At the Acumatica 2019 R2 launch event in New York City two Acumatica customers were selected to be interviewed on a customer panel. We are proud to say that one of those customers, Bryan Mullen, SVP of Shared Services at Lifeway Mobility, is a CAL Business Solutions client.
Lifeway Mobility is a rapidly growing accessibility solution provider with offices in multiple states and expecting to double in size in the next 12 months.
Based on a recording of the event, these are the insights Bryan shared with the audience, along with simplified questions to add context.
Q: Why did you choose Acumatica and what benefits have you seen?
Bryan: “Opening a subsidiary, I saw what the cost could be in infrastructure and we were looking specifically for a cloud solution.
In each of our six locations, we had a minimum of five different technologies that were implemented to manage the business, which as you can imagine, gave us very little visibility into the operations in those states. So we’ve actually replaced those six disparate systems in each of the regions with Acumatica. And the best part of that is that it provided us visibility in real time to the dashboards to allow us to change our operating models on the fly.
Our CEO loves the handheld mobile app with the dashboard on it. He uses it and texts me all the time and is looking at “Why are these numbers in this way? Why are they represented this way? Why are we seeing this trend? Why are we experiencing this change?” And we’re able to trend out our data across the different regions and be responsive to that in a way that allows us to take advantage of the change in the industry. Because as was indicated, we are actually seeing that change accelerate on a daily basis and we have to be ahead of that curve. We can no longer be waiting a month or a quarter to find out what the performance is in a certain area.
Lifeway Mobility is on a very strong growth trajectory through both organic growth and acquisitions. The Acumatica implementation for Lifeway is really allowing us to do that. What I mean is, in the past, we would do an acquisition and it would be an island. With Acumatica we’re allowed to do this acquisition, convert the systems there onto the platform and be able to, even at the time we close a deal, kind of slide our toolbox across the table. Here are the systems, here’s the support, here’s the structure. And our shared services operating model is truly enabled by Acumatica. Prior to having that set of tools, it was really a disjointed operation, and we weren’t able to have that visibility that I talked about. So, where we’re going is to be more efficient in that building of a national brand.”
Q: Why do you feel Acumatica is a competitive advantage for your company?
Bryan: “The competitive landscape within the accessibility space is completely fragmented at this point. We’re building a national brand by leveraging the ability that Acumatica provides to us. There are a few franchisees out there, which shall remain nameless, but that’s the model that we’re competing against. And having a solid corporate structure with a shared service model enables each of those branches that we’re acquiring to really focus on that customer first experience. And it’s allowing us to take the burden off of these smaller organizations and allow them to be truly focused on the customer. We talked about pushing the decision closer to the customer. Our branch offices are truly 100% focused on exactly that. They’re no longer worried about their accounts payable, their HR, their IT. All of that goes away and becomes a shared service that we were able to implement. And we’re also doing it, like I said earlier on the Cloud, with the zero IT infrastructure.”
Q: What advice would you give to new companies implementing Acumatica?
Bryan: “Particularly on the topic of training, I think today many people think these systems are so easy to navigate. They’re so easy to use. And some of the users, some of your millennial users, have never used software that came with a user manual. I mean, if they couldn’t figure out how to use them on their smart phone, they just didn’t use it. And that’s not an option here because this is the software that runs your business. So it’s not that training is just about which button to press next necessarily, but relating it to your business process.”
Q: In hindsight what could you have done better with the Acumatica implementation?
Bryan: “Support for our end users after we go live. We made the decision to go live with Acumatica last December. We launched our first office on May 1st. We’ve subsequently launched two more offices on Acumatica and we have two more scheduled at the end of the year, one in November, one in December. Like (the other panelist) said, we need to not underestimate those launches. We need to have executive involvement. We need to have buy-in from every level of the organization. When we were shifting from six applications to a single application and we were shifting from disjointed systems to a fully managed inventory control component within Acumatica, we not only changed the technology, we changed the business process.
One of the things that we could have done better, it was still a success by all means, but we could have been a little more forward thinking in the amount of support that we could have given to our branch offices after the fact. We’ve made some adjustments since our going live. We’ve actually created a user guide, a quick reference guide for every function that our staff does. We’ve organized it by job role and we have it on our intranet. So if there are any questions, there is a resource they can go to for their specific job role, for the functions they’re looking to do. There’s a quick reference guide right there that tells them step by step, with screenshots, etc…. So the more support you give to your users, the better, with any type of a transformation like this. Also make sure you have your executive leadership on board.”
There is more to the story…
After the NYC event, Bryan Mullen worked with us to tell a more complete version of their Acumatica story and the benefits they are experiencing. Read the full Acumatica success story.
Is your organization interested in consolidating multiple systems into one single version of the truth? Let’s talk about Acumatica. Contact CAL Business Solutions at 860-485-0910 x4 or sales@calszone.com
We want to see your company on stage at the next Acumatica launch event.
By CAL Business Solutions, Acumatica and Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner, www.calszone.com/acumatica
