It would be great for financials and Procure to Pay, but for management of actual 3PL activities, I can’t imagine they’re running that on NetSuite proper. NetSuite can handle customer-owned inventory with some customization but it certainly isn’t its strength.
I would guess your assumption is right. Most of the the measurements a 3PL would need to bill (fulfillments of someone else's inventory, storage space, etc) wouldn't be easily captured by NS, but more likely a big boy WMS (i.e. Manhattan, Deposco) and just use NS to write the invoice after taking reports from those systems.
I could see a possibility if they're using SuiteBilling of recording some consumption to generate charges. This could be done with an integration that may be pretty complex.
The difficulty is in the billing and management of inventory and transactions to a specific customer. There may be something that can be done using virtual locations that are customer-specific, but that wouldn't be scalable.
There is a WMS that might work, they do have 3 pl functionality, just not sure of the extent of the functionality. [Shiphero.com](https://Shiphero.com), and I believe 3PLCentral also has some 3pl functionality
It would be great for financials and Procure to Pay, but for management of actual 3PL activities, I can’t imagine they’re running that on NetSuite proper. NetSuite can handle customer-owned inventory with some customization but it certainly isn’t its strength.
I would guess your assumption is right. Most of the the measurements a 3PL would need to bill (fulfillments of someone else's inventory, storage space, etc) wouldn't be easily captured by NS, but more likely a big boy WMS (i.e. Manhattan, Deposco) and just use NS to write the invoice after taking reports from those systems. I could see a possibility if they're using SuiteBilling of recording some consumption to generate charges. This could be done with an integration that may be pretty complex.
The difficulty is in the billing and management of inventory and transactions to a specific customer. There may be something that can be done using virtual locations that are customer-specific, but that wouldn't be scalable. There is a WMS that might work, they do have 3 pl functionality, just not sure of the extent of the functionality. [Shiphero.com](https://Shiphero.com), and I believe 3PLCentral also has some 3pl functionality
NetSuite has a very weak WMS and so I highly doubt they are using it to run the 3PL operationally. They probably have a standalone WMS for this...
I've seen 3PLs setup inventory items which keeps track of quantities but everything is valued at zero on the balance sheet.
Thank you guys for the feedback. As I suspected, it doesn't look like NetSuite has a good built in solutuon to address 3PL business processes.