Lifeway Mobility

Newer Entrant Steals the Deal

The Lifeway Mobility team came within hours of signing with Oracle NetSuite when George Mackiewicz, owner of CAL Business Solutions based in Harwinton, Connecticut, suggested they look at Acumatica. “I was unaware of Acumatica prior to that,” Mullen says. “At the time, Acumatica didn’t have the name recognition that others did, but we agreed to take a look at it as CAL Business Solutions recommendation.”

Acumatica’s innovative pricing model, the mobile application for field service workers, and the ability to scale via the cloud impressed the team. “We really liked the usage-based pricing, which gives us the flexibility to scale and grow with the needs of our business,” says Mullen. “The ability to implement the solution quickly and bring on new locations also fit well with our technology strategy to be location agnostic.”

Speedy Implementation Times Six

Lifeway Mobility kicked off implementation and was live with its first office in just five months. “Having run large operations, and as CIO at a Fortune 50 company in the past, I’ve implemented a tremendous amount of technology over the years. None of them have been as smooth as Acumatica,” Mullen says. “I attribute that to the leadership at Lifeway, the skill and business partnership with CAL Business Solutions, and Acumatica.”

Lifeway spent time making sure the new business solution operated as expected before lighting up the rest of its locations. “The second office went live, then the third,” Mullen says. “We were literally standing up a new location every 30 to 45 days. We paused for an upgrade and then rolled out the next two offices.”

That pace is astounding when compared to Mullen’s most recent prior experience, in which it took 2.5 years to implement a CRM system for a Fortune 50 insurance firm across a similar six-office footprint. “After two and a half years, we had only deployed one office, versus one year to roll out all six with Acumatica,” he says.

Rapid and Remote Implementation

But wait, there’s more: Lifeway Mobility rolled out its largest office, the Chicago branch, during the Covid-19 outbreak, all done remotely. “We are all working remotely, not being on-site and being able to implement a new solution, during this time, is a testament to the way this can be done,” Mullen says. “All the training, data migration, and post-launch support was done entirely remotely.” Lifeway Mobility’s Minneapolis office has since also deployed Acumatica remotely.

Real-Time Data Informs Operations

“The implementation of Acumatica allows us to look at our metrics on a day-to-day, real-time basis. We can see what our operational impacts are which allows us to make better decisions during this chaotic time. None of that was possible with our prior systems,” Mullen says.

Four key metrics drive Lifeway Mobility’s business:

• New business opportunities
• Estimates and value they create
• New orders or activations
• Completed orders

“We can see those four measures trending on week-by-week or day-by-day basis, which allows us to make better decisions,” says Mullen. The new platform also eliminated much of the manual work and effort it took to consolidate data from disparate systems, turning hours of work into a mere click of a button.

Visibility for All Employees

“Our field employees who are delivering and installing critical equipment into people’s homes are staying safe and remain fully connected using the Acumatica mobile application,” Mullen says. The field team now arrives at a customer’s site with all the photos, change orders, instructions, and information they need, making them more informed and efficient. “We’re not spending time looking for documents or making phone calls or, heaven forbid, installing something that does not meet customer expectations. Everything is at their fingertips, and that’s been a huge benefit. Hours of work on a weekly basis have been avoided, resulting in more time with the customer providing a better customer experience,” says Mullen.

Lifeway has created extensive financial and operational dashboards specific to employee functional roles to provide actionable information across the company. “We’re asking them to look at daily metrics to understand what’s happening across our business and how we are responding to the events going on around us. They can see trends, see how their actions impact our business overall, and understand why the senior leadership team is making the decisions they are, especially during this pandemic.”

Pivot to Work-From-Home Quickly, Securely

Lifeway Mobility’s data is hosted in the cloud by Acumatica and Amazon Web Services and allowed Lifeway to pivot to work from home without as much as a moment of interruption, Mullen says. Acumatica’s cloud-based platform eliminates any worries about VPN connections, software client installations, server capacity, network intrusion, data center security, and maintenance. He adds, “we are very confident that the data we maintain on behalf of customers is secure. Each of our seven locations has a zero IT footprint. We rely on the security structure managed by Acumatica and AWS to keep our data safe.”

Acumatica, a Strategic Growth Asset

Before the global pandemic, Lifeway Mobility executives planned to double the company, mostly through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions. They still hope to attain that goal, but only because they have implemented Acumatica.

“Personally, I couldn’t do my job if I didn’t have the Acumatica platform,” Mullen says. “I couldn’t manage all those locations on their legacy systems. With Acumatica I have visibility into the data and insights into operations through dashboards and trigger notifications that allow me to respond and support teams across our various branches.”

“We have a strong pipeline and financial backing, so we do expect that growth to continue,” he adds. “Acumatica is enabling our growth through the implementation process. We are able to bring a new organization onboard, share with them our tools, and have them integrated within 30 to 60 days of closing a deal, which is phenomenal.”