Acumatica

We got Stephanie and Robert from Crestwood on here today to talk about their sales order AI agent.

for Acumatica and I don't know what we're gonna talk about with AI consulting, cause it changes by the day it seems like, but we're just gonna have fun conversation about where things are going with AI.

I think Crestwood is one of the bars that's leading in this area.

And so anyways, looking forward to the conversation.

Wow.

And yeah, for those of you that don't know us, I'm Robert Sternberg.

I'm the director of Acumatica Services here at Crestwood.

I also lead our AI Strikeforce initiative, so we can speak a little bit about that.

Now we've had a few episodes where we talked about discovery and discovering solutions out there and how to start finding out what might be a good fit for you from a software you know platform point of view and what kind of aspects of a partner makes a good partner so here we are talking about discovery again So what do we actually mean when we mean discovery week, Emily? If we go from a business point of view, first of all, we've chosen the ERP.

We know we're going to go on Acumatica or LBC and we're now planning for a discovery week.

What should we expect to do during this?

Yeah, I think first you're right that there are kind of multiple phases of your project that kind of end up getting called discovery.

Like, oh, well, okay, we're not going to spend 16 hours for this customization right now.

Well, we'll just do what's available out of the box, right? Versus some customers like, no, that's fine.

16 hours, yeah, we just need this one report and we need it, right? Which maybe could be handled by a GI in Acumatica, for example, right? You don't even have to create a report, but the person, nope, I need to hit this button.

I need to create a report, right? Blah, blah, blah, whatever that case is, and they're willing to pay for it.

So that's number six.

Number five on our list is Acumatica.

Acumatica is also designed for slightly more discrete industries.

The bill of materials that you are going to have are designed for slightly more complex products, even though their manufacturing capabilities are not going to be as rich in general.

So for the fast moving products, the product model may not be as friendly, even though Acumatica does really well in the retail distribution spaces.

And because of that, some of the supply chain players might be present in their ecosystem.

But for the most part, Acumatica is not going to provide as part of their suite or on their paper.

It's not part of their portfolio.

Well, yeah, I had reached out to you back at the Technology Leader Collective.

I forget exactly what it was called, but gathering of Acumatica people, kind of like a large user group in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

It was a lot of fun.

It was a downtown, but yeah.

And so I, I left the partnership at, at Nextech, uh, came on with SWK, um, and was there for, you know, uh, as people know for, um, about 10 years working with Jeff and then with Mark Meller, who I have great affection for, the CEO of SWK.

We took the company public.

We started and built the AX3 practice, built it up to a multimillion dollar practice, Took on Acumatica, took on NetSuite briefly, and built that team up to over 200 people.

It was a great run.

So that's number seven.

Number six on our list is Acumatica.

And Acumatica, in comparison to a lot of products that we have reviewed so far, is a much smaller product, targets smaller make-to-order manufacturing companies.

Even though their manufacturing capabilities are very deep for make-to-order companies, it can support mixed-mode manufacturing capabilities, but the capabilities might not be as deep as what you're going to find with other systems that we have on this list for complex manufacturing, complex inventory use cases.

In general, the way Acumetica product is designed, designed for discrete manufacturing-centric use cases.

So if you are... process manufacturer in the make-to-order space, and there could be process manufacturer that could be make-to-order as well, Acumatica may not be the best fit.

In those use cases, you might need to use an add-on with Acumatica, depending upon how many different business models you have, how many different processes you have as part of your make-to-order manufacturing business model.

so akumatica would be a better fit for companies that are pure play discrete and if you are going to have any other business models for example construction field service all of those are supported as part of the same product for those make to order manufacturers so that's number six Number five on our list is SAP S4 HANA.

You know, StackSync today is a leader in real-time and two-way syncing between enterprise systems and databases.

So, you know, StackSync supports CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, Zoho, et cetera, but also ERPs like NetSuite, you know, SAP, you know, Acumatica.

And all of these tools, basically, they can be synchronized in two-way sync with databases such as Postgres, Snowflake, BigQuery, MongoDB, MySQL, OracleDB, you name it.

And so what really Stack Sync enables to do is really to actually bypass all of these iPass tools, all of these complex in-house code, you know, custom code logics, and just have like a two-way sync as you would think it is in a human manner.

...

Acumatica-

Yep.

Mm-hmm

I think the list is spot on.

However, I think the third party ISV market shakes that up.

Like, you could have, you know, Acumatica as being the mid tier two, and let's say you need multi-entity functionality, and that's the reason why there's IFS out there, right? Or you have Epicor.

Well, there's a, a really good third party solution in the Acumatica ecosystem for multi-entity.

So let's say if they have some follow-up questions here on this process.

So for example, the deterministic model that you were talking about from the screens, from the interactions, the traditional model, let's say if you go to, you keep referencing NetSuite, you can reference NetSuite, Acumatica, whichever, right? So they have very traditional model where they are literally building the UI, building the report in the traditional way.

They are not, Now, I don't know if they are generating any sort of code in the background based on the queries.

For the most part, it was very traditional model, the way you would develop your UI and APIs and database queries.

I mean, I'm not sure if, if you've talked to anybody about this, but it's one of those things where I think some of these companies build great software and then companies spend years just trying to figure out what it is they built and how to use it.

And like, gosh, there's gotta be a better way to onboard this stuff or, or dial it in, and I do feel like we finally found a really good partner with-- We're working with Acumatica.

Yeah, I saw a sticker on your guitar.

Yeah, no. [laughs]

Yeah.

You know, we had some challenges with like our VAR, our value, value-added reseller, which is like a third party that optimizes for Acumatica for specific industries, and what we found is for us, it works better to go straight to Acumatica.

And that's not o- I don't think that's available to everyone, so I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to be talking about it, but, uh-

We can cut it.