How RBI Corporation moved to Acumatica while preserving the pricing structure that runs their business with Rockton Pricing Management (RPM)
For 40 years, RBI Corporation ran on one ERP system. Over that time, they built what most distributors would recognize: a pricing structure shaped around exactly how they sell.
RBI distributes lawn and garden products and arborist products. They move goods to businesses that resell them, and they sell direct to consumers through retail locations where customers walk in for chainsaw chains, mower bars, and arborist rope. A business like that does not run on one price. It runs on levels, matrices, promotions, and customer-specific programs built up over decades.
When it came time to move from their legacy ERP, RBI chose Acumatica as the platform for their next chapter. But they also knew they needed a way to bring their established pricing structure with them.
Bringing a Complex Pricing Model into a New ERP
As RBI evaluated the move, they saw the opportunity to modernize their ERP environment with Acumatica while maintaining the pricing strategies their business had developed over four decades. “Acumatica’s pricing aspect was hard to map to what we are currently using,” said Will Miller, Enterprise Analyst at RBI Corporation.
That wasn’t because RBI expected their new ERP to look exactly like their old one. Their pricing model had simply become highly specialized over 40 years. The challenge was finding a way to preserve that complexity while taking advantage of a modern ERP platform. RBI did not want to leave decades of pricing knowledge behind. They wanted to bring it forward.
The Plan: Carry the Whole Structure into Acumatica
That’s where Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) came in. RPM is a Pricing Intelligence Platform for ERP-driven distributors, and it connects to Acumatica through the API to do the one thing Acumatica’s native pricing could not: carry RBI’s full pricing structure across the move.
Rebuilding 40 years of pricing is not a slogan. It is a set of tools, and RBI put them to work:
- Recreate the matrix. RBI used attribute maps to rebuild their pricing levels and matrix structure within their new environment.
- Run any program they can think of. RBI gives promotions and special pricing based on a long list of criteria, by customer, by item, and combinations of both. RPM “gave us the opportunity to create programs any way we could really think of,” Will said.
- Break by more than quantity. Quantity breaks can be based on quantity, dollar amount, or weight, using any mixture of item, customer, or document attributes.
- Segment cleanly. Filters let RBI group products and customers so promotions and pricing land where they belong.
- Build customer-specific price files. Catalogs let RBI create price files for individual customers.
More Than Pricing
Beyond pricing, RBI also used RPM’s data sync capabilities to manage data they do not keep in their ERP. Working with the Rockton team, they built functionality that connects their website and ERP so items are added automatically, only when needed.
The result is an Acumatica environment that stays focused on the products RBI actually needs to manage, while the company can still offer a large catalog to customers without putting every product into the ERP.
The Result
RPM “delivered unbelievable value to our business, allowing us to create these structures that have helped us diversify our pricing in ways that allow us to optimize our margin output,” said Miller.
And the relationship held up under real demands. When RBI wanted to do something that “seemed impossible at first,” Rockton worked with them to make it possible, sometimes by showing them how, sometimes by building new functionality to make it happen.
“They’ve been the easiest and best to work with,” Miller said. “They get back to us right away.”
What RBI’s Story Says to Other Distributors
RBI’s experience shows that moving to a modern ERP does not have to mean leaving your pricing strategies behind. If your business has spent years building customer programs, pricing matrices, promotions, and other strategies, those structures are part of what makes your business work.
The right combination of ERP and pricing technology can give distributors a modern foundation while preserving the pricing capabilities they’ve built over time. And there’s another opportunity: understanding what those pricing strategies are actually doing to your margins.
Built for Better Margins
Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) helps distributors get more from their ERP and their pricing data without forcing them to choose between modern technology and the pricing strategies that run their business. If you want to know what your real margin picture looks like, start with a free 30-minute Margin Analysis. We use your own ERP data to show you where your margin actually sits.
In one analysis, we found 8.73% in margin the pricing system was not accounting for. On $100M in revenue, that’s $8.7M.
You can’t improve margin you can’t see. Most distributors know a gap like that can exist. Few can see where it is or how large it is.
