ACUMATICA SUPPORTS GREATER SALES EFFECTIVENESS AND AN IMPROVED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

SITUATION

Craster provides luxury products to 5* hospitality clients all around the world. Their business is very niche and yet their reach highly global. With design and operations across two warehouses – 1 in Europe and 1 in the USA. As a smaller team, less than 50 people, Craster required a system that enabled them to fully manage end to end client services from CRM to delivery, to invoicing.

They weighed their ERP decision very heavily as they needed a solution that would be simple to manage internally, but also be able to grapple with the complexities of the business. Sales opportunities emerge from projects for new Hotel and Restaurants construction presenting challenges around multiple contacts with architects, specifiers and contractors.

For years Craster had run its operations using two systems: Sage50 for finance and Clarity for sales and purchasing, and warehouse management. This provided challenges running two systems that did not work together. Data often had to manually input from one system into the other. In addition, some reports had to be constructed in MS Excel to get the desired information.

“When it came time to see the final options, it was really only Acumatica that provided the complete system we were looking for. Not only did Acumatica enable us to tailor it relatively easily but it gave us room to grow.”

– Amy Myers, Chief Operating Officer

SOLUTION

Acumatica: Cloud-based, highly integrated functionality Craster had a highly discerning set of needs that were chiefly governed by the need to manage a highly dynamic quotes-driven sales process. The ability to accurately portray the sales funnel with ‘multiple quotes provided to different entities focusing on the same opportunity’ is a key part of their operations. Acumatica supports this concept and can hold the correct contact structure to provide better control and correct reporting.

ERP Implementation help came from Arcus Universe, based in London. Through its desire to understand the meticulous business detail and its complexities, Arcus introduced a comprehensive solution. Work was undertaken by Arcus to customise part of the solution and extensive new reporting was undertaken to reflect the business operations more clearly and in real time.

According to COO, Amy Myers: “Arcus really tailored their approach to what we needed, they have an excellent team who guided us through every step of the implementation and really challenged us on new and more efficient ways of working that Acumatica offered. Their team was on site during the week of our change over, which was a very busy time in our business. What I really appreciated was that the Arcus team was willing to do the work that we needed, but also willing to train people within Craster to understand how we could do these things ourselves. When COVID hit all we could keep saying to each other was how lucky we were that Acumatica was implemented the year before, it has made remote working feasible in a way that it was never before.

Arcus continues to be a fantastic development partner as we expand our technology integration – such as a recent integration with our new Big Commerce website (www.craster.com).”

BENEFITS

In the words of Amy Myers: Acumatica has enabled Craster to have one fully integrated system from our CRM to finance. This was transformative as we were able to dispense with multiple systems that did not easily speak to one another and the spreadsheets we created to join them together.

As Acumatica was originally a finance system, we expected the greater flexibility in that department, however, we were surprised at the integration that was possible for our CRM, quoting and stock management systems. With our sales team able to access information faster, in real-time, it has helped us to have a more independent team that makes the customer experience much improved. Acumatica offers Craster the ability to join together manufacturing information from our various factories around the world and ensure that we can meet the needs of our clients in a much more efficient way.

The system is easy to learn and the benefits of visualization that we get from its seamless integration to Power BI are impressive. Finally, the built-in Wiki has enabled us to make our processes and systems more clearly defined and accessible for the team so that we all have a consistent approach.