Ongoing Managed Support: Twelve Months of Post-Go-Live Coverage
A distribution company with twelve employees on NetSuite had no internal administrator. Requests accumulated until they were urgent, then got handled reactively at unpredictable cost.
The challenge
The client, a distribution company with approximately forty NetSuite users across operations, finance, and sales, had no dedicated internal NetSuite administrator. When something needed to change in the account, they contacted the implementation partner that had built the system. Some requests took days to get a response. Others required a new statement of work before work could begin. Urgent issues, a failed script on a month-end batch run, a permission error blocking a key user, a workflow that stopped routing correctly, went to the front of the queue but still took longer than the situation warranted.
The cost was also unpredictable. Some months had no NetSuite spend. Others had three or four separate invoices for unrelated requests. Budgeting for NetSuite support was difficult because the number and complexity of requests varied, and the billing model charged the same hourly rate whether the request took thirty minutes or three days.
What we built
We onboarded the account and moved to a monthly retainer covering twenty hours per month, sized to their historical request volume. The retainer covers all standard requests: user management, role and permission changes, custom field and form updates, saved search creation and modification, workflow adjustments, and SuiteScript fixes. Requests are submitted directly by email, without a ticketing system, and most are handled same or next business day.
Release preparation is included in the retainer rather than treated as a separate project. Each of the two annual NetSuite releases triggers a review of affected customizations, testing in Sandbox against the client's real transaction types, and deployment of any fixes before Production upgrades. Over the twelve months, this covered seven scripts and two workflows that had minor release interactions, none of which became production issues because they were caught in Sandbox first.
The result
Over twelve months, the retainer covered more than sixty administration and development requests. These included new user provisioning and access changes as the team grew, two new saved searches for the operations team, three workflow modifications as approval processes evolved, and fixes to four scripts across two release cycles. No request required a new statement of work. No release caused a production script failure.
The finance team's primary feedback was predictability: a fixed monthly cost, a known response time, and no surprise invoices for urgent work. From the account's perspective, the changes that accumulated in the twelve months reflect how the business actually changed: new processes, new team members, and evolving reporting needs, all handled incrementally rather than in reactive bursts.
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