Key Benefits of NetSuite for Multi-Channel Retail Operations

By: Vivi Tran Lynch 

April 7, 2025 | 3 min read

Retail businesses, especially in the apparel and footwear industries, face unique challenges when it comes to managing their operations. With large SKU counts often grouped by styles, efficient interactions with these style groupings are essential for smooth financial and sales reporting, and operational success. SKU tracking and style performance becomes crucial for data collection, inventory management, and financial reporting, ensuring businesses can keep up with consumer demand and maintain profitability. 

The challenge lies in effectively grouping and managing styles to streamline operations and enable transparency to total product costs. Apparel and footwear companies must balance the complexity of managing product variants – sizes, colors, silhouettes and fits – with the operational and financial impact of manufacturing, sourcing, and fulfillment of highly segmented inventory. A comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can make a significant difference in managing a broad SKU count, diverse supplier base, or multiple sales channels. 

What Retail Businesses Look for in ERP Solutions 

Retailers, especially in apparel and footwear, often turn to ERP systems like NetSuite to tackle their complex needs. NetSuite is an excellent solution and out-of-the-box meets most financial reporting and compliance requirements; however, it’s not always one-size-fits-all, particularly in industries with complex demands. Most retailers require ERP systems that handle multi-channel operations, ideally integrating sales, inventory, procurement, and financial reporting under one roof. However, it’s essential to have the right implementation partnership and often a customized approach to ensure the ERP solution works effectively to meet unique needs. 

Considerations with ERP Solutions 

One of the biggest hurdles for retailers is the complexity of ERP projects. The sales process often oversimplifies the solution and downplays the complexity of implementation, or the potential need for enhancements to fully meet business requirements, leading to frustrations after go-live and hindering user adoption. While financial and accounting processes are often implemented smoothly, areas like procure-to-pay, demand planning, warehouse and inventory management often require more rigorous change management to avoid operational gaps and ensure long-term success. Retailers may find themselves limited by solutions that were oversimplified or poorly scoped during the sales process, preventing them from fully unlocking the value of their ERP system. 

Strengths of NetSuite: An Integrated Retail Experience 

NetSuite excels in many areas, particularly for companies looking to increase rigor in financial and accounting management and inventory controls. NetSuite can bring together financial data across multi-channel, multi-brand operations, allowing retailers to make better-informed decisions with increased visibility, while streamlining their financial processes. Its strong financial backbone and operational transparency are key advantages for companies managing operations across multiple locations and sales channels. 

Centralized Financial Management 

A key strength of NetSuite is its ability to deliver centralized, real-time financials. By consolidating transactional data from various business units and sales channels, NetSuite not only delivers real-time insights into a company’s financial health, but also enhances the opportunity to implement stronger financial controls and governance. This allows retailers to track revenue, expenses, and profitability with greater accuracy, helping to make more informed business decisions. Integrated financials across multiple channels also ensures consistency and reduces manual data entry and reconciliation, improving overall efficiency in financial reporting and supporting increased analysis.  

Challenges of NetSuite 

While NetSuite’s out-of-the-box capabilities have certain limits, all can be addressed through detailed solutioning or enhancement opportunities. Functions like procurement, demand planning, sales allocations, and warehouse or inventory management—particularly in a retail context—often require a more tailored approach to deliver meaningful efficiencies and increase adoption. To maximize value, retailers should prioritize implementation partners who deeply understand their business needs and operational realities. 

The Bottom Line 

Retailers need ERP systems that balance complexity and operational efficiency. Multi-channel business management in retail is a core requirement that ERP solutions should address to ensure seamless operations. NetSuite offers powerful capabilities to support these needs – centralizing financials, streamlining inventory, and real-time insights. With the right implementation partner and support, retailers can ensure the platform meets their business needs and capture meaningful efficiencies, smarter decision-making, and scalable growth.

 

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