NetSuite 2026.2: Streamlining Manufacturing Operations

Manufacturers tend to care about a fairly specific set of things from their ERP, day to day: can they see capacity constraints before they bite, do they understand what's actually feeding the production schedule, is costing accurate, and are production records clean. NetSuite 2026.2 has real substance in all four areas, alongside a few smaller but genuinely useful changes for configurable product businesses.

Rough-Cut Capacity Planning Arrives

This is a genuinely new feature in 2026.2, not an enhancement to something existing. Rough-Cut Capacity Planning (RCCP) helps you review required and available capacity by work centre over a selected date range, using planned time from work orders and planned work orders to identify potential overloads and underloads before they cause a scheduling headache.

You can filter results by subsidiary, location, work centre, date range, assembly item, and supply plan definition, and view results in daily, weekly, or monthly time buckets. The report shows total and required machine and labour capacity alongside utilisation, and you can expand individual rows to review the underlying transaction detail. Two setup notes worth knowing: if you use Supply Planning, planned work orders are only included when they come from a Supply Plan Definition with the new Include in RCCP box checked (clear by default), and Work Centre records need their machine and labour capacity fields populated for the report to be meaningful.

Better Visibility Into Supply and Demand

For manufacturers using the Material Requirements Planning replenishment method, this is one of the more practical additions in the release, even though it's easy to overlook among bigger headline features. NetSuite's MRP engine has always linked demand to the specific piece of supply intended to satisfy it, a process known as pegging. What's been missing is an easy way for a planner to actually see that chain of dependencies without digging through individual records one at a time.

Two new workbooks solve this directly:

• Pegging Analysis (Demand View): starts from demand, current or future, and shows you the supply records linked to it. Useful for answering “what is actually covering this upcoming customer order?”
   
• Pegging Analysis (Supply View): starts from the supply side, planned or incoming stock, and shows what demand that supply is intended to satisfy. Useful for answering “this purchase order is arriving next week, what is it actually for?”

For manufacturers with multi-level bills of materials, this matters more than it might first appear. A shortage at a raw material level can ripple up through several layers of assemblies before it ever reaches a customer order, and being able to trace that chain in one place makes a real difference when prioritising limited supply or troubleshooting a delay.

Keeping Manufacturing Charge Costs Accurate

Manufacturing charges, the costs on a production transaction that aren't physical components, things like subcontracted processing steps, routing operation charges, or other service-type charges, don't always stay static. Previously, updating those costs meant going through production transactions individually, which is slow and easy to get inconsistent across similar transactions.

NetSuite 2026.2 lets you bulk update costs for manufacturing charge items, including routing operations charges, across production transactions in one action, choosing either the current purchase price already on the item record or a specified custom unit cost. It applies to Service, Non-Inventory, and Other Charge items with Purchase or Resale subtypes. A new preference, Allow Bulk Update Costs for Production Charges, needs to be switched on before this becomes available, so it's worth asking your NetSuite partner to enable it if this sounds useful for your production process.

Cleaner Production Transactions

Two changes reduce clutter and reduce risk in how manufacturing transactions are stored, worth knowing about even though neither changes how you work day to day:

• Preference to Exclude Zero Quantity Components: reduces clutter on Assembly Build, Assembly Unbuild, Work Order Issue, and Work Order Completion transactions by not storing component lines with a zero quantity, which improves performance for businesses with complex, high-volume bills of materials.
• Storage of Assembly Components for Advanced BOM: assembly components are no longer stored on hidden transaction lines for several transaction types when Advanced Bill of Materials is enabled. This is a background architecture change, worth a specific check with your NetSuite partner if you have any custom reports or scripts that reference these hidden lines, since the change could affect them.

Costing New Items and Tracking Project Health

Initial Average Cost for Items lets you set the starting average cost for inventory or assembly items at each location on new item records, for businesses using Multi-Location Inventory or Advanced Item Location Configuration. This is particularly useful for manufacturers migrating data or regularly onboarding new SKUs, since it feeds into Costed Bill of Materials calculations for estimated assembly costs rather than needing to be faked through a dummy transaction.

New Project Health Indicators add five new indicators covering planned vs actual time overrun, overdue tasks, resource coverage for remaining work, project margin (cost vs revenue), and unbilled approved charges, running daily. This is relevant to manufacturers running project-heavy engagements alongside standard production, where visibility into project risk matters as much as the production schedule itself.

Time Tracking and Configurable Products

A couple of smaller changes round out this release for manufacturers with specific operational needs. Start Time and End Time fields on timesheets and time tracking forms now have expanded availability, including in saved searches, CSV exports, and SuiteScript, with a full audit trail on any changes, relevant if your business tracks shop floor labour through Time Tracking, New Weekly Timesheets, or Enhanced Timesheets with WFM Wage Rules.

NetSuite CPQ AI Assistant

A new AI Assistant inside CPQ Configurator guides sales reps and buyers through complex product configurations using natural language, launching a guided chat when a configurable item is selected. This makes configuration faster and easier on complex or highly variable products, without requiring deep configurator expertise from every sales rep. It's most relevant to manufacturers selling configurable products through CPQ.

What This Means for New Zealand Manufacturers Using NetSuite

This release delivers real progress on exactly what we opened with: visibility into capacity before it becomes a problem, clarity on what's actually feeding the production schedule, and costing that holds up under scrutiny. Rough-Cut Capacity Planning and the Pegging Analysis workbooks are the two changes worth prioritising a conversation about first, since both give planners genuine visibility they haven't had before, without requiring a full re-implementation. The manufacturing charge cost update rounds this out nicely for keeping production costing accurate, and the cleaner transaction storage changes are a smaller but worthwhile check against your current setup, particularly if you have custom reports touching Advanced BOM data. For manufacturers selling configurable products, the CPQ enhancements, including the new AI Assistant, are also worth a look, since they touch the sales side of the same production process this release strengthens everywhere else.

Have questions about this upgrade? Get in touch with us today and we'll be happy to answer them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do we need Material Requirements Planning to use the Pegging Analysis workbooks?
Yes, they specifically require the Material Requirements Planning replenishment method.

Can we use Rough-Cut Capacity Planning without Supply Planning?
RCCP uses planned time from work orders regardless, but if you also use Supply Planning, planned work orders will only be included when they come from a Supply Plan Definition with the Include in RCCP box checked.

Do we need to change a preference to bulk update manufacturing charge costs?
Yes. The Allow Bulk Update Costs for Production Charges preference needs to be enabled first, and the feature only applies to Service, Non-Inventory, and Other Charge items with Purchase or Resale subtypes.

Will the Advanced BOM storage change break our existing reports?
Only if you have custom reports, saved searches, or scripts that specifically reference the old hidden transaction lines. Standard reports and standard views of transactions are unaffected. Worth a direct check with your NetSuite partner if you're unsure.

When is 2026.2 planned to be released here in New Zealand. 
It's currently scheduled to be fully rolled out here in New Zealand by mid-September.

This article summarises publicly available Oracle NetSuite release documentation. Feature availability depends on your account configuration, licensing and enabled features, and some capabilities described here are subject to staged regional rollout or may change ahead of general availability.