ABS is a professional service organization that helps companies deploy and optimize their ERP systems. We know that implementations require detailed planning, patience and flexibility (a sense of humor doesn’t hurt either). We decided to drink our own kool-aid and deploy Acumatica Cloud ERP, the cutting-edge system that we recommend to so many other organizations. After being live on Acumatica for almost a year, we are sharing reflections on our progress.

A big benefit of migrating from multiple legacy systems to Acumatica was to have all of our data in a single system and data access via a web browser. ABS’ previous on-premise systems consisted of disparate applications for CRM and ERP, as well as a third party application for time and billing. Various levels of integration existed between the platforms. Login scenarios were separate in some cases as well as completely dissimilar user interfaces. Upgrade and maintenance schedules had to be carefully planned so as to avoid conflicts between systems. Today, all of these areas are cohesive under one Acumatica system. Upgrades are much easier to plan and take less than a day to complete. The user interface is singular, allowing users to leverage one interface for all data entry and reporting.

Defining Priorities and Planning Change

ABS needed to track customers, vendors, leads and opportunities, projects, support cases, support contracts and financial data. We decided to stage the deployment over time starting with the areas essential to our day to day operations. It was essential to balance our commitments to customers with our internal needs to migrate our system to a more modern Acumatica solution.

With a vision and target date in mind, we identified the data sources that would be migrated from our legacy system, and defined records to be migrated via import scenarios vs manually entered. We also carefully considered the data that should be left behind. Data that was not migrated could be accessed by querying legacy databases or by logging into the old software. Some companies may be anxious about leaving old data behind. Careful consideration should be given to the benefits and cost of bringing old data into a new system. We erred on the side of staying nimble and decided against weighing down the new system with legacy data that might not be useful in the long term. Transactional records that were migrated were limited to open items.

Much has been learned through managing our internal Acumatica implementation. We now track all aspects of our operations, from a starting point of daily customer and vendor management to support cases including sales processes in CRM and larger engagements via the Projects module.

The Future Looks Bright

We are excited about our future direction with Acumatica. ABS can easily scale Acumatica to accommodate additional users as we grow. We will add more dashboards in the coming months to provide relevant actionable data to users instantly. We also look forward to leveraging the marketing capabilities in the CRM tool, and the Outlook plug-in to make customer and prospect email communications readily visible to users. Portal capabilities are also on the radar, allowing our customers to submit their own support requests. We look forward to rolling out these features and growing with the system organically.

Bravo to Acumatica for providing the tools to migrate our business to the Acumatica Cloud ERP Platform so efficiently, and for building a scalable system for many different types organizations.

If you’re interested in getting the most from your cloud ERP software investment, contact us.