For years, Envent Engineering Ltd. was a successful business, but struggled to reach its growth potential. According to Chief Executive Officer, Andy Hodgson, the company—which designs, manufactures, sells, and services gas analyzers for energy producers—was running on disconnected, rudimentary technology and multiples of spreadsheets and databases. Hodgson says the younger workforce members were “appalled at the kind of banging-rocks-together-to-make-sparks level of technology we were using.”

It was clearly time for a change. The change? Upgrading to Acumatica’s comprehensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution.

“Our adoption of Acumatica was concurrent with our expansion and growth,” Hodgson says. “I would be the first to say that it probably made a lot of the growth possible. If we had had all these orders come in without having a better data management system, we probably would have been a train wreck.”

Stalled Growth

Established in 2003, Envent Engineering is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with offices in the U.S., Mexico, United Arab Emirates, and China. Envent provides world energy producers (e.g., traditional fuels, biogas, biodiesel, decarbonization, CO2 capture, and green renewable markets) with plug-and-play analyzer systems that measure H2S, CO2, H2O, and all gaseous hydrocarbons.

The Envent team write their own software and firmware as well as design and build almost every part of the analyzers except the enclosure it comes in and the power supply. Hodgson explains that Envent—which has its ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001 certification and is COR-certified—has a leg up on its competitors because they can make and deliver high-quality analyzers in 10 to 14 weeks.

“In addition to the quality of our products, we make a lot of sales because we can deliver them faster,” he says.

Even so, something was stalling Envent’s growth, and that something was its reliance on several legacy accounting solutions, various siloed systems, and lots of spreadsheets and databases. The business was running on guesses, not facts.

“It’s almost embarrassing to talk about,” Hodgson says. “The engineering team would literally stand around and say, ‘Well, it’s gonna need one of these, and it’s gonna need one of these. And then when it was all built according to what the engineering team thought it needed, they would do an as-built AutoCAD drawing of it after-the-fact and then figured out pricing.”

Determining actual costs after agreeing to the price with the customer made item profitability a moving target. The manual systems and lack of records regarding customers’ buying history didn’t help either, nor did their struggles with managing their mostly made-to-order production processes, handling their inventory needs (that included approximately 1,800 parts that make an analyzer—some of which were in stock while others needed a six-month lead time), not having a CRM solution for customer support, and the pandemic-inspired supply-chain issues.

“We were surviving and had a stable market share, but we weren’t growing. What was important was making the product, not a profit,” Hodgson says. “It is actually quite shocking how this company had succeeded in spite of itself on many levels.”

Enter Acumatica

Like most companies interested in investing in business-disrupting technology, Envent Engineering did its homework. Hodgson says they evaluated several options, including SAP’s small business solution, NetSuite, and Acumatica.

From cost to lack of user-friendliness and more, the various other ERP solutions were eliminated—except for Acumatica.

“It actually looked good to everybody from the beginning,” Hodgson says. “Because we run two sets of books, we could start with two tenants and modify that in the years ahead to one tenant with two branches.”

Acumatica’s multi-currency functionality, unlimited user pricing, deep functionality from order-to-cash, and ease of adding modules when needed were all selling points. Another major selling point was Acumatica Manufacturing, which delivers Canadian localization, MRP, bill of materials and routings, inventory control, order management, financials, project accounting, and CRM—all rolled into one.

“Once we had the opportunity to test drive it and to see our data in play, I think the accountants were the first to be happy and then it kind of went department by department after that.”

With the help of Acumatica partner Aqurus Solutions, Envent deployed Acumatica, welcoming a long list of benefits, including:

• Gaining access to real-time information from anywhere and at any time, allowing every team member to do their jobs quickly and accurately, especially traveling salespeople and executives.
• Saving significant time with financial report creation, enabling employees to access and analyze data whenever they need and from wherever they are.
• Quadrupling manufacturing capacity via building more concurrently than in the past.
• Improving inventory management, reducing inventory costs by millions of dollars and improving cash flow.
• Gaining insights into actual costs per item and profit margins, increasing profitability.

“If I were giving an assessment of Acumatica, I’d be hard pressed to say where it didn’t do something for us,” Hodgson says. “I’ve not only found it to be everything I thought it would be, but I found out working with the partner was almost intrinsic to the success of our implementation.”

With Acumatica, Envent is now an efficient, profitable business. To learn how this same customer success story can be yours, contact our experts today.