Great review from one of our favourite Acumatica ERP customers: Faithful to Nature!

For a complete review of Faithful to Nature's experience implementing Acumatica ERP , Christiaan Raubenheimer will take you through their journey with Astraia Technology as their Acumatica ERP solution provider, and where they are today.

1. How long have you been on Acumatica?

Silvertreebrands started the implementation of Acumatica in 2018. The implementation took approx. 1 year, after which we launched our first company, Nature Direct in 2019 in preparation to migrate one of our biggest companies, Faithful to Nature onto Acumatica. So all in all, we’ve been using Acumatica actively for just over 4 years now. Two big lessons we've learned with the implementation phase is to focus on the critical path to success, in our case that was making sure the integration between Acumatica & our backend platform, Magento, was solid and not rely on cookie-cutter integration solutions for a heavily customised system. The second was that you need to dedicate an internal resource to work with the implementation partner during the implementation phase. The implementation is a rigorous process, and you need to make sure that you have someone internally driving the process and adoption of the system.

?2. Previous solution?

We’ve used various finance systems across our portfolio of brands, Faithful to Nature for example previously used SmartEdge as their accounting solution and EmbedderERP as a built-in stock management system in our backend platform. Even though it could do some basic stock management & replenishment, the business has grown significantly and these systems couldn’t keep up with the volumes anymore. Funny story with the integration into SmartEdge, at the time they didn’t have any API integration available, so we needed to resort to grease monkey scripts to take the sales & stock data and run these very complicated & fragile scripts to input the data into SmartEdge as if though it’s a human being entering the data. Worse even, every time they had an update to their platform, our scripts would often fail, and then we’d need to go and update it in order for the integration to work.

?3. How it was then and how it is now?

Comparatively, our trading volumes were a fair bit lower back then, and using those systems where quite suit for the purpose. They were basic, but they did those basics very well. With our projected growth, however, it was very clear that we needed to move onto a system that could handle our future volumes. Acumatica is indeed a lot more complicated to use, but in those complexities lies the beauty of it all. We now have a lot more traceability, control and most importantly, the ability to customise the system to suit our needs - however, I must say that we shy away from making too many customisations. Instead, we try and adapt our business processes to follow that of Acumatica’s intended design, after all, they have the expertise in this field. We’ve also noticed over the years how the Acumatica platform has improved in its usability & functionality, and we look forward to each major release to see what exciting new features & enhancements they’ve implemented. One of our favorite improvements was when they introduced the warehouse management modules, e.g. Pick, Pack & Ship. This revolutionised the way in which we dispatch orders and it has allowed for a granular level of reporting.

4. Would you recommend Acumatica to other companies?

Most definitely! I’m a very big advocate for implementing solutions that are fit for purpose. If you’re a small pop-up shop, I would obviously not recommend it in that case, but if you’re an SME that is really starting to see significant growth or projected growth in your business, I would highly recommend considering upgrading your systems and processes. It really helps to scale with Acumatica, and you’d find that after your staff has become familiar with the system, your processing capabilities & capacity will increase significantly and fall in line with your growth.

For more information or a demo on Acumatica ERP please don't hesitate to pop me an inbox or email [email protected]