Customer Success with Acumatica: Fabuwood

If you could use only one word to describe Fabuwood, a semi-custom kitchen cabinet manufacturer located in Newark, New Jersey, it would be “fast”. There are other words that fit, like ‘quality’, ‘best’, and ‘technology’, but Fabuwood is well known for its industry-shattering delivery speeds, maintaining the capacity to ship stock items in as few as five business days.

That’s almost unheard of in the kitchen cabinet manufacturing industry, but Fabuwood’s exceptionally speedy delivery is not the only thing that the company does fast. The manufacturing company also implemented Acumatica’s comprehensive cloud ERP solution, with the stellar help of Acumatica partner NexVue (now Net at Work), in five months.

It’s no wonder, then, that Fabuwood is the fastest growing semi-custom kitchen cabinetry manufacturer in the country, and here’s how Acumatica helped them do it.

Harnessing the Power of Technology

In 2009, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Joel Epstein established Fabuwood as a startup made-to-order cabinet maker employing 40 people. The first few years saw the company focus on technology and automation as the keys to delivering greater quality and speed.

“We’re a technology company that happens to make kitchen cabinets,” says Sendy Stern, Chief Technology Officer.

What he means is that Fabuwood invested millions of dollars in technology to fuel its growth plans, and it paid off. The kitchen cabinet manufacturer now employs 1,200 people boasts a cutting-edge, one-million-square-foot facility and a 400,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Jersey City, and sells its quality cabinets through 3,000 dealers.

However, like many start-up businesses, the road to success had a few speed bumps along the way. One of the biggest was Fabuwood’s reliance on QuickBooks.

“QuickBooks was basically not made for large enterprises. It was slow, and data was often corrupted. There were no controls, and there wasn’t an MRP, automation and no customizations of the system,” Stern says. “As we started growing, we developed our own WMS system to track cabinets so we could see all the products in the warehouse. Then we created our pricing system. We realized we would quickly outgrow QuickBooks and hit the ceiling with it.”

Having multiple manufacturing, inventory, and finance systems that didn’t—and couldn’t—talk to each other resulted in siloed data that required time-and-resource-intensive effort to synchronize. Unfortunately, having to sync data often led to inconsistencies and discrepancies that were incompatible with the company’s philosophy of speed, efficiency, and quality service.

So, the team decided to search for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that could handle their complex needs and ongoing expansion, and their search led them to Acumatica.

Why Acumatica?

For Fabuwood, finding the right ERP system involved evaluating multiple options. Ten to be exact, but two ERP solutions quickly rose to the top: Oracle NetSuite and Acumatica.

“Back when we started looking for an ERP, Acumatica was not as popular and everyone had heard of NetSuite,” Stern says. “We wondered whether we should go with Acumatica or not and invited both back for additional demos. Acumatica won and the main reasons were our development team liked Acumatica’s flexibility and ease of integration.”

The manufacturing company also wanted a solution that could be easily customized and that could connect to third-party applications. This included integrating with their custom-made warehouse software application and internally developed digital pricing tool, EZ Pricing (which contains more than 15,000 SKUs and is the one tool its dealers use to manage all their inventory, pricing, quoting, customer, reporting, order, and delivery needs). With its open, modern xRP platform, Acumatica fit the bill perfectly.

But there was another aspect of Acumatica that greatly appealed to Fabuwood: Acumatica’s Manufacturing Management Software. The Fabuwood team was excited that they could get their core manufacturing, financial, project accounting, and reporting applications in a single solution while also being able to connect to optional applications that allowed them to tailor the system to their requirements—all of which they thought was impossible before finding Acumatica.

On top of that, Acumatica offered superlative service and support. Says Stern, “The support you get at Acumatica, you don’t get at any other company.”

Acumatica Delivers Business-Growing Benefits

With speed a priority, Fabuwood’s internal development team and NexVue’s Dan Schwartz were able to get Acumatica implemented quickly, and because they held go-live dress rehearsals and tested the operational steps over and over again, the go live went without a hitch. This quick, error-free implementation was just the beginning of the many benefits delivered by Acumatica, including:

• A modern ERP platform that allows Fabuwood to connect more than 15 integrations (e.g., EZ Pricing, PowerBI, Avalara, and more). “Acumatica is now our single source of truth, and all integrations work off the ERP platform,” Stern says.
• Clean, corruption-free, real-time data that is pulled easily into their reporting software. “One of our biggest improvements is actually the ease of getting data out of the system,” says Data Analyst Shlomit Katz. “In addition to having manufacturing and finance on the same platform, we can just pull data out so easily. We don’t need to write any complex code. We pull data straight into our reporting software and everything is there at our fingertips.”

Stern adds, “Having clean data alone saves you time. We have easy access to reports, which are integrated with PowerBI. Acumatica takes us to the next level.”

• Improved purchasing and inventory management (e.g., track material costs better, view of Bill of Materials (BOM), and more) with Acumatica’s Materials Resource Planning (MRP) functionality. “Now, I see all the data in real time,” says Jim Murray, Finance Controller. “Having a formal bill of material (BOM) and formal routing, we can see what’s happening to all those different products from purchasing all the way through the manual manufacturing cycle day-to-day, minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour.”

• Automated data entry vs. manual effort previously required in QuickBooks. “Things are being scanned in. We’re using barcodes. Transactions are really being processed through a backflush process, so we don’t have 50 people in a room just typing in all this manual data. It’s very, very automated,” Murray says. “We’re talking thousands and thousands of transactions per day. I get to see this in real-time. For me, it’s really nice to see this full integration right into the P&L and balance sheet. Now, we’re able to look at the data, start making decisions, improve processes, and drive to the solutions that are expected.”

Fabuwood: Not Slowing Down

Fabuwood’s phenomenal growth continues unabated, including acquiring Plain & Fancy Custom Cabinetry in 2024. Between their proprietary software and Acumatica’s modern, innovative platform, they have everything they need to succeed.

“We’ve seen the power of the Acumatica platform and how easy it is to work with, and how easy and accurate the integrations are,” Stern says. “We want to change, want to know our future, and we need things fast. And we feel like Acumatica delivers that.”

At Acumatica, we’re excited to watch Fabuwood, 2019 Acumatica’s Customer of the Year, soar to even greater heights. To learn more about Fabuwood, read its full customer success story, and feel free to contact our team to find out how we can help your business thrive in a competitive marketplace and digital-based economy.