Ever wondered what it’s like to work as a senior technical consultant at a NetSuite partner? Here’s an inside look at life at Annexa with Emily Symonds.
Emily joined Annexa almost five years ago after moving to Australia from Uruguay, where she started her NetSuite career at Oracle in 2017. Today she works remotely from northern New South Wales, across a rotating mix of Annexa customers including a long-standing contracted role with REA Group. We sat down with Emily to find out what drew her to a partner environment, what her role looks like today and what a working week involves.
How Emily got her start at Annexa
Emily’s NetSuite career began in Uruguay, where she spent a year and a half at Oracle NetSuite before moving to Australia. She then spent two years working in-house with NetSuite customers but by the end of 2021 she was ready for a change.
“When I worked in-house, I was the only NetSuite person in the business. You get really close to that one business and there is a lot to be said for that. I felt limited professionally though. I wanted to be across different customers, different industries, different challenges.”
A NetSuite partner offered exactly the environment she was looking for, and two things stood out about Annexa in particular. The first was the variety of familiar customers and industries, which meant a constant stream of new problems to solve. The second was the depth of the technical team.
“When you get a new requirement, there is a good chance someone on the team has done something similar. You get to learn from that experience. The technical team here is big, everyone knows NetSuite and people are very willing to help each other out.”
Nearly five years in, Emily still points to the team and the variety of work as two of the reasons she has continued to work with Annexa.
What the senior technical consultant role involves
A senior technical consultant at Annexa takes a customer’s business requirement and turns it into something that can be built inside NetSuite. That covers gathering the requirement, designing the technical solution, estimating the build and doing the development work. The role spans full end-to-end implementations as well as ongoing enhancements for existing customers, and the work covers everything from NetSuite customisation and SuiteScript through to workflows and integrations with third-party systems.
Emily works most closely with functional consultants, who often act as the bridge between the customer and the technical team, and directly with customers when the work calls for it. Most projects involve a rotating mix of consultants, project managers and customer contacts and she is regularly moving across three or four customers in a single day.
The role rewards strong development skills, an understanding of system architecture and the ability to work through a problem creatively. What Emily talks about most often though is the combination of autonomy and collaboration. Technical consultants at Annexa have room to make their own design decisions on how something gets built, and they can lean on a wider technical team when a problem calls for a second set of eyes.
A working day in Emily’s life
6:30am – Gym before the working day starts. Emily is a self-described outdoorsy person who balances her hours at a desk with an active lifestyle.
9:00am – Log on, check emails and Slack, scan for any live-account issues that need to take priority. Anything urgent on a production system gets addressed before the rest of the day begins.
9:30am – Working session on three script changes across different parts of a customer’s business. Requirements have already been gathered, and the work is now in the build stage. The changes get sent through to the functional consultant for testing.
10:00am – An email arrives from a customer she has not worked with for a few months. Their NetSuite environment is integrated with an HR system, and they need an addition to the output. A quick change, done and sent back the same day.
12:00pm – A break for lunch including a brisk walk.
1:00pm – Meeting with a functional consultant to walk through a solution design document. The two of them go through the solution together, estimate the build and confirm the technical approach.
2:00pm – Feedback comes back on a piece of work Emily sent for customer testing earlier in the week. The customer has asked for a handful of changes. She picks it up, makes the updates and sends it back the same day.
3:30pm – A working session on a piece of automation for a live customer. Someone had been doing a lot of manual work and had walked Emily through the process a few weeks earlier. The solution is now in testing, and the feedback so far has been strong.
5:00pm – A final round of Slack messages, then sign off. In summer with daylight savings, Emily times her day so she can finish work in time to catch the wind for a kite surf.
What Emily looks for in a good day
“A good week for me is when the communication is flowing. The customer has a change request, I build it, I send it for testing, feedback comes back the same day and the work moves through to production. When everyone is engaged and things are moving, that is a good week.”
The parts of the role Emily finds most rewarding are the ones where she can see a direct impact on someone’s working life. A recent piece of automation she built for a customer replaced hours of manual clicking with a background process, and the feedback from the person who had been doing the work by hand was one of the reasons she enjoys this kind of work.
Thinking about a role like this?
If you are considering a role like Emily’s, it helps to know what the work involves. You will be moving across a variety of customers and industries, taking on integrations and customisations that no one has built before and working closely with a technical team that shares knowledge freely. You will have the autonomy to make design decisions on how something gets built, and the collaboration of a team you can lean on when the problem calls for it.
If that sounds like the kind of work you want to be doing, our open roles are on the Life at Annexa page on LinkedIn.