Acumatica Implementation Expected to Boost Direct Mail Marketing Company’s Profits by $600,000

The Overview

Founded in 1998, PostcardMania is a $20 million company delivering social media, email marketing, direct mail and other services for about 12,000 active customers out of over 63,000 total. After 9 years of using QuickBooks and other software to manage financial data and reporting, the firm decided to switch to Acumatica.

The Problem

Since 1998, PostcardMania has grown from a 3-person direct mail company into a firm with more than $20 million in revenues, 200 employees and 12,000 customers at any one time. For the past 9 years, the company has used QuickBooks and custom software to manage their financial and customer information.

CEO Joy Gendusa says, “The process of delivering our product is huge. We’re doing direct mail, website development, email marketing, follow-up programs, pay-perclick management. Every one of these types of marketing has many touch-points to get it delivered and working well.  Everything that’s administrative, we have to be able to automate.”

The growing complexity of their operations led Ms. Gendusa to a realization: “We’re too big, and we had too many moving parts not to have an ERP. We had this homegrown CRM that we built a workflow into, but with no accounting in it, which was insane. It was like a small house that we kept adding rooms onto.” She adds, “It wasn’t a holistic system; I didn’t feel confident in it.”

According to Carolyn Jasiulewicz of Plumbline Consulting, “They had a lot of growth and really needed to get something that was one system.”

The Solution

Moving to an ERP was a significant decision for PostcardMania. They took their time and investigated various options for nearly two years. “We looked at SalesForce in addition to many other systems; the prices were insane,” says Gendusa.

The firm narrowed down their choice to Acumatica and NetSuite, which they found comparable in terms of features and functionality. But, she points out, “Acumatica stood out because they were the only company that offered a perpetual license. We can purchase the rights to the source code and scale up or down without having to purchase additional user licenses, and that’s huge.”

PostcardMania decided on the Enterprise edition of Acumatica. Eventually they plan to implement all of the suites Acumatica offers (Financial Management, Customer Management, Distribution Management and Project Accounting) and are also considering adding JAAS Advanced Manufacturing Software (JAMS) in the future.

The company also appreciates the flexibility of the Acumatica platform. According to Ms. Gendusa, “Acumatica gives us the ability to customize features to best meet our needs.” She adds that her firm needs a significant amount of customizations, so it is taking a bit of time to implement the new ERP: “We have a very unique business, so there isn’t anything out of the box that would work for us.”

The Benefits

With their old system, Ms. Gendusa says, it was difficult to train new staff: “We created training videos and manuals, but whenever we hired a new salesperson, the amount they had to learn just to create a quote or look up a customer was unreasonable.”

Implementing Acumatica will be a big help, she says. “Acumatica’s user-friendly system is going to be a whole new world for us and save us a ton of money on training.”

Ms. Gendusa points out that they conducted an analysis on how this change might benefit their bottom line: “We took processes experts and ran them through our entire organization to see how many touches were on each job. We put a lot of time and energy into figuring out what to do.”

That analysis showed the potential for a drastic decrease in errors and refunds, as well as a dramatic reduction in re-work “and non-value-added process steps, which meant good news for their future profitability. Ms. Gendusa states that thanks to Acumatica, “Conservatively, we’re looking at an increase of $600,000 in EBITDA profitability, once all of the suites are
implemented. That’s massive.”