As an ERP consultant at my firm for the past 10 years, I have always been a bit hesitant to embrace a new product our management team has decided to offer over my time at MIBAR.net, mostly due to….let’s face it….lack of familiarity and the LARGE EFFORT it was going to take to master a new solution in order to be able to go out in the field with confidence and advise our client base on the application.
DYNAMICS GP was a perfect solution from a distribution stand point as far as I was concerned, and I did not have the time, while working with our present client base on IT matters, to learn enough about another ERP solution…let alone master the software.
However, due to industry changes and the need for businesses to have the option for “in the cloud” processing, I have recently made a concerted effort to learn my company’s newest application offering, Acumatica ERP.
As a mostly skeptical person by nature, I obviously went into this foray with the expectation that this new product was going to come up short in all phases from the application I knew best, as well as dreaded the time it was going to take to learn this new offering.
With that being said, from Day 1 of studying this new software, I have been able to absorb it’s functionality by going through the excellently written “white page” pdfs related to the Acumatica Distribution modulesdownloaded from their website, whereby at this point I have taken and passed 6 of the 7 certification exams necessary to become a Acumatica Certified Distribution Business Consultant.
I think what made this product so easy to learn and understand for me is its almost identical functionality and processing steps which I have been working with for years in the Dynamics GP platform.
Windows are sectioned off into their distinct modules and easy to find; the product runs on SQL, where the table names are even more intuitive than Microsoft’s ERP product…thus making it easier to run SQL queries, build SQL views, and connect to tables through data connected spreadsheets; many, many of the windows in Acumatica have the ability for direct import through simple excel files, including sales orders and purchase orders, something Dynamics GP does not offer in its out of the box version without help from 3rd party products; familiar radio buttons exist on all of the windows in the system, allowing one to scroll to next records, and last and first ones, with ease much like in Dynamics GP; processing makes complete sense as far as purchasing and sales is concerned, taking a PO to inventory receipt and finally A/P voucher on the payables end, and carrying a sales order to shipment (fulfillment in the Dynamics world) and eventually to INVOICE and posting to A/R much like in Great Plains; documentation like invoices and purchase orders can easily be saved to either excel or pdf format, without the need for a 3rd party product like Dynamics GP requires; items can carry warehouse-specific costs unlike in Dynamics GP, and the product also has the more familiar multi-bins, landed costs, lot & serial tracking, kitting & assembly processing, etc….that we have all become familiar with in other ERP applications.
So in conclusion, as a whole, my experience thus far with Acumatica ERP has been an excellent one, and I look forward to learning more about the software this year, where I expect the results to be positive like my initial findings have been thus far.
To learn more about Acumatica, please click here or schedule a free consultation.
