Acumatica Summit 2026: Redefining Response in Construction Services

[00:00:00] David: Welcome to the Acumatica ERP podcast where we explore practical innovation for growing businesses. Today we're joined by Patryk Kubiszyn, vice President of Systems and Process at Smith & Long. Welcome to the show, Patryk.

[00:00:12] Patryk: Hi. Nice to see you.

[00:00:13] David: Nice to see you. So, let's start off with you telling us a little bit about Smith & Long. Our listeners may not know much about Smith & Long. Tell us what makes you unique, and I'm dying to know about your response approach.

[00:00:28] Patryk: Absolutely. So, Smith & Long is a construction services based company multi-trade electrical, HVAC, plumbing, civil, medium and high voltage. And we have a response “mindset” that the company really enforces on response is not just about speed necessarily, it is about agility, about accountability, and most importantly, it's about the precision of the solutions that we give to our customers at the end of the day. So, the response is to make sure that when anybody needs something from us that even though we might not be able to give you the answer or the final solution today, at least we let you know that you're being taken care of. So Smith & Long really prides itself on that great communication internally and externally to our customers.

[00:01:20] David: That's awesome. I was wondering 'cause your mind automatically goes, so this must be like a timing perspective, but I love it's so much more than that, right? Absolutely. It's very holistic.

[00:01:28] Patryk: Absolutely.

[00:01:29] David: That's awesome. Okay. Patryk, tell us a little bit about your role and, and how do you think about supporting growth through systems and your operations?

[00:01:38] Patryk: Vice President Systems and Processes, what it really means is the ownership to make sure that the company is able to sustain scalability and growth. And we have to work with our systems primarily with Acumatica to make sure that it can achieve that. It's not just about going into maintenance mode.

[00:01:57] It's about optimizing our processes as we grow, it becomes more complex. Acquire new business. You have a new business unit, or even just organic growth. All of them. As you add a node into the spider web, there's more connections to be made. You need a really strong system to keep supporting yourself.

[00:02:15] You have to keep improving on it. If you're not growing yourself, you're shrinking, right? So that's my, my team, the, the entire role here is to make sure that we can continue supporting Smith & Long as it changes to keep up with its changes.

[00:02:31] David: That’s awesome. I love that. If you're not, if you're not growing, you're shrinking or you know, I worked for somebody who used to say, if you're not growing, you're dying. So it's all about that change. Right.

[00:02:39] Patryk: I think it's the same thing.

[00:02:39] David: Absolutely. Yeah. Exactly. It's about adopting it and technology is changing so quickly. Right. So you've gotta gotta kind of assess what works for your organization. It doesn't work. Right. Awesome. Okay. I wanna go back to like, prior to Acumatica.

[00:02:52] So before moving to a new ERP solution, what were you facing, what challenges were you facing and what made it clear that, man, we need a stronger foundation for our organization?

[00:03:05] Patryk: I think you'll find that a lot of companies have data in too many different systems, right? Mm-hmm. It's just spread across.

[00:03:11] It's not consolidated. It's really difficult to make decisions. You're not sure as to what's going on and a lot of the time they go into a bit of a maintenance mode, right? There's no change in the system. It's stagnant and really you start building your processes or you're starting to.

[00:03:29] Change your processes and shoehorning them to make sure that they work with the system. That's what we had in, in the old one, believe it or not. We actually had two versions of the old system working side by side that didn't talk to each other, and each one was just slightly different from each other.

[00:03:43] David: Oh, wow.

[00:03:44] Patryk: And, and it, it was just causing a lot of chaos looking back. We laugh at how it was, you have to right? But in the heat of the moment, um. When you are just dealing with your business day to day, you don't really realize how weak it eventually becomes. It's a bottleneck for the business, right?

[00:04:03] So I think that's when it just dawned upon the company that, for us to achieve our growth, for us to keep growing, we needed a system that was gonna grow with us. And the old system was just not doing it. It was, we were gonna keep it in status quo. And it wasn't enough to just expand on like the volume of transactions that you were doing.

[00:04:25] Right. As I was saying, as it becomes more complex, you also have to change your processes. To maintain the growth and the scalability. If, if you're just stuck in like a pyramid scheme kind of, you know, you just keep adding resources and, and you follow the same structure, that's gonna be extremely inefficient.

[00:04:42] You have to find a way to revamp. And that meant that we also had to revamp our system along with our processes.

[00:04:49] David: Yeah, yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I, you know, I speak to a lot of customers about what, what life was like and a lot of 'em will say, you know, we were working. In the business, not on the business.

[00:05:00] Patryk: right.

[00:05:00] David: I love it when people tell me that they've been able to transition to that. So let's talk a little bit about your implementation. And,

[00:05:06] you established the fact that you needed something.

[00:05:08] So when you started evaluating ERP solutions what were your must-haves? What were your non-negotiables and ultimately what led you to select Acumatica?

[00:05:19] Patryk: Right, so our non-negotiables was that we needed a system that was gonna be flexible, was gonna be scalable, and when we're making the changes, that's not gonna slow the business down.

[00:05:29] And, and that's very important because certainly changing ERP systems is a really big process for the company. Yeah. But once you're established on the new ERP system, as you continue growing, you need to make continuous improvements to it. Acumatica certainly solved all three of those problems for us.

[00:05:46] Um. It's extremely flexible with what you can do on the front end and the backend low-code, no-code situation. So it was a really great tool for us to jump onto and when we could see how we could keep changing all of the workflows and processes and incremental steps as we needed for the business. It was a no brainer for us. So it was certainly the right choice and in all three check boxes.

[00:06:10] David: No, that's awesome. You know, you definitely want your technology to, to support your growth, not, not shut it down. Right. So, absolutely. No, that's awesome.

[00:06:18] I love this topic. You know, I, when I first started in ERP, I did implementations. Right. So there's the, I'm so

[00:06:24] Patryk: sorry

[00:06:25] David: to hear that. I know it's a grueling job, but No, it was, it was kind of fun. And this, this was not at Acumatica, but but, but definitely, you know, that whole process is, is quite involved.

[00:06:35] Right.

[00:06:35] So I'm very interested in, in terms of how did you approach not only your implementation, but, but change management and, and how did you set your company and its employees up for success and, and one part of it is just like starting to use the, the, the, the new system, but the adoption where people like, this is our process, sot talk. Tell me a little bit about that.

[00:06:56] Patryk: Right. Changing in ERPs system for the company is probably one of the most significant changes that any company can go through.

[00:07:02] David: For sure.

[00:07:03] Patryk: And knowing that that there's gonna be a lot of challenges. We had to treat it more than just a software change. We had to treat it as an organizational change.

[00:07:11] That meant that we had to do a lot of communication and explaining the why. Mm-hmm. The business needed this change. It wasn't just about changing the system for the sake of using something more modern. We had to modernize our processes. We had to become scalable. We had to become flexible. We needed to keep up with our growing business.

[00:07:29] We were not going to successfully grow on our old system. Yeah. So we had to make sure that that was why, which is a very strong cultural pillar within our company, explaining why was communicated very clearly. Communication was big. We had to introduce a lot of champions into each department, make sure that they understood the narrative and were helping us convey it to everybody.

[00:07:51] Lots of training and something that was very important for us was that because Acumatica is flexible enough for us to change, we're actually able to do these micro changes during the implementation. As we're going through all of the processes and people are giving us some sort of feedback when they're seeing it for the first time, we're able to incorporate those very quickly, made the adoption a lot smoother for us.

[00:08:15] David: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:15] Patryk: Now, the first couple weeks or, or even the first two months is, is sort of where it requires the most traction with the company. Right. It's, it's just like, it's a brick wall and now everyone's like, oh, I was using this yesterday, now I have to use a difference.

[00:08:29] And it's different. Right. And, and it's different. Right. So I truly feel that like. No matter, even if the change is for the better, people perceive change as bad, right? Absolutely. So, so it was very difficult. But you have to have your patients go through with them, continue explaining the why, and doing a lot of training.

[00:08:45] And then you could see the benefits bubble up really quickly. So it's a lot of support and understanding and listening to what your, your clients, which is your internal employees, right? Employees at, at the end of the day, they're the end user. This is what we're using to better the company. So we are here to support.

[00:09:02] Them at the end of the day. Yeah. We have to listen to their feedback and help guide them along the process.

[00:09:07] David: I talk to a lot of different leaders about implementation, and there's a consistency with all of you that have been very successful at it.

[00:09:15] It's, it's about communicating the why. It's about establishing the champions within the organization because that really influences, they get their DNA as a part of it too, right? That's right. And the other part is, I love it when leaders say, and I'm not quoting you 'cause you didn't say this exact thing, but you definitely implied it is it's kind of ugly to start, right?

[00:09:34] You just have to face the fact that it's kind of ugly to start right. And then you just kind of move through it. So I love it. Let's talk about the impact of Acumatica since going live. So what have you seen and you know, whether that's visibility to different types of data, more efficiency better customer service. Tell me a little bit about the, the impact that it's had on your organization.

[00:09:57] Patryk: Right. So certainly those that you have mentioned, like visibility is a big one where previously we were making a lot of decisions that were gonna be more subjective based on gut feeling. 'Cause the data was either obscure or multiple places.

[00:10:12] It took a lot of manual processing to get it all together. Now with Acumatica, we have everything in one place. We are able to make more objective data-driven decisions in real time. Taking out a lot of that manual effort to pull the data together. So that has been probably the biggest impact and certainly has helped with the growth year to year since we've been able to launch.

[00:10:36] There's something else that kind of like surprised me that has come out of it, and I'm very proud of the company for that is the acceptance to change. Ah, nice. So all of a sudden now. Sometimes to my detriment, the company is very happy to be requesting changes in their software system. Okay. Where previously this wasn't the case because they were, they didn't think that you could change it.

[00:11:00] It's like asking Microsoft to change outlook for you month to month, to give it little tweaks and bells and whistles. That's what our company culture has, has come out. Now we are. Very prone and accepting of doing a change. Nice. Just because we're doing something today doesn't mean that we have to do it next week or next month.

[00:11:21] People are requesting changes all the time. We're working on them, we're implementing it into the company. We're scrapping processes altogether that we like. We thought they were gonna be the next big hit, but they, even if they fail it was fantastic because the company is willing to quickly shift gears.

[00:11:37] Yeah. So that's been a really, really big impact and that allows us to stay really adaptive and in today's economy and your clients as they are exposed to new technologies and their requirements to what they need. Really, they're gonna need a lot of support from companies like ours to. Adapt with them to be able to respond to what they have to do in the industry.

[00:12:04] So Acumatica in a way, has more than just opened the door on reporting and decision making. It is built this cultural enablement to adapt with them.

[00:12:14] David: I love that. And, and you know what I really like is the fact that you have embrace the, the change or embrace the requests to make a change coming from your employees, because really that inspires ownership, right?

[00:12:28] And, and a lot of people might say, well, if you don't wanna adopt what we put in front of you, you're not adopting what we're doing. And, what you're saying is, no, you are adopting it and we appreciate your commitment to making it better. That's what I took away from that. So I think that's huge.

[00:12:43] Patryk: I like what you were saying about the ownership because a lot of the times you know, we can only come up with so many ideas. You really need a lot of feedback from everybody to come in. So a lot of the things that we are incorporating are ideas directly from our employees. So really it's their solution. It's their product that they have suggested and is putting in. So, if they're gonna adopt it easier.

[00:13:07] David: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Cool. I want to continue on that theme, which is really about opportunity for optimization and innovation. You know, the other thing that I think people might be misled by is once we're live, we're live, the system's implemented, right? There's so much more, to do there, right? So what is your approach to optimization and, and what, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for Smith & Long?

[00:13:34] Patryk: I think it's to continue deepening our workflow improvements and using various methods of automation. By having everything into one system, we get to concentrate on the one system.

[00:13:49] David: Nice. Yeah. Right.

[00:13:49] Patryk: Whether it's financial, operational, CRM, customer facing portals, et cetera. It's really easy to now stitch things together, see what is working, what is not working, and make those changes. So I see the future as really deepening a lot of these like automations. So that we can use our employees to do like the big value add instead of just data entry or copying it for one section to another.

[00:14:17] And we have the tools with Acumatica, right? They have the business events. We can rewrite our generic inquiries, our dashboards, our reports, our,workflows and everything. So it's really going into that next level and every year as they're releasing the, new major releases, there's new fund tools. And modules ever changing it. It's ever changing. Right. So a lot of these very quickly make it into our processes and we're really taking advantage of it wherever we can.

[00:14:46] David: Nice. How does AI fit into that? I mean, what's your thoughts on AI?

[00:14:51] Patryk: AI is used very generically for a lot of things.

[00:14:54] Yep. And I, have a joke in my office, I have a piece of paper like what people say and what it really means. Yeah. And one of them is a quote, like, we use AI, it's like translation. We don't use AI.

[00:15:04] David: I love it. I love it.

[00:15:06] Patryk: So, um. Very interested in AI for a lot of the data analysis, data anomaly for agents. Now, what's really important to note is that even though Acumatica is very flexible and you can build pretty much any report that you want, at the end of the day, maybe I don't have a very specific report that you have for a niche request. And this is where something like an AI agent, which is fantastic at data crunching.

[00:15:33] Can on the fly stitch together all of this information for you very quickly spit it out. Right? I wouldn't judge the merit of someone being able to download a bunch of Excel sheets and stitching it together, right? I was like, oh, oh, great. You're, you're a great employee. No, it's the data that comes out of it.

[00:15:50] So it's like, why, why spend the time doing something like that? The other thing that's interesting with things like anomaly detection and whatnot, is. When you are creating reports, you are very biased. You're saying like, okay, these are the things that we wanna look out for. hese are like good metrics.

[00:16:07] These are bad metrics. Where, where do I wanna put my checks and balances and my flags on my reports to make sure that things are lining up? With anomaly detection, it's the things that you are not necessarily think thinking about, right? You, the, the system is unbiased to what you think you should be searching for.

[00:16:25] So when it detects that anomaly and spits that out in front of you, you go, oh wow. Now this is like a new process, a new flag for me to be tracking. Yeah. So these are sort of the benefits of, of AI. So the, the real answer is like, what do I think about the future of AI, especially what they're working on with Acumatica. Arms wide open, very eager to continue seeing the integration. Mm-hmm. Not only for automation, time saving, but also for better data reporting.

[00:16:50] David: Love it. I love it. Pretty cool. All right. Last and final section. We call it the lightning round. You ready for that?

[00:16:57] Patryk: Oh boy. I'm ready for it. Let's do it.

[00:16:58] David: Okay. First question, what is an industry outside of work that you find interesting?

[00:17:03] Patryk: Outside of work that I find interesting. maybe a little bit cliche for somebody in my position, but I'm really into astronomy and space. Oh, cool, cool, cool. More of the nerd. really always enjoyed it when I, I was small ever since I got a atlas of the world's book.

[00:17:20] David: Yeah.

[00:17:21] Patryk: that, that my parents gave me. So I've always been bound to, to astronomy, following up on the news and yeah, it's a lot of fun.

[00:17:27] David: That's awesome. It's fascinating. That's, that's cool. What is something in your morning routine you look forward to?

[00:17:33] Patryk: It's gotta be my coffee ritual. Itis. I really enjoy just before the pandemic hit, we ended up buying like a little espresso machine that we had at home. And then the pandemic hit. And so that poor machine, I was just, it was begging to put it out of its misery. I was like, no one more espresso. Right? So I really enjoy that, the aromas, the flavors of preparing the coffee, sitting down, having it by myself before the whole family wakes up. So I'man early bird and yeah, that whole ritual is very sacred, kind of ground.

[00:18:05] David: You, it's kind of your quiet

[00:18:06] Patryk: time. Oh, it's very sacred to me. Yeah, absolutely. Good.

[00:18:08] David: I love it. I love it. Final question what are you looking forward to most at Summit?

[00:18:13] Patryk: It would have to be the marketplace. A couple years ago, I was at the 2024 oh, summit Las Vegas. In Las Vegas. Yeah. And the marketplace actually blew my mind. Because when you're in there seeing all the other vendors, what solutions they have, what innovations that they bring into the system. When I'm searching for something, it's usually I'm trying to solve a specific problem, okay? So I won't necessarily stumble upon some of these other solutions that are in there. Walking through the marketplace, we all of a sudden discover is like, Hey, we actually have a really poor way of communicating our training material. And then we found a vendor that like really solved that problem for us that integrated directly with Acumatica. So I'm really looking forward to spending lots of times in the marketplace.

[00:18:56] David: Nice. Nice. I love that response. I'm, you know. What's powerful about Acumatica is our community. So you just kind of hit upon it. Yes. Right. Having all those ISVs what's in the marketplace really inspires some new thinking for our customers.

[00:19:09] Cool. Patryk, thank you for being on the show. It's been great being with you.

[00:19:12] Patryk: My pleasure.

[00:19:13] David: Yeah. Appreciate the time.

[00:19:14] Yeah, you bet.

[00:19:14] And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to the Acumatica ERP podcast so you don't miss future conversations on practical innovation for growing businesses.