DiamondBack Truck Covers is a proud built-in-the-USA company and a true American success story.  Its beginnings trace back to an engineering entrepreneurial class at Penn State University in 2002. For a class project, co-founders Ethan Wendle and Matt Chverchko built a load-bearing pickup truck cover—a cover unlike any on the market. After winning Best Product Overall at the Design Expo, they recognized they could sell their unique truck cover to the masses and decided to launch their own business.

Unfortunately, success for DiamondBack did not come without challenges. One of its biggest challenges was the multiple disconnected business systems inefficiently running operations. So, the company decided to do something about it.

That something was implementing Acumatica.

Pre-Acumatica: Tasting Success with a Side of Unexpected Challenges

Wendle and Chverchko worked hard to get their durable aluminum alloy truck covers, which are designed to protect items in the truck bed (with some of their covers holding about 1,600 pounds), on the market. In their first few years of business, they were able to secure what Wendle called “amazing prospects,” and they had a vision of the company reaching its ambitious revenue goals. But their initial optimistic growth prospects were checked by the crash of 2008.

It was an unexpected hurdle, but Wendle and Chverchko didn’t let the market crisis deter them. Instead, they persevered, eventually moving their growing operations from Chverchko’s trailer to a rented industrial space and finally to their own manufacturing plant they built in 2014.

DiamondBack—which now employs 150 people in their manufacturing facility and a fulfillment center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania and at their marketing and sales office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—is now logging more than $35 million in annual sales. The company is also a repeat honoree of Inc.’s 5000 fastest growing companies list ranking the fastest-growing private companies in America.

Along their journey to success, DiamondBack encountered technological challenges, threatening efficiencies and profitability.

Says Chief Operating and Financial Officer, Kirk Davis, “As a startup 20 years ago, we created systems based on what was available on a cost-effective basis at the time. We ended up having lots of different systems that were bolted together. That worked for a while, but didn’t serve us very well.”

The Road to Acumatica

DiamondBack ran on several disconnected systems including QuickBooks, Shopify, Freightview, Salesforce, and Shoptech E2. Because they didn’t play well with one another, the company suffered inefficiencies. For example, one employee spent two hours a day processing orders, reporting took 20 days (or more), and the quote-to-cash workflow required manual intervention.

Additionally, DiamondBack had to hire people to manually handle their growing shipping processes; they had syncing issues with Salesforce, E2, and QuickBooks (along with their payment processor Authorize.net); and they didn’t trust E2 data for making purchasing decisions, resulting in the use of physical reorder systems and reliance on Kanban cards and physical inventory counts.

“We’ve grown by an average of over 20 percent per year, which is pretty big for a
manufacturing company like (ours),” Davis says. “When we would have a big backlog, we’d have lots of units sold but not shipped. All of that data would be in the system, and it would be a stinking mess. The more data was in the system, the slower it ran. It was just so painful.”

He adds, “We felt like we were in the stone ages of being able to serve our customers.”

And serving customers is a big deal for DiamondBack. In a digonomica interview, Scott Stilson, Director of Information Systems, says, “The company mission statement is pretty simple and means we are working to be the best manufacturer in Pennsylvania that customers love and employees love to work for.”

To ensure more efficient operations and completely satisfied customers, DiamondBack began hunting for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that could act as a single source of truth and that integrated with their most important third-party applications. They evaluated various ERP solutions, including Rootstock, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Epicor, Infor, CloudSuite Industrial, Odoo, and Acumatica, narrowed the list to Acumatica and Infor, and eventually chose Acumatica’s Manufacturing Management Software.

Says Stilson, “Of all the ERPs we looked at, Acumatica looked like the integrations were going to be easier.”

Acumatica’s flexibility and open APIs sealed the deal along with an intuitive user interface, which Stilson describes as “thoughtful” as well as the “best user interface of all the ERPs we looked at.”

DiamondBack: Success with Acumatica

Implementing Acumatica took approximately one year, and according to Davis, it’s been a game changer. “Personally, I love that Acumatica has allowed me to have live-time data to make great decisions and get great data to my great people.”

Benefits range from increased efficiency to improved accuracy to better customer service and more. Specifically, DiamondBack has:

• Saved 20 hours/week by eliminating manual data entry tasks.
• Gained a single system of record on an integrated, end-to-end platform that makes data silos and individual workarounds obsolete.
• Gained trust in its inventory accuracy.
• Shifted from manual to automatic processing of orders, going from two hours to 30 minutes.
• Reduced time from order to arrive at manufacturing floor from 24+hours to 3 minutes.
• Closed monthly books in 5 days vs. 3-to-4 weeks.
• Avoided out-of-stock parts and late part orders.
• Enjoyed accurate costing, now topping 92%.
• Improved customer service by allowing employees to know which stage an order is in.
• Built a programmatic bridge between their ecommerce platform (due to Acumatica’s ability to connect to Workato, an integration automation platform).
• Streamlined orders with a custom automated process.
• And more.

With Acumatica, the direct-to-consumer company is equipped with a comprehensive solution that supports continued growth of its truck cover and accessories business, empowers its workers, and helps DiamondBack make a difference in its community.

“Acumatica really changed our ability to give people the tools they need to succeed, says Davis. “And when our people succeed, we can impact the community we live in more and more.”

To learn how Acumatica can transform your company like it has DiamondBack, contact our experts today.