Danforth Pewter Adds Modern ERP to Colonial Foundation

Video transcript: Danforth Pewter implemented Acumatica Cloud ERP

My great great grandfathers on his side were pewters in the colonial era from about seventeen fifty five till eighteen seventy. It has given me great inspiration and pride over the course of the last forty years to have that background. We started Danforth Pewter in, nineteen seventy five in Woodstock, Vermont. We've always had the goal of designing and making beautiful functional things for everyday life. So we started moving into the retail business and we now have six stores and we also along the way, knew that we needed to have an online presence. So we, launched a website, and it has been, major growth for us. That evolution of all of those channels of sales has both been very challenging to us and also has given us many, many opportunities for growth. You know, I wanted an ERP that could manage our financial data, that we could produce financial statements out of, that we could manage our order processing, orders from our website, orders that came in by phone, and that integrated with a POS system that we could afford. What we could afford was a couple hundred thousand dollars, is sort of what we felt we could spend on a new IT system. You know, had sort of accepted that, not being able to find any evidence that what I wanted existed and having lots of smart people telling me it didn't, We've got inventory of two thousand one hundred products in six different stores so there are eighteen thousand different pieces of data we have to keep track of. We had a system for our point of sale in the retail stores and then we had a set separate system to handle the accounting, the inventory, and the manufacturing. We'd have to pull information from both systems and marry them together to be able to get reports and things for looking at retiring products or anything like that. Now we don't have to do that anymore. We can look at the data when we want it and how we want it and really make better decisions about what products we should be selling where and which products we should drop and which products we should promote. ERP deployments have a very high failure rate, but we did in fact launch half the system exactly on time and half the system one day late, which is rare. And the project overall over the last year that we've been using it has come in right around on budget which is also very rare. The folks at PC Bennett knew Acumatica inside and out and were responsive and friendly and you know really able to help us make sure we were using the system properly, taking advantage of everything the system was able to do. So they've been great. With Acumatica, our labor costs have gone down. It has also reduced our error rate in terms of orders going into the system accurately and customers getting exactly what they ordered. Being able to see what's going on across our entire business in one snapshot is just invaluable. A wise man once told me, never guess when you can know, and now I can know, and that's really nice.