Midway Industrial Supply Goes All in on Next-Generation ERP
For nearly 60 years, Midway Industrial Supply, Inc. has been helping customers solve their industry challenges with a comprehensive range of products, parts, and services. With brick-and-mortar locations in New York and Pennsylvania, Midway serves the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. The company has grown from its machine shop roots into a diverse supplier and fabricator of tools and abrasives, specialty metals, and industrial supplies. In an industry that’s traditionally slow to embrace change, Midway continually innovates, growing through strategic acquisitions while striving to keep its operations lean and efficient, but its outdated on-premise ERP was impacting performance due to networking issues. That’s why Midway was ready to move confidently to Acumatica Cloud ERP.
THE FACTS LED TO ACUMATICA
Richard Swank, Midway’s CFO, joined the company just as it was finalizing its decision to migrate from Infor FACTS to Acumatica. “We were ready to move the business forward by taking advantage of a next-generation, cloudbased ERP application,” he says. “The old system had been around for nearly 30 years. We had a lot of performance and network issues that zapped productivity. Also, we wanted a more agile, modern solution that would be easier to roll out to new entities and provide us with better insights across the organization.”
Swank says the company also considered Epicor Prophet 21 before deciding on Acumatica. “Many competitors use it, but we made a different choice. Our technology partner, Net at Work, recommended Acumatica as an ideal replacement for FACTS. We’ve trusted Net at Work with our technology for decades, and their recommendation carried weight. Ultimately, we chose Acumatica for its broad distribution capabilities and because the choice would allow us to continue working with Net at Work.”
A CONFIGURABLE PLATFORM
Over the years, Midway had customized its previous ERP application extensively, adding new features and functions as the business grew and changed. “A side effect of all that customization was long, painful, and therefore infrequent software updates,” explains Swank.
The move to Acumatica has positively changed this dynamic. “Acumatica is highly configurable, so we can make many changes on our own without changing the code,” notes Swank. “Plus, Net at Work has an extensive library of Acumatica enhancements that are all available to us as part of our Customer Experience Plan.”
Midway has also engaged Net at Work’s programming team to build several customizations that address specialized functionality. “But none of that impedes our ability to upgrade,” notes Swank. “We update the software once a year without issue. Net at Works tests everything for us before we go live. This allows us to take advantage of the all the new functionalities Acumatica releases each year.”
Midway appreciates the structure and professionalism evident in Net at Work’s approach to its clients. “They use a cloud-based project management platform that allows the Midway and Net at Work teams to manage tasks, track progress, ask and answer questions, and collaborate in one centralized place,” Swank says. “Everyone understands their responsibilities, and nothing gets missed.”
Swank describes the initial move to Acumatica as smooth and straightforward, even though the conversion included 10 years of transactional history. “Our COO commented that we’d been through routine updates with our old ERP that were more challenging than the migration to Acumatica.”
GEARED TO SCALE
The benefits of Acumatica’s browser-based deployment model and mobile application were recently highlighted when one of Midway’s branch locations suffered a devastating fire that destroyed the building. “We could keep right on working from home,” Swank says. “Acumatica has become an important component of our business continuity plan.”
Acumatica’s pricing model is an ideal fit for Midway. “It allows us to scale extensively and only pay for the resources we use,” Swank says. “As our business grows, we move up in tiers, but we never have to pay for additional users. That means we can easily extend the software to all our employees, empowering them and boosting productivity.”
AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS OPTIMIZE RESOURCES
One significant way Acumatica is streamlining operations for Midway is through the Business Events function. Business Events are configurable, automated alerts that inform Midway personnel of data changes and anomalies they care about. For example, if a staff member forgets to attach a copy of the vendor’s invoice to an accounts payable invoice transaction, they receive a reminder notification. “This ensures consistency, accuracy, and auditability,” says Swank.
Business Events are also proving invaluable in Midway’s distributed work environment. The company has 13 offices spread across the mid-Atlantic, which can complicate communication across departments and teams. By configuring customized Business Events, Midway is automating many routine communications, eliminating bottlenecks, and streamlining workflows. “For example, the system sends an email to managers when an order total is over a certain threshold and can route payables invoices for approval,” Swank explains. “This keeps processes moving wherever we’re working from.”
Processing an invoice used to require multiple employees and a lengthy manual process. Any changes to a vendor payment mid-process would require staff to completely start again. Plus, vendor invoices were stored in file boxes, making them difficult to locate when needed.
With Acumatica, Midway has automated the manual steps by adding approval workflows and processing guardrails. As a result, AP processing takes significantly less time, and the company doesn’t need to hire additional staff as the transaction volume increases.
“We’ve even been able to reassign some employees away from data entry tasks and on to more strategic and revenue-generating activities,” adds Swank.
The Acumatica Expense Management module is also proving itself at Midway. The company used to rely heavily on spreadsheets, but Expense Management automates much of the task, shortening the expense cycle, improving data accuracy, and saving administrative time.
25% EFFICIENCY GAINS
Since Midway implemented Acumatica, it has made three new acquisitions and added three new locations—but has only hired one new finance department employee.
“This is significant,” notes Swank. “We’re growing bigger but remaining lean. Much of that is because of the efficiencies we’ve gained with Acumatica. We can achieve things with the software we never considered with the older application. With Acumatica, every single process is more efficient. I would estimate that overall, we’re seeing a 25 percent gain in efficiency. That alone helps pay for the software.”
SUPPORT FOR ISO & DOD CERTIFICATION
Midway is ISO 9001 certified, and Acumatica helps the company achieve and maintain the quality standards required. “We’ve always put quality first, but Acumatica provides features and tools that help us demonstrate that commitment,” Swank explains. “For example, we’ve added custom fields to the vendor record to better track and report supplier performance. And the Acumatica CRM module allows us to track customer feedback and handle support issues. In addition, we’re maintaining consistency and auditability by attaching all supporting documents to their corresponding transactions and enforcing that best practice with the Business Events feature.”
Midway is a direct supplier to the Department of Defense. As part of its Defense Contract Maintenance Agreement (DCMA), the company must carefully monitor its own vendor performance to ensure accuracy and compliance. To aid in this task, Net at Work added custom fields and new capabilities to Acumatica that allow Midway to follow the specified processes and generate the necessary government reports.
EMPOWERING THE SALES TEAM
The company’s remote sales teams never had access to the old ERP. But now, each salesperson has a customized dashboard in Acumatica that provides at-a-glance access to key performance indicators, informative graphs, and detailed reports. “This has been game-changing for our sales team,” notes Swank. “They have instant access to the information they need.”
One example is customer contract pricing. The salesperson can quickly see customer-specific pricing where they would have had to call the office before. It allows them to spend more time with customers and less time looking for answers.
“I feel that our implementation has been as successful as it has been because of two factors: the product and the partnership we have with Net at Work,” concludes Swank. “They help us leverage Acumatica to scale this business and take us as far as we can go.”
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