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Episode 8 | Redefining Response in Construction Services
Acumatica Summit 2026: Redefining Response in Construction Services
Patryk Kubiszyn, VP of Systems and Process at Smith & Long, a multi-trade construction services company, describes the company’s ERP transformation with Acumatica. Smith and Long’s ERP transformation was driven by strategic planning, cultural alignment, and leveraging Acumatica's flexibility for continuous improvement.
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Show Notes
Episode Description
Patryk Kubiszyn, VP of Systems and Process at Smith & Long, a multi-trade construction services company, describes the company’s ERP transformation with Acumatica.
Smith and Long’s ERP transformation was driven by strategic planning, cultural alignment, and leveraging Acumatica's flexibility for continuous improvement.
Patryk Kubiszyn
Vice President, Systems & Process at Smith & Long
Links
It just dawned upon the company that, for us to achieve our growth, for us to keep growing, we needed a system that was gonna grow with us. And the old system was just not doing it. It was, we were gonna keep it in the status quo. And it wasn't enough to just expand on like the volume of transactions that you were doing… as it becomes more complex, you also have to change your processes. To maintain the growth and the scalability. If, if you're just stuck in like a pyramid scheme kind of, you know, you just keep adding resources and, and you follow the same structure, that's gonna be extremely inefficient. You have to find a way to revamp. And that meant that we also had to revamp our system along with our processes.
Transcript
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] David:
Welcome to the Acumatica ERP podcast, where we explore practical innovation for growing businesses.
[00:00:12] David:
Today we're joined by Patryk Kubiszyn, vice President of Systems and Process at Smith & Long.
[00:00:28] Patryk:
Hi. Nice to see you.
[00:00:30] David:
So, let's start off with you telling us a little bit about Smith & Long. Our listeners may not know much about Smith & Long.
[00:00:40] Patryk:
Absolutely. So, Smith & Long is a construction services based company multi-trade electrical, HVAC, plumbing, civil, medium and high voltage.
[00:01:00] David:
That's awesome. I was wondering 'cause your mind automatically goes, so this must be like a timing perspective, but I love it's so much more than that, right?
[00:01:08] Patryk:
Absolutely.
[00:01:10] David:
That's awesome. Okay. Patryk, tell us a little bit about your role and, and how do you think about supporting growth through systems and your operations?
[00:01:20] Patryk:
Vice President Systems and Processes, what it really means is the ownership to make sure that the company is able to sustain scalability and growth.
[00:01:30] David:
That’s awesome. I love that. If you're not growing, you're shrinking or you know, I worked for somebody who used to say, if you're not growing, you're dying.
[00:01:40] Patryk:
I think it's the same thing.
[00:01:42] David:
Absolutely. Yeah. Exactly. It's about adopting it and technology is changing so quickly.
[00:01:50] Patryk:
Right.
[00:01:50] David:
So you've gotta gotta kind of assess what works for your organization. It doesn't work.
[00:02:00] Patryk:
Right.
[00:02:00] David:
Awesome. Okay. I wanna go back to like, prior to Acumatica.
[00:02:08] Patryk:
So before moving to a new ERP solution, what were you facing, what challenges were you facing and what made it clear that, man, we need a stronger foundation for our organization?
[00:02:20] Patryk:
I think you'll find that a lot of companies have data in too many different systems, right?
[00:02:28] Patryk:
It's just spread across.
[00:02:30] David:
Oh, wow.
[00:02:30] Patryk:
And, and it's really difficult to make decisions.
[00:02:38] Patryk:
You're not sure as to what's going on.
[00:02:40] David:
That makes a lot of sense.
[00:02:42] Patryk:
A lot of the time they go into a bit of a maintenance mode, right?
[00:02:50] Patryk:
There's no change in the system.
[00:02:52] David:
That makes a lot of sense.
[00:03:00] Patryk:
It's stagnant.
[00:03:02] David:
Yeah.
[00:03:02] Patryk:
Really you start building your processes or you're starting to.
[00:03:10] Patryk:
Change your processes and shoehorning them to make sure that they work with the system.
[00:03:20] David:
That makes a lot of sense.
[00:03:22] Patryk:
So the non-negotiables was that we needed a system that was gonna be flexible, was gonna be scalable, and when we're making the changes, that's not gonna slow the business down.
[00:03:40] Patryk:
And, and that's very important because certainly changing ERP systems is a really big process for the company.
[00:03:50] David:
That’s awesome.
[00:04:00] Patryk:
So I think it's to continue deepening our workflow improvements and using various methods of automation.
[00:04:20] Patryk:
B by having everything into one system, we get to concentrate on the one system.
[00:04:30] David:
Yeah.
[00:04:30] Patryk:
Whether it's financial, operational, CRM, customer facing portals, et cetera.
[00:04:50] Patryk:
It's really easy to now stitch things together, see what is working, what is not working, and make those changes.
[00:05:10] David:
Nice.
[00:05:10] Patryk:
And we have the tools with Acumatica, right?
[00:05:20] Patryk:
They have the business events.
[00:05:30] Patryk:
We can rewrite our generic inquiries, our dashboards, our our reports, our, our workflows and everything.
[00:05:50] Patryk:
So it's really going into that next level and every year as they're releasing the, the new major releases, there's new fund tools.
[00:06:10] Patryk:
And modules ever changing it.
[00:06:20] David:
Nice.
[00:06:20] Patryk:
So a a lot of these very quickly make it into our processes and, and we're really taking advantage of it wherever we can.
[00:06:40] David:
How does AI fit into that?
[00:06:50] Patryk:
AI is used very generically for, for a lot of things.
[00:07:00] Patryk:
And I, I have a joke in, in my office, I have a piece of paper like what people say and what it really means.
[00:07:20] Patryk:
Yeah.
[00:07:20] David:
I love it.
[00:07:30] Patryk:
So, um. Very interested in AI for a lot of the data analysis, data anomaly for agents.
[00:08:00] Patryk:
Now, what's really important to note is that even though Acumatica is very flexible and you can build pretty much any report that you want.
[00:08:20] Patryk:
At the end of the day, maybe I don't have a very specific report that you have for a niche request.
[00:08:40] Patryk:
And this is where something like an AI agent, which is fantastic at data crunching.
[00:09:00] Patryk:
Can on the fly stitch together all of this information for you very quickly spit it out.
[00:09:20] David:
Love it.
[00:09:20] Patryk:
I wouldn't judge the merit of someone being able to download a bunch of Excel sheets and stitching it together, right?
[00:09:40] Patryk:
So it's like, why, why spend the time doing something like that?
[00:09:50] Patryk:
The other thing that's interesting with things like anomaly detection and whatnot, is.
[00:10:10] Patryk:
When you are creating reports, you are very biased.
[00:10:30] Patryk:
You're saying like, okay, these are the things that we wanna look out for.
[00:10:50] Patryk:
These are like good metrics.
[00:11:10] Patryk:
These are bad metrics.
[00:11:30] Patryk:
Where, where do I wanna put my checks and balances and my flags on my reports to make sure that things are lining up?
[00:11:50] Patryk:
With anomaly detection, it's the things that you are not necessarily think thinking about, right?
[00:12:20] Patryk:
You, the, the system is unbiased to what you think you should be searching for.
[00:12:40] David:
Love it.
[00:12:40] Patryk:
So when it detects that anomaly and spits that out in front of you.
[00:13:00] Patryk:
You go, oh wow.
[00:13:10] Patryk:
Now this is like a new process, a new flag for me to be tracking.
[00:13:30] David:
That's awesome.
[00:13:30] Patryk:
So these are sort of the benefits of, of AI.
[00:13:50] Patryk:
So the, the real answer is like, what do I think about the future of AI, especially what they're working on with Acumatica.
[00:14:20] Patryk:
Arms wide open, very eager to continue seeing the integration.
[00:14:40] David:
Love it.
[00:14:40] Patryk:
Not only for automation, time saving, but but also for better data reporting.
[00:15:00] David:
Love it.
[00:15:00] Patryk:
Lightning round time.
[00:15:10] David:
Yeah.
[00:15:10] Patryk:
What is an industry outside of work that you find interesting?
[00:15:30] Patryk:
Outside of work that I find interesting. maybe a, a a little bit cliche for somebody in my position.
[00:15:50] Patryk:
But I'm really into astronomy and, and space.
[00:16:10] David:
That's awesome.
[00:16:10] Patryk:
Oh, cool, cool, cool. More of the nerd.
[00:16:30] David:
What is something in your morning routine you look forward to?
[00:16:50] Patryk:
It's gotta be my coffee ritual.
[00:17:10] Patryk:
It, it is.
[00:17:20] David:
Yeah.
[00:17:20] Patryk:
I really enjoy ju just before the pandemic hit, we ended up buying like a little espresso machine that we had at home.
[00:17:50] Patryk:
And then the pandemic hit. And so that poor machine, I was just, it was begging to put it out of its misery.
[00:18:10] Patryk:
I was like, no one more espresso.
[00:18:20] David:
Yeah.
[00:18:20] Patryk:
So I, I really enjoy that, the aromas, the flavors of preparing the coffee, sitting down, having it by myself before the whole family wakes up.
[00:18:50] David:
You, it's kind of your quiet
[00:18:50] Patryk:
time.
[00:18:50] Patryk:
Oh, it's very sacred to me.
[00:19:10] David:
Final question what are you looking forward to most at Summit?
[00:19:30] Patryk:
It would have to be the marketplace.
[00:19:50] Patryk:
A a couple years ago, I, I was at the 2024 oh, summit Las Vegas.
[00:20:10] Patryk:
And the marketplace actually blew my mind.
[00:20:30] Patryk:
Because when you're in there seeing all the other vendors, what solutions they have, what innovations that they bring into the system.
[00:21:00] Patryk:
When I'm searching for something, it's usually I'm trying to solve a specific problem, okay?
[00:21:20] Patryk:
So I won't necessarily stumble upon some of these other solutions that are in there.
[00:21:40] Patryk:
Walking through the marketplace, we all of a sudden discover is like, Hey, we actually have a really poor way of communicating our training material.
[00:22:10] Patryk:
And then we found a vendor that like really solved that problem for us that integrated directly with Acumatica.
[00:22:30] David:
Nice.
[00:22:30] Patryk:
So I'm really looking forward to spending lots of times in the marketplace.
[00:22:50] David:
Cool.
[00:22:50] Patryk:
Patryk, thank you for being on the show. It's been great being with you.
[00:23:10] Patryk:
My pleasure.
[00:23:10] David:
Yeah. Appreciate the time.
[00:23:20] Patryk:
Yeah, you bet.
[00:23:20] David:
And thank you to our listeners for tuning in.
[00:23:30] David:
Be sure to subscribe to the Acumatica ERP podcast so you don't miss future conversations on practical innovation for growing businesses.
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