Eastman Music Co. Orchestrates Upbeat Acquisition Tempo, Accompanied by Acumatica Manufacturing

Video transcript: Eastman Music - Success Story of Acumatica

So Eastman Music Company started in nineteen ninety two based out of Boston. The owner of the company, Chen Ni, is a Chinese immigrant who came to the US to study music professionally. He actually imported three violins, and from there, he turned it into what Eastman Music Company is today, which is a global company, twelve physical locations throughout the world in Asia, Mainland China, Europe, Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Starting from orchestral strings all the way up through brass wing instruments, woodwind instruments, guitars. From the student instrument all the way up to the most, you know, expensive custom, we use the expertise of our artists, of our craftsmen to make a better product. I realized that Sage, our IT ERP support in itself was its own liability. You know, we were dealing with the struggles of having this massive explosive growth, but having this outdated and antiquated product where we just couldn't connect and reliably know that we're gonna be able to look up information and, you know, it became a hindrance. I think one of the things that was a big challenge for us is managing the inventory and getting information to sales staff, customer service staff, staff, as far as quoting accurate ETAs on product. We were gonna come to a point to where we aren't weren't gonna be able to continue to scale our growth because of the limitations of our ERP system. The struggles that they had with multiple databases with their legacy ERP platform based on the company structure of Acumatica where you had multiple companies within the same shared chart of accounts, items, and customers. They did a lot of intercompany sales between those brands, so it seemed like the perfect fit. ISS has been wonderful to work with. We've had a great relationship. The best way I could say is they feel like an employee. Fast forward to Acumatica, and a lot of those same processes have become so much easier and more efficient. Tracking inventory, porting ETAs, looking up inventory in the system. Doing the intercompany transactions and reconciling that could take us a whole day to two days in a span of, like, a whole week of closing the financials. Whereas, in intercompany and Acumatica, it take us, like, five seconds. And as far as setting up a new company, when it's a domestic company or international company, it's very easy for them to do on their own. Upload the data, export data, match it, reconcile, and then you're good. One thing that we've really seen as a very specific time saver is training new employees. New employees latch onto Acumatica so much faster than they ever did Sage. We don't have to teach how to navigate Acumatica. It's so intuitive because it's built like a website that you interface with every day. Acumatica's GI function really is a game changer for us to be able to create our own reports, our own inquiries, start utilizing the dashboard features. I'm able to spoon feed the information that would have been hard for people like sales staff to be able to get at their fingertips. Which allows us to convey that information to our customers, and our customer service department is able to stay on top of updating orders, providing ETAs to customers in a much more efficient manner than we did prior to Acumatica. We get the comments that Eastman is their most reliable vendor to deal with as far as timely and accurate information, particularly for ETAs, delivery times, inventory availability, all those type of things that, mean a lot to our customers. With Acumatica, it's really about the scalability. And in in a lot of ways, I feel like the handcuffs are off. Things I think about and conceive of being able to happen are so much easier in Acumatica because the limitations of the data are kind of gone with the generic inquiry or ease of adding customer defined fields and things of that nature. I feel like for a long time, it's gonna be able to help us to scale our business and be dynamic and change in the way we need it to just because the infrastructure is built in a way to not create limitations.