Extending NetSuite’s Email Capabilities
The Problem
A leading seller of consumer automotive accessories had been established on NetSuite for several years. Although they had internal resources to handle many of their NetSuite needs, they required an additional resource to handle a complex email project.
In a desire to automate their business processes further they were looking to extend the automated email functionality beyond the native capabilities of NetSuite. This included automatically sending different documents to different contacts, and in some cases, multiple contacts at the same time. Email addresses needed to be extracted from individual customer and vendor contact records relative to the document being sent. The documents were to include sales orders, purchase orders, invoices, customer payments, and vendor payment remittance.
After discussing all the client’s needs HKS Technology was quickly and easily able to establish a solution, budget, and timeline that fit their requirements.
The Process
We first established a comprehensive set of custom fields for contacts, customers, and vendors that would determine which of the document types would be sent to each email address. Then, using SuiteScript, we developed a script that would search through each related contact, match the new custom fields to the document being sent, and if it matched, grab the email address for the contact. All the email addresses would then be concatenated together and inserted into a new field. Finally, a workflow would trigger the script and send the correct email template to the correct email addresses solely based on the document type without any manual intervention.
With the proposed solution ready for testing the client decided to expand its use beyond the initial scope of documents and we were quickly and easily able to accommodate the additional requirements without any additional changes in the business process logic or code.
The Result
With extensive testing complete the client was able to deploy and enable to solution into their production environment within 45 days from the start of the project. Customer and vendors were able to receive electronic documents with no manual intervention from the NetSuite user. Communication was improved which reduced customer and vendor queries allowing internal staff to focus other productive areas.
