ERP Veteran Tackles 12th Implementation, Acumatica for Franchisee

Video transcript: BLD Brands

BLD Brands is a large restaurant group. We've got one hundred and thirty four restaurants in ten states. Our two largest franchises are Papa John's and Hardee's. And then we also have our own concept called Spaghetti Warehouse. When I joined the company seven months ago, I immediately saw a real challenge. We had desires to continue to expand the business, but because of previous acquisitions, we were running on eight different charts of accounts, four different accounting calendars, and an unsupported system of Sage Pro. It was just a real nightmare. Getting everything harmonized onto a state of the art software system was going to make a big, big difference for us. For BLD Brands, we thought Acumatica was the right fit. They were looking for very strong financials and looking for something that wouldn't limit them on their future growth. The beauty with Acumatica is you're able to set up branches fairly easily, and that gave BLD Brands the vision and ability to see everything that they need to see in each of those entities. This was actually my twelfth ERP implementation of my career and so I've had a lot of exposure to a lot of different systems. Our finalists that we ended up going with besides Acumatica were NetSuite, Intact, and Microsoft Dynamics NAV. One of the things that we liked about Acumatica was the unlimited user licenses. We're currently in negotiations to purchase a two hundred unit restaurant group that, with that acquisition would allow us to be able to add all of those users without suddenly worrying about a big increase in my, IT costs. That's a big benefit. With the help of Premier Computing, we were actually able to do the implementation in two and a half months. David and the team at Premier Computing have been very, very helpful in this process. They've been giving us good guidance, solid training. When we've had questions and issues come up, they've been able to jump right on them. We took a crawl, walk, run strategy. We've been pleasantly surprised to find that the improvement in functionality has been substantially higher, even in what we still consider to be the crawl stage of the process. It wasn't hard to learn some of the nuances of Acumatica. It was just so easy to work with. I can do my journal entries for my clothes in one day versus four days. Our long term strategy is to grow the business to over a thousand stores and a billion dollars in sales over the next five years. As part of that process, we want to make sure that we can keep our infrastructure costs relatively flat and not have to continue to grow that back office function. And so Acumatica provides a platform that will allow us to do that.