For manufacturers whose NetSuite implementation was rushed, left half finished, or handed over by a partner who has since moved on. A fixed two-week assessment, twenty-five points, findings ranked by what they are costing you.
NetSuite is rarely the thing that failed. The implementation is. A go-live date that could not move. A partner who knew finance but had never costed a work order. A scope that got trimmed in month four and never came back. A consultant who left mid-project and took the design decisions with him. The software went live. The build underneath it never finished.
It shows up in recognizable ways. The cost accountant cannot explain the variance, so it gets written off every month and nobody asks again. Production keeps a spreadsheet alongside the work orders because the system says one thing and the floor knows another. Work in progress does not tie to the ledger at period end, and the fix has become a manual journal that somebody does from memory. The planner stopped using demand planning about a year after go-live. Reports are exported and then repaired in Excel before anyone will show them to a customer.
Every one of those is a configuration decision, a data problem, or a piece of the project that was never completed. The platform underneath is the same platform running thousands of manufacturers correctly. What differs is whether somebody set it up for the way you actually make things, and then stayed long enough to prove that it worked.
A health check is the diagnostic step. Two weeks, a fixed scope, twenty-five checks, and a straight answer about which parts of the implementation are sound, which have drifted, and which are actively costing money.
It is worth being precise, because the word gets used loosely and most of what is offered under it in this market is a sales call with a report attached.
Support answers the question you already know how to ask. A ticket gets raised because something specific failed, and somebody tells you how to fix that thing. That is a different job. A health check answers the question nobody has framed yet: is this implementation built correctly for the way you actually manufacture, and if not, where exactly does it diverge. No ticket queue is scoped to ask whether the thing you are asking about should have been built that way in the first place.
Optimization is the remediation work. A health check is the assessment that tells you whether you need it and which parts to do first. If you already know what is wrong and you want it fixed, go straight to NetSuite optimization and skip this. The health check exists for the case where the symptoms are obvious and the cause is not.
Most of what a health check finds is fixable inside the system you already own, and it almost never ends with a recommendation to change platform, because the platform is rarely what went wrong. Occasionally the honest answer is that a piece of the data model was set up in a way that cannot be configured out of and has to be rebuilt, and we will say so plainly rather than selling you eighteen months of work to avoid saying it. The assessment is scoped to produce a finding, not a foregone conclusion.
General NetSuite assessments look at users, roles, performance and the close. Those matter. But they will not tell you that your standard cost rollup is producing no records because the standard cost field is unpopulated on three hundred components, or that backflushing is configured against a bill of material that stopped matching the floor two engineering changes ago. Those are the findings that change a manufacturer’s numbers, and they only surface if the person looking knows where to look.
Every health check runs the same twenty-five checks, in five groups. Each one is scored green, amber or red, with the evidence recorded against it, so the output is a picture of the implementation rather than a list of opinions. The checks are the same every time on purpose: it makes the result comparable, and it means nothing gets skipped because the engagement ran short.
We start in the system rather than in a workshop. Read-only access, and we run the twenty-five checks against your live data: the cost rollup, the variance postings, the work in progress reconciliation, open work orders, the traceability chain, the customization inventory and the release history.
Alongside that we interview five roles, because the gap between how a system is configured and how it is used only shows up when you ask the people using it. Most assessments do not tell you who they talk to, so here it is: the controller or cost accountant, the production or operations manager, the NetSuite administrator, the planner or buyer, and one shop floor supervisor. Forty-five minutes each. The supervisor conversation is the one that most often changes the findings, and it is the one most assessments skip.
We score the twenty-five points, attach the evidence to each, and rank what we found by what it is costing rather than by how hard it is to fix. A red finding that distorts your margin every month outranks an amber one that annoys three people.
The week ends with a live playback session with your team, walking through the scorecard and the findings, with the arguing done in the room rather than in the margins of a document afterward. You get the written report before that session, not during it.
Read-only NetSuite access at the start, five people for forty-five minutes each, and somebody who can answer questions during the two weeks. That is the whole ask. The assessment does not require the plant to stop, and it does not require a data extract project before it can begin.
Four things, all of them yours to keep and to use with any partner you choose.
The fee is fixed before we start and is credited in full against any remediation work that follows. If you take the report and fix everything yourself, or hand it to another partner, that is a legitimate outcome and the report is written so it can be used that way.
A health check is a diagnosis, and diagnoses have different treatments. Where findings land tends to fall into four places.
The largest group, and usually the cheapest. Costing preferences set correctly, backflushing reconfigured, work order close given a cadence, cycle counting scheduled. This is NetSuite optimization work and much of it is measured in days rather than months.
Scripts nobody owns, workflows that fight the standard behavior, and customizations that break at every release. Some get rebuilt properly, some get removed because the standard feature now does the job. That is NetSuite customization.
A surprising share of inventory and costing problems turn out to be timing or mapping issues in an integration rather than anything in NetSuite itself. If the health check points there, it becomes NetSuite integration work.
Demand planning that was scoped and never adopted, quality management sitting unused, shop floor execution still on paper. Sometimes that is configuration, and sometimes it needs the manufacturing products we build on NetSuite, including ProShop for formula and batch work, FactoryBridge for shop floor execution and FactorySync for scheduling.
And where the finding is that the system is sound and the problem is that nobody is looking after it, the answer is ongoing NetSuite support or the Consule Care program rather than a project. The full range is on the services page.
Being clear about this saves everybody a call.
You are a manufacturer running NetSuite in production, past go-live by at least six months. The project was called done before the scope was, or it lost its people partway and the remainder quietly became somebody’s spreadsheet. You have a specific unease rather than a specific ticket: the numbers do not feel right, the floor works around the system, the close takes longer than it used to, or you inherited an implementation somebody else built and you do not know what is in it. You want an independent read before you commit budget to fixing anything.
One of the more common reasons people ask is that the original implementation partner has gone quiet, or the relationship has run its course, and nobody on your side has a clear picture of what was actually built. A health check is a reasonable thing to run before you hand the account to anyone, including us. The report is written to be handed over.
You are pre-go-live, in which case the work is implementation rather than assessment. You have one specific broken thing, in which case support is faster and cheaper. You are not on NetSuite yet and are still choosing, in which case the platform comparisons and the implementation cost estimator are the better starting points. Or you already know exactly what is wrong and want it fixed, in which case skip the diagnosis.
These are the pages manufacturers weighing a health check usually read next.
Two weeks from access to playback. Week one is evidence gathering in the system plus five interviews, week two is analysis, scoring and the written report. The two weeks are calendar time, not effort, and the assessment does not require your team to stop what they are doing.
The fee is fixed and agreed before anything starts, so there is no hourly meter and no scope creep. It is credited in full against any remediation work that follows. Get in touch and we will quote it against the size and complexity of your environment.
No. The report is written so it can be handed to another partner or worked through by your own team, and the twenty-five point scorecard is yours. That is deliberate. An assessment that only makes sense if you buy the follow-on work is a sales document, not an assessment.
Almost never. The platform is rarely what went wrong, and an assessment that reached that conclusion every time would not be worth running. What it usually finds is configuration set for a business description rather than a plant, scope that was cut during the project and never restored, and data that has drifted since go-live. All of that is fixable inside the system you already pay for, which is nearly always the cheapest outcome on the table.
Five people for forty-five minutes each, read-only system access, and somebody available for questions across the two weeks. That is the whole commitment. Assessments that need weeks of workshops before they can start are usually gathering the information they should be finding in the system.
Then that is the finding, and it is worth knowing. In practice a fully green scorecard is rare, but a scorecard with two reds and the rest amber or green is common, and the value in that case is knowing which two things to fix and being told to leave the rest alone.
Yes, and it is one of the more common situations. We do not need the original partner’s cooperation and we do not need their documentation, because the assessment reads the live configuration rather than relying on what was written down at the time.
The scorecard adapts. The costing group of checks runs against whichever method is configured, average or standard, and the questions change accordingly. The other twenty checks are the same either way.
Ready to start? Get in touch and we will scope the health check against your environment, or read more about what remediation usually involves first.
