Embracing Pragmatic AI: How Acumatica is Transforming Cloud ERP Solutions

LAS VEGAS—Acumatica, a cloud-based ERP provider, has been making significant strides in recent years, focusing on delivering innovative solutions for mid-market businesses. Over the past year, the company has expanded its product offerings with regard to AI  solutions.  

For those unfamiliar with Acumatica, some background: The Seattle-based cloud ERP vendor developed an interesting way to cost-effectively address the needs of customers in certain industries by packaging its products into industry editions. Each industry edition marries Acumatica’s horizontal functionality (primarily financials, distribution, and customer management) with industry-specific modules, such as construction, manufacturing, distribution, retail, and professional services).  

At the recent Acumatica Summit in Las Vegas, CEO John Case and Chief Engineering Officer Miten Mehta (pictured) highlighted many priorities for the company in the past year, including expanding use of AI capabilities. 

“Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen that pragmatic use of AI has driven value for customers and started to make a difference,” Case said. “We’re building AI directly into our existing workflows, including at the industry level. We’re leveraging the power of our cloud to integrate rapidly changing AI capabilities, bringing them to our customers. We’re doing all of this while maintaining our foundational principles on customer data ownership and data control. That continues to be the most important thing for us.”  

‘Getting Democratized Very Fast’ 

When it comes to AI, the word “pragmatic” is a big one for Case and Acumatica.  

“AI is getting democratized very fast,” Case said. Large language models (LLMs) are expensive and demand tons of energy, “and we don’t want customers to have to figure this out for themselves. We want to be delivering things to them through our work that allows them to benefit. The average construction firm isn’t thinking about any particular LLM model or generative AI system. They just want to know, ‘Is my tool getting smarter? Am I solving more problems?’ So, for us, the question is, can we do that for them? That’s our pragmatic approach.” 

The AI focus is a change for Acumatica. It was reticent to go whole hog on the trend in 2023, preferring to focus on real-life scenarios and tangible value for its customers. Now, Acumatica says it has an AI-based strategy.  

“[Our customers] didn’t want it last year,” said Ali Jani, Acumatica’s Chief Product Officer. “It was like, ‘AI was OK, whatever.’ Now they’re starting to understand, and they’re asking. So, there’s a clear difference between where we were two years ago and last year versus this year.” 

Acumatica has unveiled several updates and enhancements that the company will release in 2025 to address these strategic priorities, including: 

• • Acumatica AI Studio: Acumatica AI Studio will empower business process experts to automate complex workflows without coding and gain insights into their data with better decision-making, all while ensuring sensitive information remains secure. 

• • Acumatica Labs: Acumatica Labs will establish a customer preview program, enabling early access to new features for testing and direct feedback. Users who sign up will have access to features such as advanced kitting, order orchestration, customer special orders, case closure notes, B2B ordering, document templates, and AI-powered anomaly detection. 

Polywood: Pioneering Sustainability with Acumatica’s Cloud ERP 

We caught up with some Acumatica customers at the summit in Las Vegas to hear how they’re using Acumatica’s new AI features and what they plan to implement in the future.   

One such company is Polywood, a pioneer in the sustainable outdoor furniture industry. The company creates outdoor furniture made from recycled plastics. Polywood’s eco-friendly products include a wide range of chairs, tables, benches, and accessories designed to withstand the elements. Its products are crafted from recycled plastic lumber, which is not only environmentally friendly but also offers durability compared to traditional wood furniture. This approach allows Polywood to contribute to environmental conservation while offering resilient furniture options. 

Polywood has faced several challenges, particularly in enhancing operational efficiency and scalability. The company’s growth has skyrocketed in recent years, with new private investors helping to pump millions into new facilities. This investment doubled its furniture and recycled plastic plant capacities. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, growth shot up even more. The surge in demand for outdoor furniture resulted in booming business and revealed the flaws in its back-office legacy systems.  

“We ended up saying, ‘OK, now we have to move, because this is happening during the pandemic when we’re growing 40% year over year,’” said Sean Valencourt, EVP of Information Systems at Polywood. “Because everyone’s staying home and getting government money and saying, ‘well, I see this outdoor space in my backyard every day that I didn’t pay attention to before.’”  

At that time, its hodge-podge system of Sage 100, Microsoft Excel, and other applications was having issues. “We got to the point where the 88th user would log into Sage and it would crash,” Valencourt said. On the other hand, “Acumatica is modern, hungry,” he said. “They’re doing two releases a year. They’ve got a full API; they’re customizable. All the things that we didn’t have with Sage.”  

Polywood had to move fast to handle the pandemic-fueled boom. “We didn’t actually do a full ERP evaluation,” Valencourt said. “We said, ‘we like Acumatica, let’s prove if it won’t work for us.’” Another deciding factor was Polywood’s implementation partner, Martin and Associates, which has many years of experience implementing Acumatica. (A robust network of independent software vendors and value-added resellers are a staple of Acumatica’s ecosystem.)   

Polywood took months to get everything lined up and dialed in before making the switch. Then, in March 2022, “we shut down Friday afternoon on Sage and stood back up at 11 p.m. on Sunday for our third shift on Acumatica.” This was a “pretty high stakes” process, Valencourt said.  

How did it go? Any issues? “There was no sleep for about eight of us that weekend,” he said. “There were a couple miracles that happened that weekend, but it was relatively smooth. We were able to close the month and haven’t looked back since.” 

What were the miracles? Valencourt explained:  

“Miracles were someone realizing that the way we had integrated with Acumatica’s API was a little too naïve, and we didn’t understand that we needed to be smarter about queuing things and rewriting. We did that within about 24 hours. And then also we had a little hiccup with our EDI setup. Thankfully, someone had some personal cell phone numbers and someone came in over the weekend and fixed the problem for us.” 

How has it gone since then?  

“We continue to grow. Acumatica is growing with us. There were certain things that we didn’t want to do from a technical standpoint, like we don’t want to add to the shoestring and bubblegum that was holding the system together in the past. Now we’ve got a really solid baseline where we can grow off this core system and feel good that we’re building to a future that is solid technically and supports the business.” 

As for what Polywood is doing now with AI, and what it plans to do in the future, Valencourt said, “That’s something that we’ve been exploring over the past year. I would say part of our philosophy related to that is we are looking for the vendors we work with to bring that to us.”  

He likes how Acumatica is integrating AI into its platform and wants to see that continue. “Right now, for us, it’s the obvious stuff—marketing copy and coding. AI is already good at those. Things that are more speculative for us would be things like user training. For instance, the operator of a computerized numeric control machine has a problem (in the manufacturing plant), and it’s ingested all the manuals and everything, and they can ask it: ‘OK, I’m running into this problem. How do I fix it to reduce downtime?’ Things like that.”  

As for the future of AI and automation for Polywood, “We’re slowly expanding,” he said. “We’ll never have all of our product line automated that way, because we sell 20,000-plus products, and not all of them are assembled that way. Some of them are higher volume than others, but the higher volume ones, absolutely. We continue to further automate.” 

Lessons for Manufacturers  

The greater manufacturing industry can glean valuable lessons from Polywood’s experience with Acumatica’s cloud-based ERP.  

• Embrace modern technology: Transitioning to a modern, cloud-based ERP system can streamline operations, improve scalability, and enhance data visibility. 

• Focus on integration: Integrating custom-made systems with a flexible ERP platform can optimize manufacturing processes and data flow. 

• Prioritize automation: Automating routine tasks boosts productivity and frees staff for more strategic initiatives. 

• Enhance customer satisfaction: Improved order processing and shipping times can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

• Scalability is key: A scalable platform is essential for handling growth and adapting to changing market conditions. 

Polywood’s switch to Acumatica Cloud ERP has been instrumental in its ability to manage rapid growth, improve operational efficiency, and maintain high customer satisfaction. This case study serves as an example for other manufacturers looking to modernize their systems. As for Acumatica, it will be interesting to see what other AI capabilities it will bring to its customers this year and how they will embrace those additions.

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By Tom Dunlap (Research Director)