NetSuite Impact Analysis

Know What's Risky — and What's Safe to Change

Automating risk assessment and impact analysis is the key to a tight, efficient change process. Unless you have a way of knowing what's safe to change — ie, what will be affected if you delete or alter something — every change must be treated with the same scrutiny.

Not only does this require an intimate understanding of how your system is customized, but it's also practically impossible in a busy environment where things change frequently.  So the result is that teams rely on guesswork, troubleshooting when things break and, if their systems are in scope for SOX, go into audit with low confidence in the integrity of their change processes. 

How Strongpoint Helps

Strongpoint impact analysis is driven by NetSuite best practices and combines detailed dependency information with practical explanations of risk.

Based on your policies, every proposed change is assessed for risk — safe changes are pre-cleared for automatic approval, and riskier ones are elevated to the proper resource. 

If you currently use Jira or ServiceNow, you don't have to change anything — Strongpoint integrates seamlessly at the ticket level.

Understanding Risk

Broadly speaking, a change to a customization in NetSuite — let's say a saved search — will fall into one of three categories:

The search is not connected to any automation or anything else that can affect reporting.

The search is used in a sensitive process such as SOX compliance and needs to be reviewed by Finance before being changed

The search is used in a script or workflow that could affect data integrity and needs to be reviewed by IT before being changed.

Risk Decisioning

When you know the risk of a proposed change, you can build smart policies around it. Strongpoint's change policies leverage automatic impact analysis to set out the level of control required for each change.

As part of the onboarding process, our team will work with you to establish approval requirements for different types of changes. Safe, simple changes are approved automatically, and anything more complicated or risky is sent for review, tested in the Sandbox, or run through a full SDLC. 

Best of all, everything is captured in an immutable log that eliminates up to 75% of the work involved in audit prep.

Streamline the change and compliance processes

Pre-clear safe changes based on established policies

Replace ad-hoc approvals with an audit-ready system

Watch a Demo

In this clip, Strongpoint's VP of Sales and Marketing, Paul Staz, walks you through how Strongpoint's default policies assess technical risk when making a change via a process issue. 

Jira/ServiceNow Integration

If you use Jira or ServiceNow to manage tickets, you can access Strongpoint's impact analysis directly at the ticket level, and get a comprehensive list of related customizations that will be affected by a potential change. 

You can also sync Jira/ServiceNow tickets to change requests in Strongpoint, so the impact analysis and approval, if required, is collected in an audit-ready report. 

Get impact analysis at the ticket level

Sync tickets to change requests in NetSuite

Implement easily without changing your processes 

Watch a Demo

Here's Strongpoint Product Specialist, Romana Henningham, walking you through how seamlessly Strongpoint's impact analysis integrates into Jira at the ticket level. 

Governance and Resource Allocation

Impact analysis is about more than making safe changes — it's about making the most of your team. Discovery is a time-consuming process, and if your team is tied up with it, they can't work on other, more important projects. 

Effective impact analysis is critical to empowering consultants and developers, making the most of your internal expertise, and generally balancing the demands of innovation and security as you evolve your account.  

Know what to prioritize and allocate resources accordingly

Manage IT backlogs without tying up key team members

Streamline the release and deployment processes

What's the ROI?

Knowing where to dedicate skilled resources saves you more than just time. With help from NetSuite consultant Techfino, we've put together a short post outlining some of the ways Strongpoint impacts the bottom line at busy companies running NetSuite.

We have countless examples of large implementations where we see that the time spent manually documenting everything and making sure we deploy everything perfectly could easily be 2X to 5X the cost of procuring Strongpoint.

Watch the Webinar

Register to watch "Impact Analysis in NetSuite" for an in-depth look at how to leverage system documentation for smarter changes.  

Next Step: Change Management

Turn accurate documentation and intelligent impact analysis into an audit-ready, 'closed loop' change management system.