Pinnacle supports IT company’s circular business model with Acumatica
September 6, 2023 | News
When faced with divestiture from its parent company and a transition of services in just a couple of months, UK-based IT Xchange turned to Acumatica Partner Pinnacle to on-board the cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Enabling IT Xchange to manage its inventory, workload, processes and flow, Acumatica also allows the business, which champions a circular IT approach, to grade components and code each one for traceability purposes.
IT Xchange does a lot of hardware reconfiguration. Like a manufacturing process, components are combined to make finished goods but in reverse, finished goods are broken down into components. IT Xchange Managing Director Michael Robertson explains: “It’s about being able to manage and track each one at serial number level, and controlling all the associated costs correctly to ensure every component is traceable – we also partner with major manufacturers like Lenovo and run programmes for them, which require detailed reporting and full traceability.”
Stuck with an unwieldy system that was unmanageable and unsuitable for the global business let alone at a local level, Michael says: “The system had been set up with various levels of customisation but trying to make any changes was firstly, very difficult and secondly, very costly.”
The company had been looking at changing the ERP system for a number of years. The divestiture of the UK and European arm of the business to the REL Group simply forced its hand.
Michael continues: “When Pinnacle presented the Acumatica demo, straightaway it looked intuitive and easy to use. Having evaluated various options swiftly and undertaken similar evaluations in the past, we were in a position to make a quick decision, and Pinnacle jumped on it.”
Two month implementation from start to finish
IT Xchange selected Acumatica Cloud ERP Distribution Edition, which provides real-time access to financials, reporting, and CRM.
Pinnacle was set quite a challenge in terms of the speed of the system’s set up, as Michael explains: “The Pinnacle team project management is impressive, helping us to identify which modules we needed to support our processes, setting the system up efficiently and all the associated testing. They managed to do it very quickly and very well in the timeframe we gave them. These projects can typically take six months. We did it in two and we were up and running and fully functional.”
Michael comments on Acumatica’s interface and functionality: “The system is as user friendly as the demo implied and once you’re up and running, every button does what you expect it to. Everything is in the right place.”
The live financial reporting avoids waiting for the finance team to key everything in and close the month, it’s all in the system live so data can be accessed and tracked on a day-to-day basis, which gives greater insight for fast decision making.
Components can be graded and tracked
Operationally Acumatica is incredibly intuitive too as Michael explains: “The way we can manage our inventory and receive items into the system are empowering efficiency and accuracy across the business. Most businesses are dealing with products and components that are new whereas we’re dealing with different grades and conditions of products so the system has various gradients built in that allow us to grade components and code each one.”
IT Xchange has also set up some automation, Michael says: “Automated sales-out reports go to our partners, and inventory reporting is easy especially when we need to report on stock levels for customers publishing on websites and other channels.”
Future growth plans
Part of the Pinnacle process is to understand what plans IT Xchange has for the future and specify the system accordingly. This highlighted the requirement for the set-up of a B2B web store. To get this up and running, the company also purchased the Acumatica plug-in Commerce module with a view to getting its inventory live online and more accessible for our customers. “Now, the initial set up and configuration is complete and working well for the business, we’ll be working with Pinnacle to develop this next stage,” concludes Michael.
