When was the last time you took a hard, honest look at your NetSuite environment? Not a quick glance at a dashboard or a casual conversation with your admin—but a thorough, systematic evaluation of how your system is actually performing, how well it’s aligned with your business, and whether it’s delivering the value you expect.
If you can’t remember, you’re overdue for a NetSuite health check. And if you’ve never had one, you may be sitting on a goldmine of untapped potential—or, more concerning, a ticking time bomb of inefficiencies, risks, and technical debt.
At SuiteRep, we perform NetSuite health checks for organizations of all sizes and maturity levels. What we find consistently surprises our clients: unused features that could save hours of manual work, customizations that are silently causing errors, security gaps that expose the business to risk, and configuration choices made years ago that no longer make sense. In this article, we’ll explain what a NetSuite health check involves, what it typically uncovers, and why it should be a regular part of your ERP management strategy.
What Is a NetSuite Health Check?
A NetSuite health check is a comprehensive audit of your NetSuite environment, conducted by experienced professionals who evaluate every major aspect of the system against best practices, your current business requirements, and the latest platform capabilities.
A thorough health check examines:
- System configuration: Chart of accounts structure, subsidiary setup, preferences, features, and accounting settings
- Customizations: Scripts, workflows, custom records, custom fields, and custom forms
- Integrations: Data flows, error rates, monitoring, and middleware health
- Data quality: Duplicate records, incomplete data, orphaned transactions, and naming inconsistencies
- Security: Roles, permissions, two-factor authentication, audit trails, and access controls
- Performance: Page load times, script execution efficiency, saved search optimization, and governance consumption
- Reporting: Dashboard effectiveness, saved search accuracy, financial report design, and KPI coverage
- User adoption: Login frequency, feature utilization, workaround prevalence, and training gaps
- Module utilization: Features and modules that are licensed but not fully implemented or used
- Release readiness: Preparedness for NetSuite’s biannual platform updates
The output is typically a detailed report with findings, recommendations, and a prioritized roadmap for improvement.
Why Regular Health Checks Matter
Think of a health check like an annual physical exam for your business systems. You might feel fine—but without a thorough examination, you could miss early warning signs of problems that will become serious if left unaddressed.
Here’s why regular health checks are essential:
Your business has changed. The NetSuite environment that was configured during implementation was designed for a specific set of business requirements. Since then, you’ve likely added products, entered new markets, restructured teams, or changed processes. If your system hasn’t evolved to match, there’s a growing gap between what you need and what you have.
NetSuite has changed. With two major releases per year, NetSuite continuously introduces new features and enhancements. Some of these may address requirements that you previously solved with custom development. A health check identifies opportunities to replace customizations with native functionality—simplifying your environment and reducing maintenance burden.
People have changed. The consultants who built your system may have moved on. The admin who understood every customization may have left. New team members may have made configuration changes without fully understanding the implications. Over time, institutional knowledge erodes, and a health check helps rebuild it.
Small issues compound. A saved search that returns slightly inaccurate results. A workflow that skips certain conditions. A script that throws occasional errors. Individually, these issues seem minor. But they compound over time, eroding data quality, reducing trust in the system, and creating workarounds that introduce additional complexity.
What a Health Check Typically Uncovers
Based on our experience conducting health checks across dozens of organizations, here are the most common findings:
Underutilized features and modules. Nearly every health check reveals features that are licensed but not fully implemented. Common examples include Advanced Financials (consolidation, budgeting), SuiteProjects for project management, Demand Planning for inventory optimization, and SuiteBilling for subscription management. In many cases, activating and configuring these features can eliminate manual processes or third-party tools.
Redundant customizations. It’s remarkably common to find multiple customizations that do similar things—or customizations that replicate functionality that NetSuite now provides natively. A health check identifies these redundancies and recommends consolidation or removal.
Security vulnerabilities. Roles and permissions are one of the most commonly neglected areas of NetSuite administration. We frequently find:
- Users with administrator-level access who don’t need it
- Former employees whose accounts haven’t been deactivated
- Roles that grant access to sensitive data (payroll, financial records) without appropriate restrictions
- Missing two-factor authentication for high-privilege roles
These vulnerabilities expose the business to both internal and external risk.
Performance bottlenecks. Slow page loads and search timeouts frustrate users and reduce productivity. Common performance culprits include:
- Client scripts that execute unnecessary API calls on page load
- Saved searches with excessive formula fields or unbounded date ranges
- User event scripts that trigger on every record save, even when not needed
- Mass update operations that run during business hours and consume governance units
Data quality issues. Bad data is the silent killer of ERP effectiveness. Health checks commonly reveal:
- Thousands of duplicate customer or vendor records
- Items with missing or inconsistent attributes
- Transactions with incorrect classifications or missing required fields
- Orphaned records that reference deleted parents
Reporting gaps. Many organizations rely on the same reports and dashboards that were built during implementation, even though their reporting needs have evolved significantly. A health check evaluates whether your reporting infrastructure provides the visibility your current leadership needs.
Integration fragility. Integrations that were built years ago may lack proper error handling, monitoring, or retry logic. They may be using deprecated APIs or connecting to systems that have changed their data formats. A health check assesses integration health and identifies risks before they cause failures.
The Health Check Process at SuiteRep
Our health check engagements follow a structured process designed to be thorough yet efficient:
Phase 1: Kickoff and Information Gathering (1 week)
We begin with a kickoff meeting to understand your business context, current challenges, and priorities. We request access to your NetSuite environment (typically a sandbox or read-only production access) and any existing documentation.
Phase 2: Technical Assessment (1–2 weeks)
Our consultants and developers conduct a detailed review of your environment, examining each area described above. We use a combination of manual review, automated tools, and saved search-based analysis to evaluate system health comprehensively.
Phase 3: Stakeholder Interviews (concurrent with Phase 2)
We interview key users across departments to understand their experience with the system—what works well, what doesn’t, and what they wish they had. These interviews often surface issues and opportunities that aren’t visible from a purely technical review.
Phase 4: Analysis and Reporting (1 week)
We compile our findings into a detailed report organized by category (configuration, customization, security, performance, data quality, etc.). Each finding includes:
- A description of the issue or opportunity
- The business impact (risk, cost, or missed opportunity)
- A recommended remediation or enhancement
- An estimated effort level (small, medium, large)
- A priority rating (critical, high, medium, low)
Phase 5: Presentation and Roadmap (1 session)
We present our findings to your team in a collaborative session, walking through the most impactful discoveries and answering questions. Together, we build a prioritized roadmap for addressing the findings—balancing quick wins with longer-term strategic improvements.
What Happens After the Health Check?
A health check is only valuable if the findings lead to action. After the assessment, organizations typically take one of several paths:
Self-remediation. For organizations with strong internal NetSuite teams, the health check report serves as a detailed to-do list. The internal team addresses findings according to the prioritized roadmap, using the report’s recommendations as a guide.
Targeted engagement. Some organizations engage SuiteRep to address specific high-priority findings—for example, a security remediation project, a performance optimization sprint, or an integration rebuild.
Managed services. Many organizations use the health check as the starting point for an ongoing NetSuite managed services engagement. The health check findings become the initial backlog, and the managed services team works through them systematically while also handling day-to-day support and enhancement requests.
Optimization project. For organizations with significant findings, a dedicated NetSuite optimization project may be the right approach. This is a focused engagement—typically four to twelve weeks—designed to address the most impactful health check findings and deliver measurable improvements.
How Often Should You Conduct a Health Check?
We recommend a comprehensive health check at least once a year. However, certain triggers warrant an off-cycle assessment:
- Post-implementation: Three to six months after go-live is an ideal time for a first health check, once the system has been in production long enough for real-world patterns to emerge.
- Before a major initiative: If you’re planning to add new modules, implement advanced features, or integrate new systems, a health check ensures your foundation is solid.
- After significant business changes: Acquisitions, divestitures, organizational restructuring, or rapid growth can all strain a NetSuite environment that wasn’t designed for the new reality.
- After staff turnover: If your NetSuite administrator or key power users leave, a health check helps identify knowledge gaps and configuration drift.
- When performance degrades: If users are complaining about slow performance, inaccurate reports, or broken processes, a health check identifies the root causes.
The ROI of a Health Check
Health checks are one of the highest-ROI activities in the NetSuite ecosystem. Here’s why:
They prevent costly problems. Identifying a security vulnerability before a breach, a data quality issue before an audit, or a performance bottleneck before it impacts customers is infinitely cheaper than dealing with the consequences after the fact.
They unlock unused value. If you’re paying for modules or features you’re not using, a health check helps you realize the value of your existing investment—without spending a dollar on new licenses.
They reduce technical debt. By identifying and prioritizing the removal of redundant, broken, or outdated customizations, a health check simplifies your environment and reduces ongoing maintenance costs.
They improve user satisfaction. When the system works better—faster, more accurate, more intuitive—users are happier, more productive, and more engaged.
They inform strategic planning. The health check roadmap gives leadership a clear picture of the system’s current state and a prioritized plan for improvement. This enables better budgeting and resource allocation.
In our experience, the typical health check engagement costs a fraction of the value it delivers—often identifying six-figure savings or efficiency gains.
Conclusion
Your NetSuite environment is one of your most important business assets. Like any asset, it requires regular inspection, maintenance, and investment to deliver its full value. A NetSuite health check provides the visibility you need to ensure your system is performing at its best—and a clear path to making it even better.
Don’t wait for problems to become crises. Don’t assume that because the system is running, it’s running well. And don’t let the value of your NetSuite investment erode through neglect.
At SuiteRep, our health check engagements are designed to be thorough, actionable, and collaborative. We don’t just hand you a report and walk away—we partner with you to turn findings into results. If it’s been a while since your last health check (or if you’ve never had one), let’s talk. Your NetSuite environment has more to give—let’s unlock it.
