Centers, and the Employee Center

We touched on centers, sometimes called work centers, a few times in earlier videos. Since they control so much of how you interact with NetSuite we’ll dive into them a bit to get a closer look. The center you use is controlled by your role. Your administrator sets this up, and anyone with the same role will have the same center. Your current role is visible under your name in the upper right hand corner, but there is not an easy way to tell what center is associated with a role; at least not unless you’re an Administrator. Since you can have multiple roles you can have multiple centers, and this is very common. The most important thing that centers control are the menus you see. Right now, I am logged in as an administrator, and I’m using the classic center. So, take a look at my menus up here. I will go ahead and switch to a different role, in this case shipping. This role uses the shipping center, and we can see the menus have changed. For example, I no longer have Transaction or Lists at the top. You can rewind the video and watch this again if you want to see how much changed. The top-level menus are not the only ones that changed though. All the stuff I had under lists must have gone somewhere, and much of it did. Some of it went away all together, but I used to have an option for lists, then relationships, then customers, in the classic center. In the shipping center, I can still get to customers, but my navigation is different. I have to go to Shipping, then Lists, then Customers. Of course, this is just one example, there is a lot of navigation that has changed. The shipping center has been setup to follow the typical workflow of a warehousing clerk, and there are other centers for other job functions. The theory is that even though the menus are different, they will be more intuitive and faster once you learn them. I am personally not a fan of the changes, especially when they are used only by a few employees, but when there are a lot of employees using a well thought out structure it really can speed things up. If you want to change your menus back, you can do that under Home and Set Preferences, in the Appearance subtab, and we covered this in an earlier video. Centers also control how their menu or category dashboards look. Let me show you what I mean. If I click on Shipping I get to this shipping dashboard. While you can customize this, the same as the home dashboard, this dashboard is specific to this category, and it is setup to make shipping easier. NetSuite comes out of the box with a number of centers that can be used, and your administrator can create new ones based on what already exists, or from scratch. In fact some of the best, or at least the coolest, customizations of NetSuite start with a custom center. Classic Center, which is what I will be recording most of this course in, is the default for administrators, and can be used by most other roles. Some of the other centers that you are likely to see employees using include Executive, Marketing, Project, Sales, Support, and of course Shipping. There are also a number of specialized centers, for use with discounted or bulk feature NetSuite licensing. These include the employee center which allows employees, who do not use NetSuite for their day to day jobs, to still use it for common business functions, such as recording their time or submitting expense reports. The customer center can be customized to provide access to your customers. This acts like an extranet where your customers can do things like order products directly. The partner and advanced partner centers can be used to build a partner portal. Partners can use this portal to access information that you provide them. There are a few other centers as well including one for vendors and one for support. Some of them do have limitations that NetSuite imposes, that you cannot get around, especially the specialized ones. Now that you understand how centers work, navigating NetSuite should be quite a bit easier. And this is true, whether you are using your own login and centers, or helping a colleague with theirs. Questions this video will answer: • 0:00 – What are centers and work centers in NetSuite? • 0:00 – Are centers and work centers different in NetSuite? • 0:10 – What controls the work center I have in NetSuite? • 0:15 – How do I tell what role I am using? • 0:15 – How do I tell what center I am using? • 0:25 – What do work centers control in NetSuite? • 0:30 – What controls my menus in NetSuite? • 0:50 – Why is my navigation different in NetSuite? • 1:40 – How do I make my menus look like everyone else’s in NetSuite? • 1:40 – How do I make my menus look the same in all centers? • 2:10 – What is the default center? • 2:20 – What are some of the centers in NetSuite? • 2:30 – What is the employee center? • 2:45 – What is the customer center for? • 2:55 – What is the partner center for in NetSuite? • 3:00 – What are the vendor center, and support centers? • 3:15 – How can I make getting around NetSuite easier?