How Acumatica Customer Karsten Group is Harvesting Success

In 1968, Piet and Babsie Karsten founded a farming business in South Africa. It was the foundation for what would eventually become today’s The Karsten Group, a leading global agribusiness that grows, packs, and markets premium fresh fruit for their international customers.

As a thriving business, Karsten Group’s philosophy revolves around cultivating excellence through a healthy workforce and sustainable agriculture practices that exist in harmony with nature. Founder Piet Karsten set the tone from the beginning:

“Excellence is the result of caring more than others think wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.”

Piet’s do-more mindset has produced a thriving, innovative distribution business committed to optimizing productivity, increasing profits, and employing more people year round. But as a complex operation with 14 farms, 13 entities, and 13 packhouses, the Karsten Group team knew they needed to end their reliance on siloed systems and spreadsheets and implement a modern ERP platform, like Acumatica.

Tough Row to Hoe: What Wasn’t Working Before Acumatica

According to Edna Coetzee, Assistant Accountant, Karsten Group’s previous systems, which included Sage 300, required multiple touchpoints and manual approvals that delayed their distribution processes. Additionally, documentation from its different farms had to be assessed and filed manually.

“It took a lot of time and attention,” she says.

Jo-Ann Moses, Assistant Accountant, agrees, noting that the manual interventions and use of Excel spreadsheets were having a negative impact on the business. “It was very easy to make mistakes.”

With unintegrated systems, Karsten Group’s data was siloed, and the team was unable to access and process it in real time. Jeandre Van Der Linde, Financial Manager, says the lack of real-time access to critical information made ordering and invoicing both time consuming and inefficient, which resulted in bottlenecks and delays when the paperwork had to be transported from the various farms to the head office.

The answer? Replace its disjointed systems with a single platform that could:

• Handle a complex, multi-entity operation
• Integrate with Karsten Farm’s specialized applications
• Support mobile workflows across remote locations

“After evaluating several options, Acumatica stood out for its flexibility, scalability, and ease of use,” says CIO Jannetje Slabbert.

Bearing Fruit: What’s Working with Acumatica

For Karsten Group, implementing Acumatica’s comprehensive distribution ERP was, per Je Slabbert, “surprisingly smooth.” She gives Acumatica’s user-friendly design much of the credit as well as the efforts of Acumatica partner Adinga ICT Solutions, a South African-based IT company specializing in business management software, cloud hosting, and ERP systems, for their quick and easy deployment.

Adinga provided full-service assistance and training, making learning and using Acumatica a breeze. “We were able to consolidate our data, streamline processes, and get our teams up and running quickly,” Je Slabbert says.

Adinga’s Director, Abrie Pretorius, knew Acumatica would be a great fit for Karsten Group, and the benefits supported his belief. “The benefits The Karsten Group got from implementing Acumatica was to digitize the process procure-to-pay from start to finish. It also assisted them in integration with other systems to make that seamless, and it also assisted them in making use of mobile applications.”

Using Acumatica’s cloud-based ERP solution, Karsten Group team members are now able to work anywhere and at any time. They can also easily export data and pull reports, have seamlessly connected five third-party applications and united 12 databases into three, easy-to-switch-between tenants.

What’s more, they:

• Decreased their disconnected systems from six to one.
• Eliminated 2,500 printed invoices per month.
• Gained access to real-time data and financials across all their entities.

“It’s become so much easier to upload documents, to retrieve information we need, especially from orders,” says Moses. “Having real-time data is very important.”

Adds Van Der Linde, “Data is very important in the farming operation. This helps us to make decisions quicker, helps us in spotting trends, and helps us discuss realization with our operational team.”

Harvesting Success: Karsten Group’s Future

With Acumatica as its solid ERP foundation, the successful distributor is focused on being the best and growing its employment opportunities.

“Our success and expansion are tied to the demand for our products, which naturally spurs business growth,” says Slabbert. “The more we grow, the more employees we need. The more employees we have, the greater the responsibility we have towards them in terms of job security and careers. This causes us to expand, and the cycle repeats. Once you start to expand, you can’t just stop expanding.”

As Karsten Group continues to grow, the team is fully supported by Acumatica and having access to data in one place, helping them be more efficient, competitive, and make better data-driven decisions.

“Acumatica is an excellent choice if you are to modernize your operation and eliminate a paper-based system,” says Coetzee.

To learn more about Acumatica and Acumatica Distribution Management, download our distribution ERP system checklist to see how we compare to other solutions, and if you’re a QuickBooks user, you can review our complimentary Infographic to see if QuickBooks is holding you back. You can also contact our experts today with any questions and/or to schedule a demonstration.