How Storm Smart Grew 50% and Built a Stronger Business with Acumatica

Video transcript: Storm Smart - Success Story of Acumatica

The company was founded in nineteen ninety six in a garage here in Cape Coral, Florida. We're a vertically integrated manufacturer, installer, and servicer of hurricane protection products. And we want to put in essence a bulletproof vest on your home. So when mother nature wreaks its wrath on you, not only does your home withstand it, but you and your family walk out alive and safe. Now we have seven branches on the east and west coast of Florida all the way up to Tampa and over to the West Palm Beach area. And we've gone from around two hundred employees to close to four hundred. So before we switched to Acumatica, it was a lot of different systems not talking to each other, having to go in, log in, check into something, go to another system, maybe go to five systems potentially to be able to get the information we needed. We realized the data was really a reactive tool for the business, but I had very limited visibility to what happened yesterday, what happened last week, and more importantly to me, what's going to hit us in the next month, three months out, a year out. And so that became a big challenge. We couldn't continue to grow and scale with the systems that we had. I remember we vetted a few other different solutions. And at some point somebody said, Hey, has anybody heard about Acumatica? They basically have it all under one. And Acumatica was fully cloud, fully supported, and moving into the future and being able to change and adapt with the software was a good fit for us. Acumatica allows us to get to our information fast in real time, all in one platform. It's personally given me that access to the data and more importantly the clarity of the data, the accuracy of the data so we can make decisions quicker, be more nimble as a company. It's given the team's ability to be more autonomous and they can make decisions and run their departments much more effectively because they have access to real time data. Now our manufacturing is running fully through the system. It's reducing our waste, just making our manufacturing more efficient, it's helping us order more efficiently. We're using much more robust label creation and scanning on the floor of materials. This has given us a much more granular view on inventory control, we can really see material issues out to the floor, material consumptions, what a more real time view of our stock position looks like. It allows our supply chain team to be much more proactive when they're going out to the market and we're trying to source the materials we need. So our field service team, they do use the mobile application, which is very convenient for them to pull up project level information while on-site. All that is run through Axiomatica today, and we have access to put that right in the installer's hands while they're in front of the customer. For us, automations are key. So we're able to automate our invoices. They get sent out to our customers, our customers pay, they come back in our system, it updates all of our accounting information, and then it's all in one place. Roughly since twenty one, we've doubled the business without doubling the back office, meaning your IT departments, all your supporting functions, and leveraging a technology efficiently really helps us be more nimble. What I've really come to appreciate with Strategies Group is the partnership. Very open, very transparent, gave guidance, gave feedback, weren't afraid to say, wait a minute, have you thought about this? We want to help them grow their business and be a part of that and not just we're in, we implement and we leave. With StormSmart, we're continuing to make things efficient. We're continuing to streamline their processes. They have been so great helping us along the journey. I don't need to have all these experts on our staff. We have one administrator today that works in Acumatica in house, and then the rest of it, we rely heavily on SGI as our partner. One of the reasons I recommend it, especially from an IT perspective, is we can hire multiple people, we can ramp up, and there's not that direct cost like some of our other software providers. Flexibility and scalability, those two words can really sum up what Acumatica provides. We've gone through the transition. We're now reaping the benefits of that. And if you want to make sure that your company is stabilized and ready for the next step in its growth, I couldn't think of a better partner than Acumatica.