Inspirus LLC

Solution

The Inspirus team evaluated SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Sage X3, Acumatica, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and discussed its needs with technology partners representing each solution. The evaluation team included a group researching solutions for the business side while another team evaluated the underlying platform technology.

“On the business side, Acumatica ranked highest, and on the technical, Acumatica was second,” says Severns “When we averaged the requirements from sales, finance, technology and operations, Acumatica ranked the highest.”

Initial cost investment also played a role. “The 5-year total cost of ownership for SAP was significantly higher,” she adds, mentioning that Sodexo uses SAP.

The evaluation team liked the look and feel of Acumatica, which they cited as user-friendly and intuitive. They also appreciated Acumatica’s open architecture for low-code and no-code integration and third-party application connectors.

“With its unlimited user licensing model, we could add auditors at no cost, and we could connect to Velixo for reporting,” Severns says. “Acumatica was also multi-tenant, SOC compliant, and provides a sandbox for upgrade testing.”

Due to the complexity of its operations, Inspirus wanted to work with a local systems integrator, selecting Acumatica Gold Partner AIM Solutions, Inc. The implementation was led by AIM’s Luke Rains.

“Acumatica’s intuitive design, enterprise scalability, and flexible pricing model made Acumatica an excellent fit for Inspirus as we evolve and transform our business,” Severns says, adding the project “was delivered at a fraction of an alternate vendor for SAP in both cost and implementation time.”

Benefits

By implementing Project Accounting in Acumatica, Frierson and the executive team learned who its most profitable customers are and which are not. The data helped them reevaluate the customer roster and led to decisions to drop some that weren’t profitable, says Koch, the CFO.

Inspirus now can allocate non-operational costs to the customers ‘cost bucket’. They obtain standard profitability reporting at a customer, item, or order level, which gives the company a holistic view of the overall cost to service each account.

“Acumatica helped us be more proactive, faster, to react faster, to close faster, to do analysis faster, and meet deadlines,” Koch says.

The company automated many manual tasks. For example, Inspirus leverages invoice templates and can bulk process them across multiple customers automatically. They are refining the process and plan to automate the entire process, eliminating employee intervention and reviews. Previously, invoices were printed and distributed manually.

Reporting and Dashboards

Inspirus makes better business decisions combining real-time data from Acumatica with a seamless connection to Velixo, an Excel-based reporting tool that adds more than 70 functions to Excel specially designed to work with Acumatica’s General Ledger, project data and Generic Inquiries, among other Acumatica functionality.

“With Velixo, we have the most up-to-date data since data is loaded and refreshed in a matter of seconds,” says Koch. “We can build multiple report types such as P&L, Cash flow statements, sales dashboards, budgets, and allocation and accruals, which help us make better business decisions.”

Inspirus employees have the information they need with drilldowns to the original source transaction in Acumatica, such as customer ID, reference numbers, or any other data, and do so from Velixo too, he says.

Dashboards “deliver visibility into what needs to be done that previously required someone to run an exception report to have to FIND what was missing,” Koch says. Key performance indicator dashboards provide real-time visibility into shipping, accounts receivable, accounts payable, purchase orders, receiving and eCommerce.

With automated dunning letters, Inspirus has improved collection rates, reduced past due accounts, and fortified working capital. “We can customize invoices and spend less time chasing the customer because Acumatica does it for us,” he says.

Streamlined Manufacturing, Sales Orders and POS

Rather than importing manufacturing orders one by one manually, sales orders are imported automatically into Acumatica from multiple commerce platforms seamlessly. Based on the configuration of the items and the orders, various fulfillment methods are executed simultaneously including warehouse fulfillment, drop shipment, and automated processing for digital redemption.

Previously, Inspirus used a home-grown batch process to get information for its online sales, which meant data was not instantly available. With Acumatica’s low-code, no-code functionality, Inspirus and AIM configured Big Commerce, in a mere two weeks, gaining real-time data.

Further Integration for Operational Improvements

“We have been able to connect Acumatica to our internal portfolio, and integrate it with our own software, which helps us run the manufacturing floor, take orders and bring them into Acumatica and manage purchase orders, invoicing and bill payments,” says Lesa Blakey, Vice President Operations & Culture.

Now that Inspirus has much better insight into its customers and has streamlined many operational processes, the team plans to deploy Acumatica’s CRM, and integrate the platform with Hubspot for lead generation.

“Acumatica is essential to Inspirus as we evolve our products and scale our operations,” says Severns. “Our Acumatica implementation was instrumental to achieving our business objectives and we can now be much more responsive to our customer’s needs, which ultimately helps us with our growth.”