For 25 years, Houston-based SpaceManager Closets has been designing, manufacturing, and installing custom closets, office cabinets, pantry closets, garage cabinets, entertainment systems, and so much more. The Texas company uses the latest CAD (Computer-aided design) design technology to create custom designs for its 8,600+ clients and operates out of its own manufacturing facility.

With a passion for providing its thousands of clients with excellent customer service, personalized designs, and expert craftsmanship, SpaceManager Closets rated highly with its customers. However, according to Founder, President, and CEO Francis Nwabudike, they were limited in reaching their potential and better serving their customers by a reliance on QuickBooks and Job Nimbus, a roofing industry-specific CRM.

“[QuickBooks] is a nice piece of software but limited,” Nwabudike says. “[Job Nimbus] was pretty decent, and because my business has a mobile sales team, I needed a way to capture data and manage the process.”

Unfortunately, the two systems—along with the company’s multiple inventory applications and its lack of purchasing and receiving systems—made for inefficient processes and stunted growth. Nwabudike admits they turned to spreadsheets to help manage things, but it wasn’t a workable or long-term solution.

“We didn’t have inventory to grow, and we were missing raw materials in the first six months.”

It was time to find an all-in-one, cloud-based, and affordable manufacturing solution, and during the search, Nwabudike evaluated three options: Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and Acumatica Cloud ERP.

Each solution had the financial management, manufacturing, and field service capabilities he was seeking, but there was only one that surprised him—in the best way possible.

Amazed by Acumatica

Before founding SpaceManager Closets, Nwabudike worked for large manufacturing companies and used several ERP solutions, including SAP, but he had never heard of Acumatica and Acumatica Manufacturing Edition.

“When I discovered Acumatica, I was quite surprised that anything like that existed. I was amazed that it could do all the things that it could do.”

He discovered—and was impressed by the fact—that Acumatica Manufacturing Edition is designed to meet the needs manufacturers, from make-to-stock, make-to-order, and configure-to-order to engineer-to-order, and project-centric, while offering native applications and the manufacturing features businesses like SpaceManager Closets need right out of the box. Nwabudike was also impressed by Acumatica’s:

• Mobile app
• Payment integration
• Open APIs

These features along with Acumatica’s flexibility, ease of use, and pricing model sealed the deal for Nwabudike. “I wanted a system that did not have a cost every time I wanted to do something. Because I am trying to keep costs down, I don’t want to hire a consultant if I want to change a variable.”

Fast Implementation Leads to Game-Changing Benefits

Nwabudike tapped Acumatica partner ASWI to deploy the solution, and he told them he needed to do it quickly. “I didn’t want to limp into another year with QuickBooks.”

ASWI was up to the challenge, helping the SpaceManager Closets team get up and running with Acumatica within four months. The benefits began rolling in within the first year, with the team:

• Resolving 95% of inventory challenges, gaining real-time data, and reducing material costs. “I made the decision to buy in bulk, which I couldn’t do before. Looking at the data, I realized we could leverage our size to reduce costs. I made our first international purchase because it made sense to buy 6 to 9 months of inventory and save 30 percent. Decisions like that have paid off significantly.”
• Improving quality control, automating and optimizing inventory, streamlining operations, and increasing profit margins. “Now, when we sell a project, the proper SKUs are included and flow through the system. This drastically reduced errors. At the picking point, you arrive with the right parts.”
• Refining the sales pipeline and acquiring profitable lead data. “In the past, I used a spreadsheet to capture data from job numbers and then retrieved data from QuickBooks, but I never knew what our ROI was on different spend on channels. Now we understand how much we are going to sell in a month. The other thing we look at is how many leads are getting from all these different marketing channels and how do they flow through the system to the sale.”
• Automating and improving customer communications without developer assistance. “Before, we would take the customer’s money, and they’d never hear from us again for six weeks. People would call us and didn’t like that they had to chase us around. We didn’t have the bandwidth to call people, so one of the first things I did was create automated notifications, which are very nice and personal.”

Additionally, SpaceManager Closets implemented Acumatica Field Service Management to support its field-based installers, which includes easier scheduling and creating of teams for each project.

Growth with Acumatica

SpaceManager Closets, which already serves 236 zip codes, is continuing to expand its reach , and Nwabudike says Acumatica is essentially the source of their success.

“Acumatica is literally the lifeblood of our business,” Nwabudike says. “There’s nothing we do that doesn’t include Acumatica.”

He adds, “There’s a whole lot of data that’s now available to us to make smarter decisions.”

To see how Acumatica can also help you make smarter decisions and grow your business, contact our experts today.