The aim is to bridge the gap between financial and transactional applications and the HR function by tying specific functions including expense reporting, purchase requests, time and billing and document management, to the existing NetSuite applications. For example, employees will be able to fill out expense reports, bill items to clients or projects, and automatically route reports to supervisors, while supervisors will be able to approve the reports from their dashboards. Approved expense reports are reflected automatically on the next payroll run.
As a dedicated and early-to-market SaaS vendor, NetSuite has merited plenty of attention, and interest levels will rise further as it prepares for its IPO. As a provider of broad-based on-demand business applications it is also well positioned to capitalize on the expansion of SaaS outside the CRM area.
Analyst Ray Wang of Forrester Research highlights HR and ERP as having the highest adoption rates of all types of SaaS applications. According to the Forrester report: Among enterprises that use or are piloting SaaS applications, adoption of HR applications (at 54%) and ERP (at 40%) top the list, exceeding even CRM (at 38%).
