Often, in the building supply industry people are not buying a certain number of an item, but the amount of product needed to cover a specific space or unit of measurement.
The question is, how can unique units of measurement be tracked in the ERP system?
This is a challenge we accepted recently when we worked with a building supply company based in Virginia that was moving from a legacy product to a new system in the cloud.
Traditional Units of Measure
Most ERP systems can handle something that is sold by the foot or the square foot. But a varying unit of measurement, such as space square feet, is more difficult.
For example, if you are selling a pallet of bricks or blocks.
Let’s say somebody is coming in and they're going to buy or cover an area of 5000 space square feet, in order to do a project. In this case, their priority is covering a certain space, they're not necessarily interested in the dimension of a typical brick, they're interested in the SPACE square feet.
Space Square Feet
This is the space that is covered when you build the front side of a building, for example. In a traditional ERP system, how would you know how many bricks you need to buy?
We needed to modify Acumatica to not only keep track of how many bricks were on a palette but how many space square feet were on that palette. You have to keep track of 2 dimensions, not one. Plus, with most of these type of building materials, there's also some type of Pallet Layer size, which they call “band”.
So not only do you need to know how many bricks are on the pallet, how many space square feet it includes, you might also need to know how many bands there are, number of bricks in a BAND. Because this is the information the workers need in order to go out into the yard and load the truck.
The long and short of it is when somebody comes in and orders 5000 space square feet of brick, the Acumatica system needs to tell the salesperson or yard person exactly how much brick to sell/pick for the customer order.
Acumatica Customization
The financial, distribution and development teams at CAL Business Solutions worked together to customize the Acumatica system for our client to meet this specific business requirement. Now, these customizations did take time, which was an extra cost. But it made a huge difference for this client, and it was worth the investment.
The fact that we were able to do this, within the Acumatica platform, is one of the reasons that we choose to sell Acumatica. It means we can turn challenging implementations into .
If you a distribution company that is ready to replace your ERP/ accounting software CAL Business Solutions can help. Our team has specific expertise in .
Read the full success story:
. Contact us at 860-485-0910 x4 or sales@calszone.com.
By CAL Business Solutions, Microsoft Dynamics GP and Acumatica Partner,
Follow us on Twitter:
