Data Centralized in Single Solution
With the move to Acumatica, Mous instantly had its data in one centralized place, allowing employees to instantly see what was happening in the business in real-time rather than learning about it three weeks later.
“All of our data is now centralized in one place,” Day says. “All of our supply chain data is linked, so there are no gaps in our data. We know the second we go from a purchase and invoice to needing to transfer a SKU to a different warehouse, to its receipt at a warehouse, when it’s shipped to the customer, and even the shipping and tracking data. It’s all in one place so there’s no risk for any data integrity issues.”
Increased Data Analysis
“The open API and ease of building reports is brilliant,” he adds. “Using General Inquiry, we can see what is going on right now and most of the operations team can access the data and facilitate their own reporting needs. We now have accurate COGS (cost of goods sold), visibility end-to-end into the supply chain, and we can manage inventory better.”
With easy access to its data, Mous has improved and streamlined operations. The company has reliable management reports showing COGS accurately, orders and revenue from third party websites such as Amazon, and they view month-end data just a day later – not in three weeks, which was the time frame previously, Day says.
“Pulling data from different systems just took ages, before” he says. “Now the tool supports calculations on the fly and in theory, I can know what happened an hour ago if I wanted to. It’s just awesome.”
Any growing business needs a platform that delivers KPIs and provides easy-to-use reports and can scale easily, Day says. With Acumatica, employees can build their own reports with KPIs specific to them. “It’s a flexible solution that can handle a mass scale of transactions, the user interface is really nice and its easily personalized to our business,” he says. “It’s pleasant to look at, easy to search for reports, invoices, or bank transactions, and you can find what you need rapidly. “
More Data Unlocks Opportunities
The Mous team has gained more specified data to drill into to view items by order, by SKU, by repeat purchase rates, and by country. “We can do really complicated analysis that has unlocked new opportunities for us,” he says. Executives learned a lot about repeat purchase rates and habits and how they vary by SKU, by country, and how shipping rates vary among countries.
“Having this kind of granular data has allowed us to learn a lot about our business, about finding efficiencies, areas for savings, and opportunities,” Day says.
Mous can perform sophisticated analysis without needing a development staff or IT team devoted to infrastructure maintenance. “Acumatica being cloud-based and having an open API was great because we don’t have to maintain our own servers and we don’t need a host of data engineers,” Day says. “Our consultants maintain our platform in the cloud, and we have a couple of people who write SQL, but no data engineers.”
Easy to Add New and Improved Business Processes
Acumatica is also highly customizable, and offers low-code, no-code tools to modify the business platform to the way Mous operates, Day says. “Acumatica allows you to do business the way you want and can work around your unique requirements,” he says. “It does make you reflect and identify where it will help you straight out of the box, but is also flexible and agile, allowing you to reflect on your processes and make slight changes as you see fit.”
After its implementation, Mous streamlined how the customer service team processes replacements, eliminating several steps and screens, streamlining the process to automatically link to the original order, a replacement screen and simply add the appropriate message they need to send to the customer.
“These projects are not huge, but I can imagine doing something like that in a system like NetSuite would hog development time, according to several of my friends who run that program,” Day says. “In Acumatica, it is a low-code project that doesn’t require tech experience and can be done in 6 or 7 hours. We’re doing those things all the time and asking how we can make things more streamlined; do they have a decent return, and can they be done reasonably fast.”
“That’s been great, and we just keep improving, knowing projects like this can be completed in a quick turnaround time.”
Continued International Growth, New Product Development
Mous plans to launch new premium tech accessories for tech-lovers and thrill-seekers everywhere and will continue to enter more international markets. Acumatica’s multicurrency functionality makes it easier for Mous to expand to new countries. “We already operate in GDP, USD, EUROs and are exploring accepting more local currencies,” Day says. “Acumatica can take in data and translate it into GRD, and we have visibility into taxes by country. Having accurate data is powerful and important because we can’t make decisions from faulty data.”
Acumatica continually invests in the platform, adopting customer suggestions and continually fostering a growing community of third-party application creators. It is a platform built for the future, which for Mous means the company won’t have to think about moving to a new system, and, because it’s also robust, the operations team can focus on building for longevity, Day says.
“We have confidence that the platform can scale with us doubling, tripling or quadrupling,” he says. “Acumatica can handle that and is built to scale, which is really good. It’s also a business application that we can build from with other processes. It’s not a patchwork, and once it’s built (Mous’ internal program), there’s no limit to what we can do – it’s something we can be on forever. Just like our products, the only limit is our imagination.”
At a time when supply chains are still in flux, inflation is rapidly rising, the world economies are teetering on a recession and the war for Ukraine continues, Day has one less worry as he guides Mous’ future.
“I go home and sleep not worrying about my system falling apart, where the next data may have been missed, and where a formula wasn’t correct in Excel,” he says. “Now data is systemized and in one place, which gives me greater security and reassurance. It’s much more relaxing. “