Customer Success with Acumatica: IOC Construction

Based in Batavia, Illinois, IOC Construction offers construction, painting, roofing, masonry, flooring, design, and maintenance services (and more) for commercial, industrial, and medical facilities. It started out as a single handyman painting company but quickly grew into a thriving, full-service construction firm made up of different companies with their own specialties, including roofing and siding.

Yet, for all its success, IOC Construction’s growth was challenged by their reliance on multiple instances of QuickBooks and Salesforce. Their manual workflows and prolific use of paper files didn’t help either.

Says Chief Financial Officer Joel Sisto, “Because our systems didn’t talk to each other, intercompany data was unbelievably difficult to maintain. Missing an entry in one company but not another, became a humongous headache for us.”

As the IOC Construction team’s challenges continued to pile up, the decision to consolidate everything into a single entity was made, which meant looking for and finding a modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. Turns out, that ERP was Acumatica.

IOC Construction’s Journey to Acumatica

According to Sisto, the construction firm’s issues with its technology stack were incredibly painful. “Reconciliation was a nightmare.”

If a construction project included roofing and painting, they had three instances of QuickBooks to deal with, making cost allocation almost impossible. Using Salesforce as their gross income measurement tool didn’t work because the numbers didn’t always add up.

The firm’s ERP Manager Jessica Hill notes, “There were six of us who daily entered data into all platforms. Hardly anything ever matched.”

Their data disaster was a huge hurdle on its own, but the team had other problems. For example, IOC Construction’s inability to reconcile credit cards from four different companies resulted in unknown receipts being placed in paper expense folders (which may or may not have gotten reconciled), and their efforts to allocate project costs for up to 300 or more projects a year were done with paper folders. The company was being stretched to its limit.

“The complexity of our accounting setup was a black box of unknowns and bad data,” says David Benning, Chief Executive Officer. “We were trying to use various systems not as they were intended but in an overly complex way.”

So, with the help of a hired consultant, the IOC Construction team began looking for  ERP technology that could fix their data issues. They demoed several ERP solutions, including Microsoft Dynamics and Sage 300, and gave the latest version of Salesforce a chance, but it was Acumatica that stole the show.

“It was undeniable that Acumatica was the thing that we needed because it allowed us to do intercompany transfers,” Sisto says. “It allowed us to bring CRM into the same program where the accounting and the projects rested, and it allowed us to maintain a client list all in one place that could then be utilized by all of the different modules in the system.”

Unique Implementation, Tremendous Benefits

IOC Construction’s digital transformation followed the standard operating procedure, from their decision to unify their disjointed companies to how they conducted their ERP evaluation process. But their implementation was anything but normal.

Instead of implementing Acumatica’s Advanced Construction Edition cold, the IOC Construction team decided they would attend Acumatica’s annual cloud ERP Summit to get familiar with the system and its features before deploying it. They had ample opportunity to talk with other customers about their Acumatica experience, learn from the Acumatica team about the platform and its future, and explore the third-party applications available to them. And their consultant attended Summit with them.

“We gained much more clarity as to what we were doing, why we were doing it, and what downstream effects making certain selection would have on the entire implementation process,” says Sisto.

The Summit event, he says, is like a “live version of Acumatica University.” By attending, they were able to arm themselves with information that would help make the implementation a success, including knowing what data they needed in the future and ensuring it was built into the system from the beginning. They also saw firsthand the third-party applications that could extend Acumatica’s solution, and they learned from other Acumatica customers what they did to make their implementations a success.

“Those three days of training were really beneficial because it got us using the system so much that by the time we came back and started doing our integrations, it felt like we’ve been using it forever.”

Their advanced knowledge led to amazing benefits. With Acumatica’s award-winning construction software, the IOC team:

• Consolidated customer accounting: “We were entering in client’s information 3, 4, or 5 times,” says Sisto. Now, they don’t have to, which has helped them streamline workflows and reduce search time.
• Gained a clear picture of financials and performance: “We have a really strong grasp on our financial picture, our margins, conversion rates—all those metrics through Acumatica, and the data is relatively easy to pull,” says Benning. “Getting business insights from performance is pretty nice, anything from conversion rates to tracking.”
• Automated their workflows: “Through Acumatica’s business event tool, we’ve been able to automate a lot of things, including transactional emails, updating customers on a project’s status or to send notifications of certain activities internally,” Benning says. For example, Acumatica provides IOC Construction with automatic expense and past-due invoice alerts.
• Eliminated paper-based processes and multiple QuickBooks instances: “With all the non-visible aspects of multiple companies, there was a lot of paper floating around with files everywhere. Having everything in one place allowed us to go paperless, which is a huge benefit,” says Hill. And with QuickBooks out of the picture, IOC Construction could figure out how much their multiple companies were worth.
• Added mobility and remote access: “If a project manager is out in the field, they can pull up a project the same way that someone in the accounting department, the operations department, an estimator or a salesperson, can,” Sisto says. “With Acumatica, we have a unified voice, a single source of truth where no matter who a customer talks to during a project, it’s all going to be the same data.”
• Extended Acumatica functionality with third-party applications: “We integrated early on with a marketing and transactional email third-party program that Acumatica has a native integration with. And that’s been huge,” says Sisto. “We’ve been using it for a lot of our transactional emails, but we recently started going live with our nurture email campaigns from a digital marketing experience.”

Significant growth for IOC Construction, Thanks to Acumatica

With Acumatica, IOC Construction transformed from a construction firm with disjointed companies and disconnected systems into a strong, united, and data-driven organization. Building a modern, cloud-based technology foundation has laid the groundwork for future growth.

“Now we’re at a point where I could see this company growing significantly without needing to add significant investments in our digital architecture,” Sisto says. “If we added a zero tomorrow (to revenue), we would just be adding people. We wouldn’t be adding really a whole lot of technology.”

To learn more about IOC Construction’s customer success story with Acumatica, read the full case study here, and to learn more about our industry-specific cloud ERP software, contact our experts today!