OFS International

Implementation Challenge: Cultural Change

“As we build the business from purely a service company to a manufacturing and full solution provider, we needed more than just an inventory system,” Dorovskikh says. “Acumatica gives us the capability to provide PO’s, available raw material, and manufacturing modules to provide accurate available for-sale inventories, including all pertinent costs.”

Dorovskikh convinced top management to implement Acumatica in a newly acquired division as a test case so that he could prove that it could work for the entire company, including several acquisitions in the works.

In the beginning, the biggest challenge was getting many at OFSi to not only adopt new business practices, but also to become comfortable with using new technology. “It was about changing how we do business.”

OFSi purchased the on-premises version of Acumatica and has implemented the Manufacturing, Inventory, Financial and Field Service modules, the last of which is designed for companies that repair products or equipment at their customers’ locations.

It has also integrated third party solutions including Office 365 and Microsoft PowerBI, among others. “Anything Acumatica can provide, we want it,” Dorovskikh says. “We are planning to build on it as our foundation.” He also notes that he’s won approval to spend a little more than a quarter of what other vendors said he’d have to spend on an ERP.

Managers with correct permissions have full transparency into OFSi financial operations in any of its four entities. “Now we can analyze how late customer payments are, who the biggest customer is at any moment, and how much we have in inventory,” Dorovskikh says. “We didn’t have this information before.”

“Managers can now drill down within Acumatica and see where an actual number is coming from instead of having to asking accounting to find it,” he adds. OFSi has about 300 employees, with about 80 using Acumatica.

OFSi has reduced its invoicing time from 21 days to the same day. Acumatica has introduced transparency into their systems, and quickly provides all of the information related to a specific job or customer.

100 percent Revenue Growth

“Acumatica has allowed OFSi to increase sales 100 percent year over year,” says David Green, vice president of operations. Acumatica’s flexible and full-featured software probably saved OFSi about $250,000 in consulting fees needed to modify software to OFSi practices with other ERP solutions, he says.

OFSI’s competitive advantage is that it offers a full-service package of pipe, couplings, premium connections, accessories and field services. To deliver this full product and service suite with high levels of customer service, OFSI needed a highly accurate ERP system to fulfill customer orders from request to fulfillment within 2 weeks. Acumatica helps the company maintain a high level of customer service.

Incorporating a MES (Manufacturing Execution System) and Automated factory

OFSI is in the midst of its fourth Acumatica implementation phase, a customized effort to help it buy, sell and monitor pipes, along with the services it sells during the use of the pipes.

The company is required to capture and trace specific parameters about its pipes to ensure quality of service to its customers. To accomplish this, it created a program that links a specific pipe order and its attributes to a bar code on the pipe that can be tracked throughout its use, and Acumatica will connect to all that data.

“Everything has to be traceable because if anything goes wrong at the customer location, we need to know how to resolve it,” says Green. Adds Dorovskikh, “Only Acumatica could allow us to integrate all of this information.”

Ease of Audit

“OFS International, LLC recently completed a financial statement audit per the strenuous guidelines of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and Acumatica played an integral role in its successful and timely completion. We audited several years in tandem, and in the middle of the audit timeframe we had switched ERP’s from a previous system to Acumatica. There is a noticeable difference in the data collection, representation, and archiving that Acumatica provides versus our previous ERP, and Acumatica facilitates a level of transparency for our records that is crucial for our data archiving and financial representation. Our future audits will be more streamlined thanks to the data retention and presentation capabilities of Acumatica.” Adds Erica Howard, Senior Accountant.