with AtLast Fulfillment. Supporting AtLast Fulfillment’s XML file format, Celigo puts and grabs files off an FTP site, runs logic against the orders and fulfillments, and pushes this data into NetSuite.

In addition to the standard 3PL solution, Celigo implemented a custom SuiteScript that allows IslandSurf to rank locations in order of fulfillment priority. For a given order, Celigo’s solution determines the fulfillment preferences and tries to commit inventory from a single location. As necessary, the solution splits the fulfillment across locations, including AtLast Fulfillment. Furthermore, if a backorder is necessary, Celigo’s solution assigns the items to ship from the default backorder location.

With Celigo’s combined 3PL and custom SuiteScript solution, IslandSurf no longer manually flags and splits orders to be partially fulfilled or fulfilled via different locations. Celigo’s solution does this for them – only sending the necessary items to AtLast Fulfillment.

Being in retail, IslandSurf processes a high volume of transactions each day. With Celigo’s 3PL solution, over 80,000 orders have been processed successfully in this automated fashion.

When asked what his favorite aspect of the solution is, Kelly Izer, COO of IslandSurf, said, “The headache factor – there isn’t one. It’s seamless. It just works!” Additionally, Kelly also appreciates the ease of use when it comes to status checking and troubleshooting. Using the Integration Dashboard that comes with Celigo’s 3PL solution, Kelly can easily see when the integration ran (every hour), how many orders were processed, and if there is an issue, what the issue is.

The Bottom Line

The benefits and returns that IslandSurf realizes from Celigo’s 3PL are numerous.

Order turnaround time decreased by at least 50%

• Prior to the Celigo 3PL solution, since it took IslandSurf so much time to send orders to AtLast Fulfillment, they could only send orders once per day.
• With Celigo’s solution, they now send orders to the warehouse every hour, decreasing delivery time to customers Man-hours were reduced by 20%

• IslandSurf was able to repurpose employees’ time towards more value-add activities, since orders no longer have to manually flagged, sent, tracked, and updated. The Celigo solution has saved hundreds of hours for IslandSurf.
• Additionally, IslandSurf did not need to hire someone to move orders back and forth during peak seasons

All in all, IslandSurf finds the Celigo 3PL solution integral to their business, enabling them to focus on growing their business and further increasing customer satisfaction.

The Grove’s existing NetSuite web store was built only via the out-of-box capabilities available in NetSuite. This existing web store did not provide customers with the kind of interaction The Grove wanted to provide, and the web store was not able to support certain revenue streams and the company’s continued growth. The customer experience was not clean and easy, the web store did not provide the image The Grove desired, and the web store didn’t meet all of The Grove’s needs.

Additionally, The Grove needed a new vendor that had the necessary NetSuite expertise to design the right solution, execute on the design with accuracy and confidence, and deliver as promised. The Grove knew they wanted a web store that was technologically advanced and they needed a reliable, experienced partner to help them get there.

Celigo Solution

Celigo provided a cutting-edge web store for The Grove that “pushed the limits” of NetSuite ecommerce. Using a combination of suitelets, scripts, custom records, and custom web pages, Celigo was able to build an advanced web store that met The Grove’s high design aesthetic while still utilizing standard NetSuite functionality as the shell within which the web store was built and delivered.

The Grove’s unique product families and groupings – and the customer experience they wanted to provide – presented a unique challenge during the design of the web store. Celigo devised a way to bypass the standard NetSuite product catalog and templates in order to meet the following requirements:

• present related products in an easy-to-select method on one page
• enable customers to add multiple items to the cart on one page
• bring together different groupings of products together on one page and purchase without leaving that page

The following examples highlight how Celigo implemented unique, cutting-edge components into The Grove’s web store.

• Script-Enabled Custom Item Detail Pages: In order to accommodate The Grove’s requirements to streamline and clean the user experience when purchasing and checking out, Celigo created a custom page to present the item details. Using a custom record and SuiteScripts, Celigo created an item detail page that allows a customer to add multiple items to the cart on one page. The item detail page allows a customer to select item variations from a drop-down list and then click an “Add Another Item” button as many times as necessary – without ever having to leave this page, go back, and select the next item to purchase.
• Suitelet that Dynamically Filters Product Categories & Items: On the web store home page, the page body is a custom suitelet that dynamically presents the products when a user clicks on a product category (i.e. Top Tools). This enables The Grove to quickly and easily assign items to these categories and for the web store to automatically present the correct items to the users as they click through the store.

These features, along with the standard NetSuite shopping cart and checkout process, allowed Celigo to deliver a sophisticated yet streamlined shopping experience to The Grove’s customers – and a web store that took the best of standard NetSuite functionality, paired it with the best of NetSuite’s customization capabilities, and met the functional and budget requirements for The Grove.

The Bottom Line

As Bobby Pardini, The Grove’s Director of the Design Solutions Group, said, “This web store project with Celigo was as seamless a development process as I could imagine one to be. The Celigo team totally executed. When necessary, they gave us options and always figured out a solution.”

Celigo provided The Grove with a professional ecommerce solution that:

• increased revenue by supporting a new digital download revenue stream
• opens possibilities for The Grove to create new revenue streams
• provides a sophisticated yet streamlined customer experience
• can grow with the business

Their customers love the ease with which they can find products and information on the new web store and are thrilled with new features such as digital downloads. This new web store has positively impacted revenue, increased customer satisfaction, and maintains the same high-quality image that The Grove has built.

Lumens Light + Living, a company dedicated to offering the very best of design-oriented lighting, fans and home accessories, needed a way to get accurate, consistent feedback from customers on their level of satisfaction with Lumens. Whether the customer walked into the store to make a purchase, shopped via the web, placed a phone order, or requested an installer to do the work, Lumens just had a feeling about customer satisfaction; they did not have a solid gauge of how well they were doing and whether they needed to improve certain areas. And since customers come from various points of entry, Lumens needed a way to ask questions specific to a point of entry and weight what’s more important if a customer purchases in-store versus over the web.

Lumens had recently implemented Netsuite to help manage their business and wanted a customer satisfaction survey that was integrated with Netsuite and transaction-based. Since most survey solutions that Lumens looked at were not based on transactional events (such as a purchase or installation), Lumens turned to Celigo to extend Netsuite and build a solution within Netsuite’s inherent customization capabilities.

Celigo Solution

With its deep expertise of Netsuite and commitment to client satisfaction, Celigo was able to build a solution that not only met Lumens’ needs for an integrated customer survey tool, but that also has been re-purposed for other transactional communication that Lumens has with its customers.

Using custom records, suite scripts, email templates, formula fields, saved searches, and KPIs, Celigo created a solution that sends automated surveys that are relevant to the transaction type and place, tallies the results using a ranked scoring system, and sends and displays satisfaction metrics to the relevant Lumens stakeholders, such as the service employee and department manager.

Celigo’s survey management solution for Netsuite is comprised of 3 key components:

• Logic that sends automated emails to a target audience. The target audience is dynamically retrieved via saved searches, enabling Lumens to manage and modify the target audience at any time using basic saved search functionality. The email sent is based upon the transaction type, ensuring that the right questions are asked for the specific transaction.
• Online satisfaction survey forms that maintain Lumen’s corporate branding and are automatically linked to and accessible via the transaction record, enabling Lumen’s employees and managers to extend their 360-degree view of the customer to include the satisfaction surveys the customer has completed.
• Ability to rank and weight survey questions and responses as well as score the responses, enabling Lumens to accurately capture customer satisfaction metrics that are relevant to the type of transaction.

When asked what her favorite aspect of the solution is, Jenny Thielen, Lumen’s Web Operations Manager, said “Any number of different transactions that we want to communicate with customers about, we can re-purpose the script to do that.” Celigo implemented the solution using parameters throughout, so that Lumens can simply change the content of the parameters to re-use and re-purpose them. Celigo put the solution in the hands of the client so that Lumens is able to maintain and re-use the solution themselves.

Benefits

“What started out as a script to follow up with customers and rate the experience with Lumens customer service, installation services, and retail showroom experience moved into the overall communications we have with customers regarding estimated shipping dates and fulfilling orders.” Jenny said.

Lumens has re-purposed the survey solution in many ways. Most impactful is their use of the solution to communicate with customers regarding estimated ship dates. Before re-purposing the Celigo solution for this use, Lumens was “limping along communicating estimated ship dates.” It was a completely manual process, using plain text emails that an individual had to create and send. In approximately 8 months, the automated solution has sent approximately 13,000 email communications to customers regarding ship dates.

Because Lumens had implemented the survey solution that Celigo created, they had been tracking customer satisfaction around communication of ship dates. Jenny said “We immediately saw a significant increase in customer satisfaction when we implemented the estimated ship dates automated communication structure. We saw an almost a one-point increase in satisfaction on a scale of 1-5.”

The Mac Address Book automatically creates a contact record for the current user. This entry has a “me” icon emblem. For example, in the screen shot below, the current user is “Guest Account” and is symbolized with a head icon emblem in the contact list and the “me” icon emblem on the detailed contact record.

The NetSuite login email address must be added to the current user’s contact record – this “me” contact record.  If this is not done, declined events will still be displayed on your iCal with the “declined” icon next to your attendee listing.

To complete the settings, ensure the email address you are using to login to Netsuite (pictured below) is also added to the “me” contact record for your Address Book entry.