The Acumatica ERP Podcast Recap: Hitting the Right Note with Eastman Music Company

With 14 production companies, manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Canada, Switzerland, and China, and a distribution network throughout the U.S., Europe, and Australia, Eastman Music Company has found global success making, selling, and distributing handmade musical instruments. But its promise of providing the finest instruments and responsive service to its customers was put to the test by the company’s decades-long reliance on Sage 100.

I had the privilege to sit down with VP of Operations, Ralph Torres, for a recent episode of The Acumatica ERP Podcast, to discuss Eastman Music’s operational growth and use of technology to help them expand and scale.  According to Ralph, Eastman and Sage were unable to make beautiful music together.

“Even though Sage said it could work in the cloud, it definitely was not doing well there. Every time Microsoft would do an update or a security update, all of a sudden, Sage was crashing,” he says. “On top of that, we were limited on the production side.”

In the podcast episode (Episode 11), Ralph also lays out what made Acumatica a great fit, from the ERP implementation and the ability to add new companies with ease to Acumatica’s dashboards, reporting, and data visibility and usage-based pricing.

A Little History: Ralph’s Background and Eastman Music’s Introduction to Acumatica

Ralph joined the Eastman Music team in 2008 when the company was much smaller and called Eastman Strings. As a musician, he found working for a company in the music industry a perfect blending of his passion for music with his need to make money.

His first role was as a customer service representative, eventually moving into a position that had him managing the growing company’s many parts. From there, his background in music and his evolving skillset gave him an exciting product opportunity.

“I designed one of our best-selling saxophones, the 52^nd Street, with one of my colleagues at the time,” he says. “We’ve advanced and grown it many times over since then, but when we first started doing saxophones, I was the guy, so that was cool and fun as a musician.”

Musicians, Ralph explains, use both their left and right brain, allowing them to combine analytical and creative skills in a way not seen in many other human activities. “I truly believe my music background, my music education helps feed my ability to manage the complex structure of Eastman and analyze and understand how things correlate and work. I have to be very creative, but I also have to be very data oriented.”

This combination of skills has helped him with his role as VP of Operations where he has a hand in almost all of Eastman Music’s entities—all of which are now operating on Acumatica.

The decision to replace Sage with Acumatica came out of their need for a solution that could handle their growing sales and acquisitions without breaking down. “[Sage 100] is an old product. It was antiquated,” Ralph says.

In addition to Eastman Music’s external IT support company, Modern IT, doing all it could to keep Sage running, the Eastman Music team wanted to be able to run the company globally with 24/7 access and support with a web-based, secure solution. They also needed to be able to have data that wasn’t hard to use and analyze.

“Acumatica had checked off all the boxes for us on that.”

Acumatica’s Suitability and Ralph’s ERP Implementation Advice

As a multi-currency, multi-tenant company, Eastman Music appreciated that Acumatica delivers a comprehensive, uniform data structure that underpins their different entities. Ralph says having a singular chart of accounts but separate tenants hasn’t slowed them down, including when they need to add more companies to the Eastman Music umbrella.

“The last three companies we added, I did it myself,” Ralph explains. “Our VAR [Value Added Reseller] didn’t even help with it. Obviously, they helped set up all the work in the past to do it. Literally, our VAR was on vacation while I created the oboe company and its friends.”

He adds: “If you have someone who’s dedicated and willing to learn the product and learn the software, then you can do a lot of things on your own.”

Ralph cautions, however, that there is a lot of internal structure work that needs to be done first. “Because you do that extra work, because you get the structure set up, then that’s what makes it dynamic to me, and scalable, and easy to add once you have that structure underneath.”

Of course, before any of this can happen, the ERP implementation has to take place.

His implementation advice? Know from the beginning that change isn’t going to be easy, which was true for Eastman Music.

“We had three companies at the time based in the U.S., so when we decided how we were going to do this, the big decision was, do we just move Eastman, the main company over, or do we take that three-company block over?”

They went the three-company route, which Ralph says was challenging. But he learned a few things along the way. He says it’s important that companies moving from one ERP solution to the next should:

• Not recreate processes and data from the existing structure (that’s why they moved in the first place).
• Understand their chart of accounts.
• Educate themselves on the reporting tools and capabilities.
• Start simple and grow their complexity from there, finding the gaps and fixing them once they’re found.
• Don’t create anything new (e.g., reports) until they’ve tried finding it in Acumatica first.

And, finally, do the implementation when it’s going to make the least impact on the business.

“We did it after the school season because we do a lot of school business. Make sure you do it when you can manage it,” he says.

Acumatica: A Layered ERP Providing a Strong Foundation

Now that the Eastman Music Company and all its brands are on Acumatica, Ralph says they’re getting everyone up and running on the new Modern UI, which is “intuitive” for all users.

Other Acumatica benefits Ralph discusses in the interview? Acumatica’s:

• Ease of use, which helps ease user adoption
• Customizability
• Strong Community
• Acumatica Open University and other training assets

And he touts being able to use Acumatica as the company’s centralized source of truth for all their data needs. “There’s the data you need to act on today and then there’s the data that you need to analyze to make decisions against.”

Ralph says Acumatica provides the visibility via dashboards they need to manage the business, including when products need to be shipped or how to deal with the ever fluctuating tariff situation.

“All of a sudden, tariffs are a huge portion of the purchase price of a price of a product, so now we added landed cost. We were able to do that [because] Acumatica has landed costs,” he says. “And even as far as using user-defined fields to help us understand what sales orders were affected by a tariff increase versus not.”

Ralph had a lot more to say about Acumatica, including the fact that over 200 Eastman Music team members use Acumatica weekly, with most using it daily.

“We use [Acumatica] extensively. We wouldn’t be able to run our business without using it,” Ralph says. “Acumatica is our true source of data. So, in every way that we need to have a digital representation of what happened in the physical world, we’re trying to use Acumatica for that need, because at the end of the day, those all tie into the financials, and that’s what this is really about. It’s reporting what we sold and here’s how much we made.”

Take a listen to Episode 11 to hear more valuable details provided by Ralph about how Eastman Music benefits from relying on Acumatica’s award-winning ERP solution as well as his thoughts on Acumatica’s affordable pricing and his advice for organizations evaluating their ERP options.

You can also subscribe to The Acumatica ERP Podcast to ensure that you don’t miss out on the latest business trends, tools, and strategies that can help you scale smarter and build a resilient business.