SpaceManager Closets

Affordable Manufacturing Platform

All three ERPs offered financial management, manufacturing, and field service capabilities. “But NetSuite didn’t’ have field services natively, and neither did Dynamics but they had limited features, which was not very attractive to me.”

One of the bigger stumbling blocks with the two alternative offerings was the cost. “NetSuite had per-user licensing, which, if you are trying to grow, doesn’t offer a predictable cost as you add employees. And then you have different levels of users where some are like me – on for five or six hours – and then others might log in during the morning and then once at night, but the cost per user was the same.”

“Microsoft Dynamics Business Central just seemed very clunky and wasn’t what I expected from modern software. I didn’t like the licensing model or the general feel. It wasn’t smooth or modern,” Nwabudike says.

Acumatica Manufacturing Edition

Nwabudike had not heard of Acumatica and was surprised at its breadth of functionality. “When I discovered Acumatica, I was quite surprised that anything like that existed,” he says. “I was amazed that it could do all the things that it could do.”

Acumatica Manufacturing Edition, he learned, was designed for make-to-stock, make-to-order, configure-to-order, engineer-to-order, and project-centric manufacturers. Native apps connect data and business processes for engineering change control, production management, material planning, advanced planning and scheduling, estimating, and rules-based product configuration.

Features such as kitting with disassembly, matrix items for product families, engineering change control, outside processing, lot and serial tracking, and demand forecasting enable productivity across departments. The connected platform allows manufacturers to create production orders manually, from the material requirements planning (MRP) application, or sales orders.

Since he was bootstrapping his company, he was impressed with Acumatica Manufacturing Edition’s unique licensing model, the system’s flexibility, and ease of use allowing him to implement and support the platform with minimal IT and development resources.

“I wanted a system that did not have a cost every time I wanted to do something,” Nwabudike says. “Because I am trying to keep costs down, I don’t want to hire a consultant if I want to change a variable.”

He also liked that Acumatica was cloud-based, had a mobile app, offered payment integration, and offered an open API for easy connections to third-party applications.

“Acumatica made this so easy (to operate) with user-defined fields, which means you don’t have to have anyone help you run the system outside of the initial setup,” he says. “You can do most of it yourself.”

SpaceManager worked with Acumatica partner ASWI to deploy the business management solution in just four months. “ASWI said the implementation would take 6 to 9 months, but I had to be done before the end of the year because I didn’t want to limp into another year with QuickBooks.”

Eliminated Inventory Problems

Within the first year of using Acumatica Manufacturing, Nwabudike says they resolved 95% of their inventory challenges.

They’ve also utilized Acumatica’s real-time data, helping shop-floor employees do their jobs efficiently. The leadership team makes smarter, more strategic business decisions, such as buying materials in bulk, and ensuring they have items they need in inventory while simultaneously reducing material costs.

With a full year operating on Acumatica, Nwabudike reviewed a year’s worth of data to figure out material consumption rates. The company had struggled to keep several items in stock during the global supply chain storages caused by pandemic shutdowns.

“I made the decision to buy in bulk, which I couldn’t do before,” he says. “Looking at the data, I realized we could leverage our size to reduce costs. I made our first international purchase because it made sense to buy 6 to 9 months of inventory and save 30 percent. Decisions like that have paid off significantly.”

Reduced Errors, Improved Quality Control

SpaceManager Closets didn’t have a formal quality control process and relied on employee experience to estimate the ancillary knobs, pulls, and other components needed for storage projects. “We never had a way to properly account for those items besides paper verification and know that a project was supposed to have six of these and seven of these,” he says. “With 2,000 to 3,000 SKUs, it was almost impossible to manage without a system.”

The company stocked one handle style in 15 colors, but only used a general SKU description, he says. Without documentation on the proper color needed, the company wasted a lot of time when installers didn’t have the right parts on hand in the field.

“Now when we sell a project, the proper SKUs are included and flow through the system. This drastically reduced errors,” Nwabudike says. “At the picking point, you arrive with the right parts. If I sell you a closet and ask for 50 percent down and promise I will install it in six weeks, the customer expects that we will purchase all the items and come to their home six weeks later. To say we don’t have all the right parts is not acceptable.”

Not only did wrong colors or missing parts waste time but these errors also reduced the company’s profit margins.

“A lot of homeowners wanted a concession, and don’t consider that we spent the same money twice. Instead, they had to take off work twice, and want something for their trouble,” Nwabudike says. “You can imagine what it did to margins. It’s hard to measure, but we had a lot of loss there.”

With an improved workflow and better data, Acumatica has helped reverse margin erosion and improved overall customer satisfaction due to excellent service delivery. “We’re making good strides now,” Nwabudike says.

Improved Customer Service and Customer Experience

Acumatica’s CRM helped SpaceManager refine its opportunity pipeline, better understand where profitable leads come from, and calculate cost per lead.

“In the past, I used a spreadsheet to capture data from job numbers and then retrieved data from QuickBooks, but I never knew what our ROI was on different spend on channels,” he says.

Now he has a system built around different purchase stages and customer’s likelihood to buy since an opportunity takes time to turn into a purchase. “Now we understand how much we are going to sell in a month.”

“The other thing we look at is how many leads are getting from all these different marketing channels and how do they flow through the system to the sale.”

It is important to see data flow throughout the system to capture the opportunity process from a lead to a sale through execution and invoice to understand how much the company spent to get that lead, he says.

Nwabudike also has real-time data he uses to evaluate the sales team, providing insights into reps with higher close rates and personnel that need additional coaching. “Before, we were doing nothing,” he says.

Automated Processes Improved Customer Communication

SpaceManager created an automated email series to update customers on their purchase and delivery schedules. “Before, we would take the customer’s money and they’d never hear from us again for six weeks,” he says. “People would call us and didn’t like that they had to chase us around. We didn’t have the bandwidth to call people, so one of the first things I did was create automated notifications, which are very nice and personal.”

Nwabudike set up the automated email and text notifications himself using Acumatica’s low-code, no code capabilities, processes without developer assistance.

He plans to automate processes around payments and deposits to make sure the company accounts for cash appropriately for work they perform.

After perfecting its Acumatica Manufacturing installation, SpaceManager Closets rolled out Acumatica Field Service, supporting the company’s 15 or so field-based installers. The Field Service application includes a scheduling feature that lets SpaceManager schedule people over multiple days and create teams of people assigned to a single project.

Nwabudike plans to create checklists to remind installers to take photos, upload receipts, and provide final approval paperwork in the field from the customer’s home or office. These tasks are often overlooked and required when a customer questions a project’s status.

Acumatica: Lifeblood of the Company

While Acumatica has many third-party applications available should SpaceManager need very specific functionality, Nwabudike says Acumatica’s breadth and depth of functionality in its out-of-the box platform provides everything he needs for now. However, he is more confident in the future, knowing that as his company grows, additional functionality can be added seamlessly.

“There’s nothing we do that doesn’t include Acumatica,” Nwabudike says. “Acumatica is literally the lifeblood of our business. There’s a whole lot of data that’s now available to us to make smarter decisions.