Why You Should Consider Using the Business Intelligence Connector

What is it?

The Business Intelligence Connector is an add-on to SuiteProjects Pro that allows list views and reports built in the application to be fed to other applications or to  the SuiteProjects Pro scripting engine.

How have SuiteProjects Pro clients used this?

Here are a couple of example use cases:

• A company with a central data warehouse can use the Connector to pass data elements with specific filters and/or structures directly into the warehouse from SuiteProjects Pro. If the data needs change, there is no integration to alter – it’s simply a matter of updating (or adding) a list view or report.
• An organization that wants a script that sums large amounts of data (all approved hours for a project, all charges for a specific time period, etc.) will find that building a report that summarizes the data and then sends it to a script can be much more efficient than building the calculations within the script itself. This method can also drastically reduce the time required for the script to run (thus eliminating the risk of timeouts).
• Organizations can send data directly to NetSuite from SuiteProjects Pro reports through the standard NetSuite integration built into SuiteProjects Pro.

How does it work?

The Business Intelligence Connector uses the standard OData V4 protocol to publish report or list view data to a secure server in JSON format.  Any application that can digest the OData protocol can connect to that server and read the data.

While report data has to be published on a schedule, data from SuiteProjects Pro list views is updated in real time.

Is there a cost associated with this tool?

Yes – talk to your NetSuite account representative and get a quote.  We’ve found that the tool often pays for itself within a short period of time in terms of efficiency and business value.

Where can I find more information?

In 2019 we wrote a step-by-step guide to using the Connector for report publishing, which can be found here.  Note that this was written before the Connector was compatible with list views, but the steps are virtually identical.

NetSuite has also published an info sheet as well as more specific details of the tool.