ERP is changing. Organizations are no longer simply asking how to implement or optimize NetSuite. They are looking at how their ERP environment can help automate processes, improve decision-making, prepare data for AI and support growth.
As Tenth Revolution Group expands its NetSuite capabilities, we sat down with Tish Bates, DBA, Executive Vice President and NetSuite Practice Leader, to discuss her vision for the practice, what customers can expect and where she sees ERP heading next.
What attracted you to Tenth Revolution Group and the opportunity to build its NetSuite consulting practice?
What attracted me was the opportunity to build something different.
Tenth Revolution Group already had an incredible foundation through Anderson Frank. We’ve spent more than a decade in the NetSuite ecosystem building relationships with customers, partners and some of the best NetSuite professionals in the market.
We weren’t starting from zero. We already understood the ecosystem and had this tremendous network of talent. The opportunity was to take that foundation and build a consulting organization around it.
ERP is also entering a very different era. Customers aren’t just asking, “How do I implement NetSuite?” They’re asking how they automate more of their business, how they get better information out of their systems, how they prepare their data for AI and how technology can help them scale without continually adding people and complexity.
That is what made this opportunity so exciting to me. We have the chance to build a NetSuite practice designed for where customers are going, not where ERP consulting has traditionally been.
What is your vision for the NetSuite practice over the next 12 to 24 months?
My vision is for us to become one of the most trusted transformation partners in the NetSuite ecosystem.
That means implementations, certainly, but I don’t want our relationship with a customer to end at go-live. I want us helping customers continuously improve their businesses, optimizing NetSuite, improving processes, strengthening their data, integrating their technology ecosystem, introducing automation and AI and helping executives understand what they should do next.
Over the next 12 to 24 months, I believe AI is going to fundamentally change what customers expect from ERP. The conversation is going to move from simply recording and processing transactions to asking: What can the system predict? What can it automate? What decisions can it help us make faster?
I want our practice to be at the forefront of that shift.
What does achieving Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner status mean for Tenth Revolution Group and Anderson Frank?
It is an important evolution for the business.
Anderson Frank has been part of the NetSuite ecosystem for years and has built an extraordinary network within it. Alliance Partner status allows us to combine that history and talent capability with a true consulting and delivery organization.
We can now support customers across a much broader lifecycle, from strategy and business process design through implementation, optimization, integration, managed services, AI and specialist talent.
To me, it represents the evolution from helping customers find the people who can solve their challenges to being accountable for helping solve those challenges with them.
How does Alliance Partner status change the way we can support NetSuite customers?
It allows us to become much more strategic with customers.
Instead of coming into the conversation only when someone needs a particular resource, we can start much earlier by asking: What is the business trying to accomplish? Where are the operational bottlenecks? What isn’t working today? What information does leadership need that they don’t have? What should be automated? And where could AI realistically create value?
From there, we can help design the roadmap, implement the technology and then stay engaged through managed services and continuous improvement.
That continuity is incredibly important because ERP isn’t a one-time technology project. The business keeps changing and the system has to evolve with it.
What makes the combination of consulting, implementation support, managed services and specialist talent particularly valuable to customers?
One of the biggest challenges I see in ERP is fragmentation.
A customer may have one company doing strategy, another doing implementation, another supporting the system and then recruiters trying to find specialized resources when something goes wrong. Every handoff introduces risk and knowledge loss.
Our model is different because we can bring those capabilities together.
We can help determine what should be done, provide the team to implement it, support the environment after go-live and bring in very specialized expertise when the customer needs it.
And because of the Anderson Frank network, we have access to an extraordinary depth of NetSuite talent. If a customer needs expertise in a very specific module, industry, integration or technical area, we aren’t limited to whoever happens to be sitting on a consulting bench.
That gives us tremendous flexibility in building the right team around the customer’s problem.
How do you help executive teams connect ERP investment to measurable outcomes such as productivity, visibility, cost reduction and growth?
I try to move the conversation away from features and toward outcomes very early.
Executives don’t ultimately care that we configured a workflow. They care that an approval process that took three days now takes three hours. They don’t care that we built a dashboard. They care that they can see margin, inventory, cash or operational performance without waiting for someone to assemble a spreadsheet.
So we start by understanding the business process and establishing the current state.
How long does this process take today? How many people touch it? How many manual steps exist? Where are errors occurring? Where are people exporting data into spreadsheets? Where are decisions delayed because information isn’t available?
Then we can connect the technology investment to measurable improvements in those areas.
That becomes even more important with AI. There are hundreds of things companies could automate. The question we should be helping executives answer is which opportunities will actually create measurable business value.
Your doctoral research focused on change management and user adoption in ERP projects. What lessons from that research are most relevant to customers today?
One of the biggest lessons is that technology alone does not create transformation.
You can implement an excellent ERP solution and still have an unsuccessful project if people don’t understand why processes are changing, aren’t prepared to work differently or simply recreate their old processes outside the new system.
That is why adoption and change management can’t be something you address two weeks before go-live.
People need to be involved throughout the transformation. They need to understand the business reasons behind the change, have opportunities to participate in process design and receive training that reflects how they actually perform their jobs.
And now AI makes that even more important.
AI is going to change roles, responsibilities and processes. Organizations need to think not only about what AI can automate, but how employees will work alongside it, where human judgment remains necessary and how people will trust the outputs they’re receiving.
The organizations that manage that human side well are going to see dramatically better results.
How does Anderson Frank’s established NetSuite talent network strengthen the new consulting offering?
It gives us a significant advantage.
For more than a decade, Anderson Frank has developed relationships across the NetSuite ecosystem. That means we have access to a very deep pool of consultants, architects, developers, functional experts and industry specialists. This is actually how they found and began working with me and many others I consider to be the best in the industry.
In consulting, the quality of the outcome is ultimately determined by the quality of the people doing the work. Ask anyone with a failed or poor implementation experience what they believe the problem was and, more often than not, they will tell you it was a lack of quality consultants with strong advisory capabilities, not just order takers.
What is powerful about our model is that we can build teams around the customer’s requirements rather than trying to fit the customer’s requirements around the resources we happen to have available.
As our consulting practice grows, that talent network becomes a force multiplier for us and is a serious advantage for our customers.
Where do you see AI creating the most immediate value within NetSuite and wider ERP environments?
I think the immediate opportunity is eliminating the enormous amount of administrative work that still surrounds ERP. There are still people spending hours entering information, reconciling transactions, researching exceptions, building reports, chasing approvals, responding to routine questions and moving information between systems.
AI can dramatically reduce that burden. But I also think the bigger opportunity is decision support.
Imagine an ERP environment that doesn’t simply tell you what happened last month but helps identify what is likely to happen next: where inventory problems may occur, which customers may pay late, where margins are changing, which transactions look unusual or what management should be paying attention to today.
That changes ERP from primarily being a system of record into something much closer to a system of intelligence.
The important point, though, is that organizations need the right foundation first. AI sitting on top of poor data, broken processes and an overly customized ERP environment isn’t going to magically fix those problems. In many cases, it will amplify them.
That’s why AI readiness starts with data, process and architecture.
You have said that AI will not simply remove the need for people. What role will human judgment and governance continue to play?
AI is extraordinarily powerful, but it doesn’t eliminate accountability.
There are decisions in finance, operations, supply chain, compliance and customer management where context matters enormously. AI can analyze information, identify patterns and recommend actions, but organizations still need people who understand the business and can determine whether those recommendations make sense.
Governance becomes increasingly important as AI becomes embedded in business processes. Organizations need to understand what data the AI is using, what decisions it is allowed to make, where human approval is required and how outcomes are monitored.
I believe the companies that get the greatest value from AI will be the ones that understand how to combine machine intelligence with human judgment, not the ones that simply try to remove people from every process.
The nature of the work changes. People spend less time processing information and more time evaluating it, making decisions and managing exceptions.
What do you want customers and partners to understand about the direction Tenth Revolution Group is taking?
We’re building a consulting organization around where we believe the market is going.
ERP, data, automation and AI are converging. Customers increasingly need partners who can look across that entire environment rather than solving one isolated technology problem at a time.
Our goal is to help customers build that roadmap. Sometimes that means implementing NetSuite. Sometimes it means fixing an implementation that isn’t delivering what the business expected. Sometimes it means improving data, redesigning processes, integrating other platforms or determining where AI can create the greatest return.
And then we want to stay with the customer as those needs evolve. We aren’t trying to be a partner that simply completes a project. We want to become a partner that helps customers continuously improve the way their business operates.
What should a NetSuite customer expect when they engage with Tenth Revolution Group and Anderson Frank?
They should expect us to ask a lot of questions.
We want to understand the business before we start prescribing technology. What are you trying to accomplish? What’s slowing your people down? What can’t you see today? Where are you spending money unnecessarily? Where are you relying on spreadsheets or manual processes? What is preventing the business from scaling?
Then we can determine how NetSuite, automation, integrations, data and AI should work together to address those challenges.
Customers should also expect transparency. If something doesn’t need to be customized, we’ll say that. If a process should change instead of building technology around it, we’ll have that conversation. And if we need very specific expertise, our talent network gives us the ability to bring that expertise into the engagement.
Ultimately, I want customers to feel that we’re invested in the outcome, not just the implementation. Because success isn’t whether NetSuite goes live. Success is whether the business is better after it does.
Tenth Revolution Group has expanded its NetSuite offering following two significant developments: Anderson Frank achieving Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner status and the appointment of Tish Bates, DBA, as Executive Vice President and NetSuite Practice Leader. Read the full announcement here.
Turn your NetSuite investment into measurable business value
From strategy and implementation to optimization, managed services and specialist talent, Tenth Revolution Group and Anderson Frank can support your business throughout the NetSuite lifecycle.