Plastic distributor and manufacturer successfully implements a single, integrated solution with MIBAR and Acumatica Cloud ERP

Employees

50+ employees

Z

Solution

Acumatica

Industry

Manufacturing and Distribution

Overview

Acme Plastics is a leading plastics and acrylic distributor and manufacturer offering customers a one stop plastics center for any brand, shape, or product. Serving customers with a proud heritage of customer service and reliability since 1943, they have grown over the years to include an expansive warehouse and manufacturing facility in New Jersey and Florida.

Their expansive warehouse stocks a wide variety of acrylic sheets, polycarbonate sheets, marine board, PET-G, expanded PVC foam and more. They combine quality raw materials, cutting-edge manufacturing technology, and the desire to gain the trust of their customers while offering extremely competitive pricing. 

In addition to their expansive warehouse, Acme Plastics offers custom part fabrication and cutting services for any shape or size. Their experienced team of engineers, machine operators and fabricators can create anything customers need with their top-of-the-line equipment. They offer CNC routing, laser cutting, digital printing, and much more.

The company worked with MIBAR, a leading Acumatica Certified Partner, to implement and manage Acumatica Cloud ERP software.

Situation

As their business growth continued, Acme Plastics was faced with some back-office challenges. 

First, they were using 3-4 legacy solutions that were all disconnected. They used Macola, on-premise, to handle billing and accounting, another solution for manufacturing, eCommerce, and more. This created countless processing silos and their days were riddled with redundancy and manual processes around. Another issue caused by these legacy systems was the complete lack of automation.

With no unification of data present, they struggled with effective materials management. Their Bill of Materials was stored offline in Excel spreadsheet. This meant that stakeholders often had outdated or incomplete information causing delays and other issues.

Over the years, quite a bit of custom code was developed as a temporary band-aid for many of these issues. These customizations were prone to breaking during upgrades. Therefore, custom code had to be painfully redeployed, costing extra time, money, and resources. On the other hand, some upgrades had to be postponed indefinitely, so they were stuck in a vicious cycle of “version-lock” and unable to modernize their business.

When Acme Plastics launched its other business unit shopPOPdisplays, managing intercompany transactions became difficult. They were manually handling financial reporting, inventory transfers, vendor, payments, cash management, and inter-company transfers between the two business units.

Solution

Acme Plastics needed a single, modern cloud-based ERP solution that could automate their processes, systemize and digitize their fabrication and cutting services, integrate with their eCommerce platform, streamline replenishment, and more.

The company worked with MIBAR, a leading Acumatica Certified Partner, to plan and implement and manage Acumatica’s Manufacturing Edition.  

Acumatica Manufacturing Edition delivers unparalleled depth with an extensive suite of connected manufacturing business applications for production, estimating, engineering, material planning, scheduling, and product configuration for both discrete and batch process production. 

The Acme Plastics team is also leveraging Manufacturing Data Collection (MDC) module to automate shop floor data entry for material and labor transactions.

With flexible and powerful inventory management, they can now use replenishment and automation to increase inventory turns and balance supply and demand.

Importantly, their eCommerce platform, Miva, is now completely integrated with their ERP system. Now they can Automatically sync orders, fulfillment, inventory, customer, and other key data. Payment transactions and their status are now updated automatically. All fulfillment, shipping, and inventory levels are kept in sync.

Finally, Acumatica’s Intercompany Accounting module enables the Acme team to automate financial reporting, inventory transfers, vendor, payments, cash management, and inter-company transfers across their business units.

Results 

Since migrating from Macola and their other legacy systems, the company has seen many benefits including:

  • Successfully implemented a single, integrated, cloud-based ERP solution, eliminating multiple legacy systems, database silos, and manual reconciliation processes.
  • Eliminated manual, paper-based workflows, saving time and money
  • Gained connection to their Miva eCommerce platform, eliminating the manual reprocessing of orders
  • New MDC capabilities (integrated shop floor materials scanning & data collection) eliminates back-office data entry, provides real-time data, and gives stakeholders visibility into profitability on finished goods
  • Streamlined accounting and reporting across their business units, reducing errors and inaccuracies in consolidated financial statements. 

With their new flexible and scalable business platform and partnership with MIBAR, Acme Plastics has continued plans for growing their business with Acumatica.

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