01 Feb Celebrate, Discover, Imagine – Acumatica Summit 2023 Day 1 Keynote
Celebrate, Discover, Imagine – Acumatica Summit 2023 Day 1 Keynote
The top event for the Acumatica community of customers and partners is the annual Acumatica Summit. The conference offers inspirational keynote speeches, stimulating networking opportunities, and a wide choice of in-depth seminars on the most recent features, developments, and best practices.
From January 29 to February 3rd, the magnificent Wynn, a five-star luxury resort in the centre of Las Vegas, is hosting the Acumatica Summit 2023.
Celebrate, Discover, Imagine
The focus this year will be on three main topics:
Celebrate community, catch up with old friends, and honour creative companies’ accomplishments that have overcome obstacles and reinvented their business models.
Discover the newest features and best practices that enable users to achieve new levels of productivity, growth, and efficiency.
Imagine where technology is leading us, where it may go, and how your business can benefit from this development to optimise its influence and take charge of the future.
Building The Future Of Business Together
Acumatica CEO John Case emphasised in his opening speech that although many companies are claiming that their company ecosystem is different and thriving, at Acumatica the story is so real due to the impact they have on company growth and success and due to the excitement Acumatica has for what’s to come.
He also emphasised that Acumatica’s focus is on “Building the future of business together”. John mentioned that 2022 was not the easiest year for companies all over the world due to record inflation and economic uncertainty, which were changing business realities. He mentioned that there was a survey of small and medium businesses, which were asked what they expect and what they are worried about, and it’s exactly what they would expect, the threat of the potential recession, and many more potential threats to business operations. So any technology investment has to ensure that it can help those businesses cope with those issues. That is also important to understand the scope and size of this business community, and how important they are, and John emphasised the huge potential of these businesses to impact the lives of people. They are not just growing, they create all kinds of innovations.
John also was happy to announce that in 2023 Acumatica has reached 10K+ customers worldwide, which is an incredible milestone and a testament to the team that has put work in. But it’s not about the number of customers, the activity that it represents is enormous: around 132M+ annual logins, $250B+ transacted and 840M+ annual transactions processed and no security breaches happened.
John also mentioned that Acumatica is in some ways unique in the ERP business, one way is that it has a first-hand understanding of the real growth challenges of the medium size enterprise. Acumatica constantly focuses on how to manage growth and customer success.
Acumatica has also announced the updated approach to customer bill of rights. That is a new promise that will be made for the Acumatica community and customers, like commitment to security, free professional online training, customers owning their data forever, no hidden fees and so on.
Inspirus Customer Success Story
Sanket Akerkar, Chief Revenue Officer at Acumatica was speaking about the success and achievements of the Acumatica community in 2022, focusing on what brings it to life, and what makes it real. He presented a customer success story of the company Inspirus. It’s in the business of employee engagement, with the mission to bring joy to work, ‘one experience at a time’. They are in this business for over 100 years and half the million employees that they are helping to drive success.
Inspirus CEO, Tatiana Frierson, has mentioned that employees play are large role in defining a company’s culture and if they have a sense of belonging and feel valued, they are more engaged and more productive. And Inspirus is a SaaS company that helps organisations to harness the full power of the potential of the most important asset, people. People are what drive an organisation to success, drives innovations and culture. Inspirus offers recognition and engagement solutions. Recognition affects employee happiness which ultimately affects employee engagement.
Tatiana emphasised that when she just started working for Inspirus, they had a 38-year-old finance system, and the first thing she wanted to do was to get customers’ P&L, but that was an impossible task for that system. The system could aggregate these data only on the top level. That was an indicator they needed a change in the ERP software. During the evaluation process, many different ERP systems were considered, but the not only top management of the company was involved in the evaluation process, but also end users could test and give their feedback. These joint efforts helped Tatiana in the process of choosing an ERP system, and their final choice was Acumatica. It was chosen because it had an intuitive design, checked all the boxes had a flexible pricing model and was scalable, which was a perfect fit for their business model.
Sanket Akerkar also mentioned that Acumatica’s growth and success are uniquely built on the principle of having a robust community. It takes partners, customers and developers to work together to make Acumatica stronger together. It was especially important in 2022 when there was huge uncertainty. The best of the manifestations of this community is the Acumatica portal, where users can stay connected in a collaborative digital environment, learn and grow every day. Here are some numbers describing Acumatica’s community:
But who are these all users? There are mainly four types of users – partners, customers, Acumatica employees and prospects.
Avante Health Solutions Customer Success Story
Sanket Akerkar has also introduced Avante Health solutions, one of Acumatica’s customer of the year. They are in the business of selling, managing and servicing medical devices for hospitals and clinics. It has more than 35 years in the healthcare industry and they are industry leader provider in the world. Before Acumatica’s implementation, they had multiple business challenges, due to a series of mergers and acquisitions, so each division of the company was operating as a separate division and the ways of doing business varied actress the company. That was having a significant impact on efficiency and effectiveness. So they needed a tool to allow them to grow and become one in Avante.
Acumatica became a catalyst which helped them to reimagine their business services to better serve their customers. And they started their digital transformation journey with one system used across all divisions. This allowed them to present a holistic view to the customers. They managed to achieve over 50% efficiency gain.
Acumatica’s Chief Technology Officer, Mike Shchelkonogov, was speaking about modern ERP. although ERP is a conservative market, in the last 10 years, we can see a lot of changes and new modern ERP projects emerging. But what stands behind it is technology (a modern user interface accessible through the browser or ERP as a service becomes a must during the very early stage of the ERP selection process) and also the second factor which is even more important is the change of user expectations. What does it mean? Users who use the ERP system are not the same as 30 years ago. 30 years ago it was primarily accountants, but nowadays it is pretty much everyone within the company. Users not only expect up-to-date information, but they also expect the system to be automated and do the job for them, to show them what is going wrong without constant monitoring, so that they can focus on their job. That creates the notion of automated ERP, where the system does the work for users. That requires not only modern technology but it also needs the application to be designed in a modern way.
Mike also emphasised what makes Acumatica unique in the ERP world – focus on industry verticals (manufacturing, retail/commerce, construction, distribution), and deep expertise within these verticals. He also mentioned that Acumatica is not trying to develop everything alone, allowing partners to have a flexible solution for developing their customisations for their needs. It is possible through a Non-programming customisation framework.
Upcoming Changes in The ERP World
Ali Jani, Chief Product Officer at Acumatica mentioned that employees in companies have to contribute to digital transformation, and that process can’t be limited only to the IT department. Ali informed me that innovations in Acumatica are coming from the analysis of user feedback and requirements for the system, taking into account the impact that any changes will have on the customer’s business and seeing this influence from their perspective.
LifeSource Customer Success Story
LifeSource is a company dealing with matching organ donors and recipients. That type of activity has no margin for error, taking into account that every action is time sensitive too. There are over 100K+ men, women and children, waiting for organ donation and transplant. And Acumatica helps to manage effectively all the operations related to organ, eye and tissue donation, so LifeSource can focus on what they know to do best – saving lives.
Environmentally Friendly Event
This year, Wynn Las Vegas once again hosts Acumatica Summit 2023, therefore Acumatica will keep up sustainability initiatives to make the summit experience’s environmental impact “Zero-Waste.” The last Acumatica Summit 2022 successfully diverted 98% of event trash from the landfill within the operational control with the help of Wynn Las Vegas and Acumatica.
