Eastman Music Company—a world renowned instrument maker—was constantly hitting a discordant chord with Sage 100, so they chose to scrap it in favor of Acumatica. According to Ralph Torres, Vice President of Operations, it was a business-changing decision.

“One of our employees described going from Sage to Acumatica like going from a commuter car to a Ferrari,” he says . “All of the sudden it was like ‘Holy Cow, something as simple as allocating an order in Acumatica replaced so many manual workarounds in Sage.’”

For years, Eastman Music’s legacy ERP solution frequently crashed, requiring the  Eastman Music team to deal with corrupt data, and forced them to contract out for extensive external IT resource support.

“We have had so much growth through increased sales and acquisitions that it has been hard to keep up,” says Torres.

They knew something had to change. “Our IT partner was just trying to Band-Aid this thing together every time it broke.”

Eastman Music’s decision to fix what was broken led them to Acumatica—and to remarkable growth and success.

Global Success, Technology Challenges

In 1992, professional flutist Qian Ni founded Eastman Music Company. It began when Ni, who was studying in Boston, MA, sold three imported violins from the trunk of his car. Now, Eastman Music Company boasts 14 production companies, manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Canada, Switzerland, and China, and a distribution network throughout the U.S., Europe, and Australia.

The global manufacturer handmakes woodwinds, brass winds, orchestral strings, guitars, and percussion instruments using methods employed by workshops over 100 years ago. It promises its customers around the world the finest instruments and responsive service. And according to Torres, the formula is working.

“We are now performing at levels that we were only dreaming of just years ago,” he says.

Much of Eastman Music’s growth was orchestrated by Ni, who decided to invest in technology infrastructure improvements during the pandemic. His decision kept Eastman Music on the path to success while many organizations in the music industry suffered. The investment included Sage 100.

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

As the sole IT support person for Eastman Music, Torres relied heavily on an external support IT vendor—Modern IT—to help them with the ongoing issues. The amount of Sage connectivity tickets Eastman Music was submitting resulted in Modern IT telling Torres that it was losing their shirts by supporting them.

No longer able to manage Sage’s frustrating challenges, Torres needed a new, unified business management solution.

Rebuilding with Acumatica

Torres began his search by briefly considering Sage X3 but quickly discarded the idea. He turned his attention to Epicor, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle NetSuite, and Acumatica, ultimately cutting his options down to Microsoft Dynamics and Acumatica.

Acumatica stood out with its unlimited user pricing, tightly integrated platform, and its Acumatica Manufacturing Edition, which easily connects to other systems. Easy configuration with open APIs was also an attractive Acumatica offering that would eventually help Eastwood Music’s Canadian clarinet, woodwind, and brass wind accessory company, BAKUN, connect to Shopify.

Unlike Sage, Acumatica also provides multiple tenants, currencies, and language capabilities. This meant Eastman Music’s central accounting team could handle finances for its 14 entities on a single platform.

With the help of Acumatica partner Integrated Systems Solutions, Eastman implemented Acumatica in stages. Three Eastman Music sites were implemented first followed by a new acquisition. From there, eight additional companies were added before the end of the year, putting their implementation timeframe for their fourteen separate entities around two years.

“Eastman grew at ridiculous rates during the same time,” Torres says. “I felt a little bit like Forrest Gump. We were just trying to get everything done, and then all of the sudden, the clouds parted, and everything came together beautifully.”

Now, Torres can manage all deployments for other locations and new companies himself within a day. “It actually gets easier each time because we can tweak things and learn from the times before.”

In addition to easy deployments, Eastman Music has logged an impressive number of benefits, including using Acumatica’s flexible and customizable manufacturing ERP platform to streamline and automate financial, sales, and manufacturing processes. The company has eliminated many manual operations, can drill down into data (e.g., POs, invoices, and bills of material) from tailored dashboards, and has full visibility into its 14 operations located across the globe.

“I can now manage our global operations 24 hours a day,” Torres says.

Eastman Music has also increased their order tracking, quoting, and inventory look up efficiency, which Sales Manager Jay Schreiber says has their customers calling Eastman their “most reliable vendor.”

One of Eastman Music’s entities, Wm. S. Haynes Co, a flute maker, was the first to move to Acumatica. It now enjoys:

• Critical materials report to see what items are missing.
• MRP for ordering parts.
• Reorder points highlighting when an order needs to be placed.
• Bill of materials (BOM) and work-in-process information that can be viewed in real time.
• A by-product process that allows the company to automate scrap adjustments (scrap metal is from the silver, gold, and sometimes platinum used to make the flutes).
• Version functionality, which enables updates to material lists in a single step.

Elizabeth Horowitz, ERP Production System Administrator, says that Acumatica’s pulling of correct materials and quantities is a distinct improvement over Sage. “It’s just simple compared to what I was used to in Sage, which was cumbersome and very reactive. You can make changes on the fly if needed. Now we can actually see what is in production.”

Complexity No Match for Acumatica

Eastman Music Company—Acumatica’s 2025 Customer of the Year —has complex global operations. Each entity focuses on its specific function, whether manufacturing, distribution, or selling, but with Acumatica as its ERP solution, the entire organization has transformed, with Torres and his team citing improved warehouse, distribution, inventory, and order processes, saved time for employees, and increased productivity.

Acumatica has also helped streamline Eastman Music’s container shipments, improved sales forecasting, and allowed Torres, Schreiber, and other team members to create any reports they need.

“Being able to create the generic inquiries and control the data on our own was huge,” says Torres. “Once we felt comfortable making our own reports, that was a huge turning point for us.”

He adds: “Now, without having to learn coding to use Power BI, we’re able to just pull so much of the data out of Acumatica ourselves that we were never able to before because we had to pay a consultant to do it.”

Eastman Music’s phenomenal growth is just the beginning, and Torres is confident that Acumatica’s platform will help them scale far into the future.

“We are just scratching the surface with how we can use Acumatica to continue to improve and reengineer our business processes,” Torres says. “We’ve done some pretty cool things with Acumatica already considering the resources we have and the complexity of our companies.”

Simple or complex, every business can benefit from a modern, affordable, and intuitive ERP solution like Acumatica. Contact our team today to learn more.