Into the Unknown

Confucius said, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". Which is relevant to everything in life. My Acumatica journey was like an apocalyptic story, it started in mid-2020 a few months after the start of the covid 19 global pandemic, I never liked following the news on TV, I never liked watching anything on TV either. Actually, I only bought my TV to comply with a sense of obligation doctrine to me since childhood, a prosperous household must own a TV. Anyway, the pandemic actually convinced me to turn on Cable News every morning. Amid all that horror and uncertainty, I who was reduced to a half salary “she’s too good of a resource to let go, but we have nothing for her to do” employee, was first introduced to Acumatica.

The roofing company I work for has been long due to change its ERP. At that time, the specialized construction company was still utilizing a discontinued, archaic ERP built on Visual Fox Pro installed on a remote server part of a SAAS acquired by the company. Although I do have to admit, VFP is "badass" providing till the end a stable and reliable platform albeit with hiccups. 

To be honest, although I was tasked to review many potential new ERPs for the company, including MS Dynamic. I was actually not involved in the process of identifying Acumatica as the new platform, being assigned to company relevant development of Salesforce CRM. It wasn't until the company's president was 80% sure to sign up with Acumatica did I get the call to drop everything I was doing because we were going to move to a new ERP-CRM combo. The big boss was tired of using several different systems that didn't talk to each other directly. That was when I first heard of Acumatica, from watching Youtube links forwarded to me, then being curious I googled Openuni and started to take the courses. As I Googled Acumatica and the subjects related to it, at that time, 2 things caught my attention, the implementation Dos and Don’ts, and OpenUni.

I participated in implementation webinars and read articles on consultant view Dos and Don’ts, that time I found that the implementation checklist was definitely useful. When I was assigned as the client-side project manager for the implementation, it helped me focus and map out what the company would need to provide, giving me the edge to give a heads-up to the related department managers and get them ready for what was coming their way in this new venture.

Now in retrospect, I found diving into the Openuni that early was a futile activity. I was inundated with information that I did not have a single idea what it was related to, how to use, or what it was used for. Although getting the thumbs up for proactiveness from upper management did feel good. The reason that I found it not very useful was that I came in with the viewpoint of an end-user. It did not occur to me to install a local instance of Acumatica, and looking back, if I did not have the technical knowledge, I don't think I would have been able to install a local instance, given the pre-requisites. What I'm trying to say is that an End-User will definitely have a hard time understanding the ups and downs of Acumatica, without a Consulting Partner holding their hands. And in the end, even when the company did have the Implementation Partner, we found a huge gap between them and us, which lead us to make mistakes in the early implementation stages of Acumatica. Mistakes that till today, after over a year of usage, still come back to haunt us.

After going through all the roller coaster ride that was Acumatica implementation, I decided that I wanted to share my experience with the implementation process, not as a professional consultant, because I am not one, nor am I affiliated with any Acumatica Partner company, but as a true user, working for a non IT related service company in the construction sector.  I plan to share my experience and knowledge I picked up along the way, in layman’s language that will be easy to understand by users like me, to hopefully help others out there to avoid situations, where we end up thinking “Oh-oh….I shouldn’t have done that!”