One of the joys I have, twice a year at Acumatica, is to reveal the hundreds of cloud ERP software improvements found in our bi-annual product releases Each release is engineered to increase product usability and enhance user productivity and efficiency, and with the general availability of Acumatica 2024 R1 announced on March 20, we’re excited to dig into its many user benefits.

Our Chief Product Officer Ali Jani put it best: “This release not only delivers essential enhancements businesses need today but will also help our customers reimagine how they operate and compete in today’s dynamic and increasingly interconnected markets.”

Acumatica Addresses Customer-and-Industry-Specific Needs

Acumatica’s commitment to putting customers first can be seen in our reliance on customer and partner input into our product development.

Ongoing, honest feedback from real users like you is the driving force behind the decisions we make, the features we include, and the upgrades we provide within each product release. Garnering real-user feedback also helps us tailor our distinct Industry Editions—including Construction, Distribution, Manufacturing, and Retail—so that they address your specific and unique vertical needs.

One business with firsthand experience using our vertical-specific applications is Portacool, Acumatica’s 2024 Customer of the Year. Portacool—a company that manufactures and sells portable evaporative coolers—implemented Acumatica when they realized their antiquated system was incapable of managing their complex operations and was stalling their growth.

With Acumatica, they’ve improved their inventory management, streamlined their operations, and seamlessly integrated with vital third-party applications.

“You can’t be successful by chance,” says Portacool President and CEO Ben Wulf. “You have to be successful by change and having a robust ERP that can give us that added flexibility in these unique and uncertain times is going to help us win in the future.”

Overcoming Challenges, Winning in the Future with Acumatica 2024 R1

Having a cloud ERP solution that offers functionality that matters in the workplace is what businesses in every industry require for a successful future. Let’s take a look at the challenges industries are facing today and how the customer-driven and vertical-specific feature benefits of Acumatica 2024 R1 can help businesses overcome them.

1. Feature Benefits for Manufacturers

Manufacturers continue to face a stubbornly unstable economy, a still-chaotic supply chain, ongoing labor shortages, and a growing need to modernize facilities.

Fortunately, Acumatica’s latest release enables manufacturers to operate efficiently and competitively regardless of these challenges by offering manufacturers a number of feature benefits, such as:

• Improved material demand planning by forecasting optional stock and non-stock kit components.
• Flexibility for manufacturing workers to report production operations when they are run in parallel.
• Optimized MRP generation with ‘planning horizons’ that enable organizations to define time-constrained data for inclusion in supply and demand calculations.
• Configured MRP and DRP to include or exclude sales order types to improve planning by excluding returns and other types of orders from inventory planning calculations.

2. Benefits for Contractors, Project, and Service Organizations

The construction, project, and service industries have also seen their fair share of challenges in the first few months of 2024. High interest rates and inflation continue to plague their bottom lines along with labor and material shortages and project delays.

Even so, businesses that implement Acumatica have acquired a comprehensive business management solution that enables them to become efficient and profitable—especially with the feature benefits found in Acumatica 2024 R1:

• Access AP cost transactions related to progress billing lines from a new pro forma invoice side panel for timely vendor payments and increased billing accuracy.
• Empower users to enter and process negative expense receipts to make a full or partial refund to the corporate credit card for faster and simpler GL account reconciliation.
• Ensure accurate and efficient handling of pro forma invoice corrections with a streamlined workflow for previously closed and released accounts receivable documents.
• Leverage one-click initiation to correct invoices created from service documents.
• Improve project budget updates by project transactions, where budget rules no longer depend on the transaction source and GL account type.

3. Feature Benefits for Distributors

Like the manufacturing industry, the distribution industry has been facing ongoing economic, labor, and supply chain challenges. To ensure distributors operate as smoothly and effectively as possible, Acumatica 2024 R1 offers a number of distribution benefits:

• Improve demand planning and forecasting with time-phased purchase orders, kit assembly, and warehouse transfer recommendations with the new Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP) application, which includes exception messages for distributed items, kits, and kit components.
• Streamline small parcel and LTL shipment processing workflows and configure packing and shipping scenarios with Acumatica and 3G Pacejet. The enhanced integration of these shipping and processing capabilities, now in the core of the Acumatica solution, provides transparency for shipment data, including hazardous materials, PRO bill number, delivery instructions, accessorial definitions, non-standard containers, serialized shipping container codes (SSCC), and other packaging and shipment information with no need for separate customization.
• Expedite return material authorization (RMA) processes with improved document searches using invoice and line details such as sales order type and number, inventory ID, lot or serial number, and order dates.
• Improve warehouse management activities with bidirectional picking and aggregated quantities for pick lines.
• Configure unique document approval workflows for invoices, credit memos, debit memos, cash sales, and cash returns.

4. Feature Benefits for Retailers and Commerce Merchants

Retailers and commerce merchants are not immune to the economic headwinds of 2024, but according to Deloitte’s 2024 retail industry report, the volatile economy has not stopped consumers from spending. With this in mind, Deloitte experts advise retail businesses to spend their time and energy on improving their loyalty programs, their “omni-experience”, and their individual engagement with the help of “trustworthy AI.

These strategic growth initiatives require businesses to utilize data not only from these focus areas but from other critical areas (e.g., inventory and order management), as well. Acumatica—acting as a centralized database—makes gathering, storing, analyzing, and reporting on such large and diverse amounts of data possible.

Now, with Acumatica 2024 R1, retailers and commerce merchants can:

• Gain a unified connection between Acumatica and Amazon with synchronized data for order fulfillment, product availability, Amazon fees, payments, and taxes.
• Increase efficiency and accuracy by directly importing exchanges to Acumatica from a Shopify POS order for the same product at the same or different price or for another product at the same or different price.
• Use bidirectional sync to import products from Shopify and BigCommerce stores to Acumatica through the Commerce connector.

Acumatica 2024 R1: Make Decisions “Based on Fact—Not on Feelings”

Acumatica 2024 R1 delivers on our promise to consistently provide our customers and partners with an intuitive, innovative, and industry-specific business management solution. Together with help from you and the entire Acumatica Community, we’re equipping businesses in every industry with the tools, resources, and support they need to make strategic, profit-driving decisions that allow them to grow on their own terms and control their own futures.

As Portacool’s Director of Operations Kimberly McElroy says, “[Acumatica has] become the heartbeat of our company—it’s really the pulse that runs the business now. You have to be agile in the market we’re in today, and you have to be ready to make those decisions based on facts—not on feelings.”

To learn more about Acumatica 2024 R1, watch Acumatica Summit 2024’s Day 2 Keynote, which also includes a preview of our new user interface (scheduled for a controlled release later in 2024 before general availability in 2025) that enhances usability, personalization, and customization. You can also contact our experts with any questions or to schedule a demonstration today.