As businesses grapple with the sheer volume of enterprise data, the challenge isn’t just collecting it – it’s making sense of it. Without a cohesive approach to reporting, data quickly becomes a liability rather than an advantage. A sustainable ERP reporting strategy, built on clean, consistent and well-structured data, is the key to unlocking growth, profitability and a sharper competitive edge.
This blog explores how NetSuite Analytics Warehouse (NSAW) answers this need, offering a holistic approach to business reporting. From consolidating fragmented data scattered across systems to enabling deep insights with Oracle’s advanced technology, NSAW equips businesses with the tools to shift from data overload to on-point decision-making.
You can also read about how NetSuite Analytics Warehouse consolidates your data for richer business insights.
Oracle injected NetSuite with some serious analytics power
As the demand for more sophisticated analytics solutions grew, so too has NetSuite evolved its analytics capabilities – moving from simple dashboards to a fully-fledged analytics ecosystem capable of handling the complexities of modern business data. NetSuite users already have the standard analytics feature of NetSuite, which provides a foundation for custom reports and lightweight analytics. While useful, it can only access the data within NetSuite. And more often than not, NetSuite customers rely on third-party systems integrated with NetSuite.
Recognising the demand for deeper insights and seamless integration, NetSuite introduced NSAW, leveraging Oracle’s enterprise-grade technologies – Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) and Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC).
Bridging the gap with data lakes
NSAW functions like a data lake, acting as a central repository where businesses can store large volumes of raw data from multiple sources. This means companies don’t have to worry about structuring every piece of data upfront – they can store it as-is and tap into it when needed for analysis, reporting or predictive insights.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) – scalable and self-optimising
ADW provides the foundation for managing structured and unstructured data with:
- Dynamic scalability to adjust resources automatically based on demand.
- Self-optimising performance through machine learning-driven query tuning and indexing.
- Diverse data support, handling everything from financial records to IoT data.
- Built-in security, including encryption and autonomous patching.
Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) – actionable insights
OAC brings data to life with:
- AI-driven insights that uncover patterns and trends automatically.
- Customisable dashboards and visualisations for interactive exploration.
- Predictive analytics to forecast outcomes and inform decision-making.
Ultimately this pairing has given smaller NetSuite customers access to a platform that delivers a single source of truth, a flexible analytics engine and the capacity to grow alongside their business needs.
NetSuite Analytics Warehouse (NSAW) is purpose-built to address the real challenges of enterprise data management right inside of NetSuite. Here’s what it delivers:
Purpose-built for NetSuite users
NSAW connects with NetSuite modules through automatic data pipelines, delivering real-time access to critical data without the need for manual syncing or third-party tools. Designed with NetSuite customers in mind, it ensures instant insights where and when they’re needed and based on individual user roles.
Comprehensive data integration
NSAW also consolidates data from multiple sources – including NetSuite, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Shopify, CSV files and even historical data from legacy systems.
AI-powered Insights
NSAW leverages advanced AI capabilities to deliver smarter, faster and more actionable analytics:
- Auto-Insights: Automatically generates visualisations and rich text reports, highlighting key metrics, KPIs and trends.
- Explain: Identifies business drivers, anomalies and growth factors in a single click, offering context-aware insights.
- Oracle Analytics AI Assistant: A virtual assistant that provides intelligent, context-driven help via text answers and interactive visualisations.
- Ready-to-run AI models: Prebuilt models for predictive use cases like churn detection and inventory forecasting.
- AutoML: Automatically assigns predictive models to datasets based on user inputs and machine insights.
- Oracle Machine Learning (OML): Advanced tools for data scientists to build, train and deploy custom algorithms for specialised use cases.
Scalability and performance
Built on Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, NSAW automatically tunes, scales, provisions, and patches itself—eliminating the need for manual database management. This not only reduces IT overhead but also ensures consistent, high-speed performance even as data volumes grow. Businesses can analyse large datasets in real-time, run complex queries faster, and make data-driven decisions without delays.
Prebuilt subject areas make insights ready to go
NSAW comes with prebuilt subject areas and metrics for finance, sales, procurement and manufacturing. Whether tracking supply chain efficiency or analysing sales performance, businesses can hit the ground running without the usual setup delays.
Customisation that fits your needs
The prebuilt dashboards are helpful but NSAW also lets businesses customise visualisations, add unique metrics or create entirely new dashboards to fit their needs. It’s powerful enough to accommodate niche KPIs while remaining intuitive for teams to tailor without requiring deep technical expertise.
Seamless collaboration
NSAW includes in-module collaboration features, allowing users to add comments, questions and feedback directly on reports or cards.
Enterprise-grade security
Built on Oracle’s trusted cloud infrastructure, NSAW offers robust security ready to scale with your business.
- Role-based access controls ensure users can only access the data relevant to their roles.
- OKTA integration simplifies identity management, making it easier to manage access securely as your organisation grows.
- Transparent data encryption protects information both in transit and at rest.
- Multi-factor authentication adds an extra layer of user verification.
- Real-time activity monitoring detects and quickly addresses potential threats.
Real-world applications of NSAW
The true measure of a platform like NSAW lies in how it performs in the wild. Across industries – from manufacturing to retail – businesses are using NSAW to unlock new levels of strategic insight, streamline operations and foster a culture of data-driven decision-making.
In manufacturing, NSAW can be put to work tracking operational costs and optimising production efficiency. By integrating supply chain, manufacturing and NetSuite data, manufacturers can identify bottlenecks, streamline workflows and make real-time adjustments to labour allocation.
In retail, NSAW brings clarity to customer behaviours and sales trends. By combining eCommerce metrics with financial data, businesses can refine inventory strategies, forecast demand more accurately or create more targeted promotions.
For professional services, NSAW can be used to track project profitability by bringing together time tracking, billing and operational data into a single, clear view. This allows firms to pinpoint which projects are performing well and identify any costly inefficiencies.
What we predict for future NSAW releases
With each new release of NetSuite Analytics Warehouse, customers gain new functionality that ultimately delivers faster time to broader business insights. Based on Oracle’s focus areas for its technologies, NSAW’s current trajectory and industry wide trends, here’s what could be in the horizon:
- Expanded data connectors with more third-party platforms | Recent updates to NSAW, such as the addition of REST API connectors and preview integrations for platforms like Azure SQL and QuickBooks Online, suggest a focus on meeting the growing demand for integrating more systems into analytics workflows.
- Advanced AI capabilities with custom models and AutoML features | Oracle Analytics Cloud already includes AutoML and advanced AI tools like contextual insights and predictive models. Future updates may focus on enabling businesses to build and customise these models further – a common trend in enterprise analytics.
- Real-time streaming analytics for instant dashboard updates | The move towards faster refresh rates and segmented data updates in recent releases suggests Oracle may enhance NSAW to support near-real-time or streaming analytics, an increasingly in-demand feature in modern analytics tools.
- Enhanced automation with auto-suggested KPIs and dashboards | Automation features like auto-generated insights and dashboards are already part of Oracle Analytics Cloud. Expanding automation to dynamically suggest KPIs or preconfigure dashboards based on user activity would streamline NSAW’s analytics even further.
- Improved governance tools for data lineage and compliance tracking | Data governance is a growing concern, especially for large enterprises. Oracle already emphasises security and compliance in its offerings, so adding more granular tools for data lineage tracking and regulatory dashboards would be a logical next step.
Want a walkthrough?
If you’re an existing Annexa customer, contact us to discuss if NSAW is right for you.
Learn more:
- NetSuite data and analytics: a practical guide for growing businesses >
- Introducing NetSuite Analytics Warehouse [Video demo] >
- What is a SuiteAnalytics Workbook? >
- NetSuite SuiteAnalytics vs NetSuite Analytics Warehouse
- Turn numbers into narratives with NetSuite’s financial reporting & analytics tools >
- How NetSuite Analytics Warehouse consolidates your data for richer business insights >
- The mega guide to NetSuite modules (2024) >