At SuiteWorld in October 2025, Oracle NetSuite SVP Brian Chess called NetSuite Next “the biggest update to NetSuite since 1998.” After months working in it, I don’t think that was overselling.
For anyone building software inside NetSuite, a line like that reads as a work order. A redesigned interface, new technology standards, and a new AI layer touch nearly everything an application does.
My team requested a developer preview and ran the full Crafted ERP test suite against it. We found only one issue serious enough to stop production work. That result wasn’t luck. It came from decisions we made long before NetSuite Next existed. Those decisions tell a more interesting story.
A New Experience, Not a New Platform
It helps to be specific about what NetSuite Next changes. The user experience is new: navigation moves, pages render differently, and Ask Oracle — NetSuite’s AI assistant — sits alongside everything. The underlying transactional platform stays the same. Records, transactions, scripts, and workflows keep running the way they always have.
For an application built inside NetSuite, that distinction matters. Crafted’s features and functions live in server-side scripts and custom records: how a batch consumes ingredients, how a barrel transfer posts, how a compliance report calculates, and everything else Crafted does. The screens people use to trigger that logic are a thinner layer on top.
Crafted is built in NetSuite, not integrated alongside it, so when Oracle redesigns the user experience, Crafted’s screens pick up that redesign the same way a native NetSuite page does. That limits what a redesign can reach. It can change how people get to a batch or a barrel transfer, but not how either one is processed.
How Do You Know Whether Anything is Broken?
When the developer preview arrived, the question was whether anything in Crafted had broken. The only way to answer it was to run the product against the new build.
Two things make that hard in NetSuite. Oracle controls the release schedule, so you don’t get to choose when a change lands. And much of what needs verifying, especially after an interface redesign, only shows up in a browser. Many vendors handle that with manual regression testing: someone works through the system with a checklist, which can take days or weeks.
We’ve spent years building an automated testing framework that drives Crafted the way a person would, paired with manual regression scripts for the parts that still need a human eye. Every Crafted release goes through both.
Because we can run the test suite on demand, “does it still work?” gets answered in a couple of days instead of multiple weeks. When a pre-release build of a redesigned user experience lands, we don’t schedule a testing effort. We run the suite.
That’s insurance we’ve already paid for. The premium went in years ago as engineering time, and the payoff arrives whenever major changes, like NetSuite Next, arrive.
Our tests found one serious issue and a handful of minor ones. That’s better than I expected for a change of this magnitude.
The serious issue was in the termination of our Suitelets, the custom screens that trigger much of Crafted’s functionality. They finish cleanly in classic NetSuite, but NetSuite Next changed how they hand off to the next step of processing. It was the interface-layer break I described earlier: the logic was fine, and the hand-off was not.
The fix was simple. We made it, re-ran the suite to confirm, and worked through the minor items. Credit for how clean that went belongs to our development standards and to NetSuite’s partner framework, both of which held up well.
Certification came next. NetSuite’s program for confirming that partner applications work in NetSuite Next includes demos, video reviews, and deep technical reviews with NetSuite staff. Crafted passed for the core platform and the complementary SuiteApps, including our Commerce7 integration.
As of the September release, every Crafted customer is running the NetSuite Next compatibility version.
What Changes for Your Team?
Navigation is the most noticeable change in NetSuite Next. The work stays the same, but you’ll reach some of it differently.
Core menu items move into a hamburger menu at the bottom-left. Universal Search sits at the bottom-right, doing roughly what the old top-center search did. Ask Oracle lives in the same corner and helps you find pages and run analyses that weren’t possible before. A few Crafted functions will land a click or two from where they used to be.
Administrators set access under Setup → Company → NetSuite Next Access. You’ll have three choices: No Access, Optional, or NetSuite Next Only. Pick one deliberately, or people will drift between the two experiences and end up half-trained on both. And if you haven’t enabled the Redwood interface in classic NetSuite yet, now is a good time to turn it on. It softens the visual jump.
What We’re Still Watching
NetSuite Next is still in preview, so every test so far has been against pre-release builds. We’ll keep running the suite as NetSuite Next continues to evolve.
The open item that matters most for Crafted is how Ask Oracle treats custom records. Batches, production orders, barrels, and more all live in custom records, and NetSuite has said formal Ask Oracle support for them arrives with the 2027.1 release in spring 2027. We’ve done an initial enablement pass so that data surfaces today. Some of it works, but results may vary until formal support lands.
Every account is configured differently, too. Testing and certification cover a lot of ground, but if something looks off in yours, please reach out.
Readiness Is Something You Build in Advance
Mark Davidson, managing director and head of grape and wine production at Tamburlaine Organic Wines, once described what his team wanted from software: “We can’t rely on software that’s old, clunky, and might not achieve a next phase of development — if there is a next phase. It’s a risk.”
Whether a product has a next phase depends on how well it adapts to change and how easily it can be verified. Keep the logic out of the screens, build in the platform instead of beside it, and test it with an automated framework. Do that, and an update the size of NetSuite Next becomes a manageable project instead of a crisis for the development team.
It’s the same principle I wrote about in building better distillery software: the software absorbs the disruption so the people making the product don’t have to.
We’re excited about this next phase of Crafted ERP + NetSuite, and we hope you are too. If you’re a current Crafted customer, the NetSuite Next user guide in the Customer Success Center walks through enabling it. If you’re not on Crafted yet, we’d love to walk you through the only beverage platform built natively in NetSuite. Reach out to our team.
About Jason Hatfield
Jason Hatfield is the head of product at Doozy Solutions, the team behind Crafted ERP, where he leads product strategy and engineering development. He has spent more than 25 years in software and nearly 15 in ERP, and he works closely with beverage producers and Crafted’s field teams to keep the platform pointed at what actually happens on a production floor.
