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For Acumatica customers, there are two essential components of cloud ERP success: connecting with the Acumatica Community and embarking on a digital transformation journey. A digital transformation is an open-ended path towards growth, efficiency, and profitability, and the connected customer consistently achieves these goals by learning from—and being inspired by—the Acumatica ecosystem.
Three Ways to Connect with the Acumatica Community
Connecting with others is an ingrained human need. It’s also important to our health. Lack of connection is debilitating, according to psychologist and writer Susan Pinker, author of The Village Effect: Why Face-to-Face Contact is Good for Our Health, Happiness, Learning, and Longevity. She writes, “[N]eglecting to keep in close contact with people who are important to you is at least as dangerous to your health as a pack-a-day cigarette habit, hypertension, or obesity.”
Though she is referring to more personal connections, connecting with your professional associates is also incredibly important. In “Come for the Community, Stay for the Digital Transformation,” Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill encouraged our Acumatica Community members to attend Summit 2021 (the keynotes of which are available on demand). Highlighting that Acumatica prioritizes having our community meet face-to-face and that our annual Summit is like a family reunion, Jon says: “I know this connection has been heavily influenced by our customer-and-innovation-first mentality, which puts precedence on people and outcomes, not on processes.”
This focus on people and their success foregrounds the following three ways to connect with the Acumatica Community.
1. Connect in Person
Our annual cloud ERP Summit is by far the best way to interact in person with members of the Acumatica ecosystem. Every year, partners, customers, developers, and industry analysts intermingle during keynotes, general sessions, breakout sessions, training courses, and social activities. The COVID-19 pandemic was a concern for Summit 2021, but the high vaccination rates across the nation and the safety precautions taken by the venue (Wynn Las Vegas) allowed this year’s event to be a huge success, drawing in over 2,500 attendees.
In many ways, nonverbal cues define how a message is received, and connecting in person allows people to communicate clearly through eye contact, tones of voice, hand gestures, and facial expressions. An article published by HelpGuide, an independent, nonprofit metal health and wellness organization, says, “Your nonverbal communication cues—the way you listen, look, move, and react—tell the person you’re communicating with whether or not you care, if you’re being truthful, and how well you’re listening. When your nonverbal signals match up with the words you’re saying, they increase trust, clarity, and rapport. When they don’t, they can generate tension, mistrust, and confusion.”
Strengthening relationships in person, when possible, is essential for growing a connected business’s success.
2. Connect with Partners and Peers
Connecting in person leads to a question: “With whom should customers connect?” We recommend taking time to speak with partners and other customers.
Acumatica’s partners are our Value Added Resellers (VARs) and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). VARs are the only avenue through which we sell our cloud ERP system, and ISVs provide innovative, third-party applications that extend Acumatica’s cloud ERP platform in practical, meaningful ways.
Their success is our success, and it all hinges on giving customers knowledgeable help when they are researching, buying, and implementing Acumatica’s cloud-based ERP solution. When customers connect with our partners, they are tapping into a wellspring of information about how to continuously glean value from their ERP investments. The same can be said of connecting with other customers.
At the Acumatica Summit, customers can see specific cases of how Acumatica can be used with its built-in functionalities and with additional capabilities provided by third-party products. For example, customers who use Salesforce and have also implemented Acumatica may realize that they can get what they need just by using Acumatica’s CRM software—eliminating hefty third-party fees and fully integrating with Acumatica’s Financial, manufacturing, and Distribution (plus more) software. Conversely, they may find that they need further specificity not supplied by Acumatica, so they may choose a point solution, which can be easily integrated into Acumatica’s open, flexible platform.
Both partners and other customers offer insights into what is possible with and through Acumatica’s cloud ERP technology based on their own experience and expertise. Connected customers, then, can better understand how to derive the best value from the Acumatica solution.
3. Connect Technology
Let’s further pursue this idea of deriving value from Acumatica. At every Summit, we provide both partner and customer demonstrations of how Acumatica can be used to increase productivity and profitability.
For example, Acumatica customer Nick Novy, president and founder of Korpack, a B2B single-source supplier of retail packaging, chose Acumatica Cloud ERP for its flexibility, easy customizations, and agile cloud xRP platform. During a panel demonstration at a previous Summit, Nick explained how he has extended Acumatica’s CRM to fit his company’s needs, especially for workflows. Customers who heard Nick’s example were able to go back home and incorporate his ideas into their own businesses.
At Summit, customers also have many opportunities to speak with other customers, who have used Acumatica products that may technically fall outside their industries. For example, some manufacturers and distributors have implemented Acumatica’s Retail-Commerce Edition—which tightly integrates with our sales, CRM, financial, fulfillment, and inventory systems—to manage their order, shipping, inventory, and customer support needs. Some manufacturers and distributors have also chosen to implement third-party applications, such as BigCommerce’s native integration or Shopify’s native integration. These ideas have proven successful, and that success shows other customers how they can shape their own connected businesses.
Both scenarios are strong, fruitful examples of how Acumatica’s products are not limited to a single industry.
The annual Acumatica Hackathon is another excellent way for customers to connect their technology with the Acumatica system. Working as teams, the attendees compete and collaborate with developers and non-developers to create unique solutions for Acumatica, producing and learning about innovative ways to extend Acumatica’s capabilities even further.
What Developer MVP Kyle Vanderstoep (Contou Inc.) had to say about attending his second Acumatica Hackathon perfectly captures the importance of connection and its impact on success: “There are only so many connections you can make behind the screen. Everyone here is very much into Acumatica, and sometimes you don’t find that level of enthusiasm even face-to-face with like-minded developers. You learn tons of new stuff. There’s always an infinite number of things you don’t know that somebody else knows, and, when everyone gets together, it’s like they pollinate each other’s ideas.”
Pollinate, Connect, and Succeed with Acumatica Cloud ERP
We want everyone to “pollinate each other’s ideas.” This happens when people come together, connect in person with partners and other customers, and share what they know to inspire others and spur them on to success. The Acumatica Community is a rewarding way to make these connections happen. Currently sitting at over 8,900 members, the Acumatica Community offers user groups, product ideas, and partner and discussion forums, all of which answer questions and encourage new ways of using Acumatica’s cloud ERP solution.
This continued growth through connection corresponds to the never-ending digital transformation journey we should all be pursuing. In “Digital Transformation Doesn’t End at Go-Live,” Jon Roskill notes: “A real digital transformation is part-and-parcel of the business; it doesn’t stop with setting the business and its processes on top of the software and moving up a level. It’s being able to grab opportunities as they present themselves because of digital resiliency and business agility. And this resiliency and agility continue to manifest throughout the digital transformation journey.”
He also writes, “Your digital transformation journey should be an open-ended proposition. It’s the only way businesses can continue to grow and mature in fluctuating markets and unexpected crises.”
Acumatica is here to help businesses grow, mature, and connect, and our next cloud ERP event, the Acumatica Summit 2022, is coming soon. Registration is live, and we can’t wait to get everyone together again.
To learn more about Acumatica’s cloud-based ERP solution and about becoming an Acumatica customer, contact our experts today.
