Acumatica Case Study: New England Tile

Situation

New England Tile imports and sells tile and stone for home remodeling and construction projects. They serve homeowners, designers and contractors. Their inventory includes more than 8,000 products. In addition to its original tile showroom, New England Tile recently opened a retail store offering stone for indoor and outdoor projects. The company employs eight people in sales, accounting and warehouse, plus a delivery driver.

For 14 years, New England Tile had used server-based Everest ERP software and its preceding versions to track inventory, write sales and purchase orders, and manage accounting.

New England Tile owner Pat Mobilio says he realized a while ago their server was dying: “We kept trying to patch the server and add this and that, but we were really running on empty.” And when they contacted Everest to upgrade, Mobilio says their prices had gone “through the roof.” He also wasn’t satisfied with the level of support that would be provided.

New England Tile then looked into other options, including NetSuite. Acumatica partner Gregg Mercede of Cloud 9 ERP Solutions said, “New England Tile found NetSuite’s user interface to be kind of primitive, so they quickly ruled that out.”

Solution

Researching Acumatica, New England Tile found an ERP system that had everything it needed, and could adapt to the company’s emerging needs.

Owner Pat Mobilio points out, “To have the kind of a system that does accounting, inventory and sales is a huge plus. To have all that functionality integrated together just makes our job a whole lot easier.”

Results

After transferring data and testing for a couple of months, New England Tile went live with Acumatica 4.0 in April 2013. They chose to purchase the Acumatica Distribution and Financial Management suites on a perpetual license. Mobilio estimates the company is saving about $500 per month in ongoing server-related costs, in addition to the upfront cost of $7,000 for a new server.

In the brief time since going live with Acumatica, the company has already experienced improved productivity and connectivity. Mobilio says, “The nice part about having a system like this is we can all follow along: if someone’s not in on a certain day, anyone can pick up where the other person left off; you can track orders whether you wrote the order or not.”

Productivity has also improved thanks to what they consider one of Acumatica’s greatest new features, an “inventory browser”—instead of having to enter an item number to find a product in the inventory, now they simply enter a word, such as “red,” and find it in the item descriptions.

Another efficiency improvement involves deliveries: their driver can now find an address on a map quickly by clicking on the customer’s name, then a link to a map. Avoiding the extra step of a map search saves the driver time; a process that used to take a couple of minutes now just takes a few seconds.

“The Acumatica system is very customizable,” Mobilio reports. Customer service has improved since now his employees can email customers directly from the sales form open on their computer. Previously, this was a three-step process (print the order; scan it; attach to an email) which used to involve a few minutes—now it takes just a couple of clicks.

New England Tile was also impressed with the level of customizations made possible with Acumatica. “You can change reports so they fit your company, which was a big thing for us. It wasn’t like we had to change for Acumatica,” Mobilio says. He adds that support from Acumatica and partner Cloud 9 ERP Solutions has been great: “If there’s something we have an issue with, they are very speedy to make the fix.”

Having a reliable ERP system is significant, says Mobilio. “It reflects on our whole business, who we are as a company. Acumatica makes us professional, modern—on the cutting edge of ERP software.”