Hedstrom Fitness

Move to the Cloud, Streamline Processes

Parallel Solutions LLC supported Hedstrom Fitness through its transition to a separate
company, and its use of Macola. Understanding the business, knowing of its desire to
streamline processes, and move to the cloud, led Parallel to recommend Acumatica Distribution.

The cloud-based ERP could streamline processes and help them go paperless, which
were two of Hedstrom Fitness’ goals. With end-to-end visibility, it could improve inventory
management and shipping by bringing fulfillment and warehousing in-house.

“Not having to touch things multiple times was the number one goal,” says McArdle.

“Going paperless was another one of our big goals.”

Adds Williams, “For me, it was basically doing everything in one platform so I can input my
order, click a button, see it’s at the warehouse, and I was done with it.”

A cloud-based system could also reduce its technology expenses. “We didn’t want a server
and the hassle of ongoing server expenses. It’s just like anything else: a giant computer that
needs to be updated, replaced and protected,” McArdle says. In addition, “I do feel the cloudbased system is better than having a local server susceptible to cyber threats and ransom.”

Acumatica Distribution

The team liked Acumatica for several reasons.
“When we demoed Acumatica, it just seemed very intuitive, which was very exciting to me,”
says McArdle. “I’m not a tech person; I just don’t function well in some of the Macola-type
systems where there’s too many different layers of information that you have to specifically
know how to get to.”

“With Acumatica, you can dig in based on different links and the customer reports that we built.”
Christian O’Shell, Inventory and Procurement Specialist, liked that Acumatica offered an open
API that allows third party solutions to easily connect to it. “The ability for integrated solutions
is massive compared to competitors,” he says. ”With Macola, it was next to nil. But because
we sell online, tying everything together through integration is massive.

The simplicity of Acumatica is even better.

“Acumatica also allowed Hedstrom Fitness to start fresh,” McArdle says. “We were able to pull
out of Acumatica the data that we wanted that we felt was clean and accurate. We were almost
going on 20 years of data with Macola that I felt that had been over-corrected and done to try
to compensate for errors in the system.”

Parallel Solutions helped Hedstrom Fitness deploy Acumatica and port data accumulated over
20 years from Macola.

Full Visibility

With Acumatica, employees gained real-time visibility into operations and eliminated much of
tedium and wasted time importing and exporting data to other systems in an attempt to analyze
data and understand KPIs.

“Acumatica really allows me to have a very high level view, and it’s very intuitive if I want to try
to dig into some of the granular details,” says McArdle. “Previously, it required a lot of different
people to pull data, create a report, and send it to me. Now I can monitor 95% of what I need
to on a daily basis and not put any burden on anyone else.”

Previously, McArdle might wait an hour or sometimes days for someone to run a report for him.
Now he has instant access to the data while his team has more time to concentrate on their jobs.

Because Acumatica is so streamlined, easy to use, and data is housed in one platform, Hedstrom Fitness
doesn’t need as many finance employees it utilized previously as part of the larger company.
“From a logistical standpoint, we had eight to 10 people that supported our division that, while shared resources,
had a great deal to do with our division.”

Now, the company functions very efficiently with a single person handling accounts receivable
and account payables, and a part-time accountant helps close the books monthly. “And that’s
it,” McArdle says. “I’m able to oversee the financial piece of it throughout the month based on
what’s coming in and what’s going out. I don’t believe anyone is overworked or overstressed
doing the same amount of work that we were doing before.”

Moving to the cloud allowed employees to work from home when needed. “Being cloud based
has definitely given us a lot of flexibility,” McArdle says. “We are not a work from home company,
but we understand that employees have families and need to be home for periods of time.”

Eliminated Manual Data Entry

Williams and others have eliminated the time they previously spent manually entering data.

“There was a lot of inputting that we don’t have to do now,” says Williams. “There are a lot of functions in Acumatica that we didn’t have with Macola.”

In addition, she says, “The more I think about it, the more I realize how many systems I
had to use just to process an order, which was two additional systems. Then I had to use the
FedEx toolbox to quote orders.

Now I just put an order in, click a button, get a shipping quote
back immediately, all within Acumatica. The frosting on the cake is being 100% able to do it
from anywhere.”

Streamlined Inventory & Purchasing

Entering inventory tickets into Macola was very cumbersome, says O’Shell. He often waited for
items to post before he could view variances. “With Acumatica, it’s a lot simpler,” he says. “As
soon as you finish your count you can see the review right away.

You are not waiting a day for all these postings to go through. And I have the ability to drill down through the documents on
the accounting side to see where the errors may be and get to the root cause.”

The company previously counted inventory items manually. The task took about a week. “We
used to order pre-printed tickets that were big and had all kinds of data we had to fill out,”
O’Shell says.

“It used to take a week to do a full count of everything, which included sporting
goods and toys. We just did Hedstrom Fitness inventory in two and a half days with a lot less
people.”

His team will soon start cycle counting by codes to keep the inventory accurate, he added. “So
we won’t run out of something we need or that we think we might need from the purchasing
side. Acumatica is going to streamline inventory and not let us run out. We’ll have stock on
hand all the time.”

As part of its transition to a stand-alone entity, Hedstrom Fitness implemented EDI through
True Commerce, brought its shipping in-house and moved its warehouse from to its
headquarters in Ashland from Columbus, Ohio. Under Hedstrom Plastics, it utilized a third-party logistics firm for fulfillment and shipping.
Executives made those decisions to better control inventory, company processes, and improve
its shipping times, McArdle says.

Previously, to preview orders, a person had to call up each order individually. With Acumatica,
all orders come through EDI. “I can just look and review orders, which has been a huge help to
me,” says Williams. “Once I see everything looks good, I just hit process and two minutes later
I have 200 orders going to the warehouse, and know that we have everything we need to fulfill
those orders.”

“Acumatica gives us a bird’s eye view on whether we can fulfill an order or not instantly, which
means we can accommodate same day shipping,” says McArdle, explaining that previously
shipping orders under the 3PL took four days.

“When we get an order, our goal is to ship it as soon as we can, and we’re able to control that as opposed to sending an order to a 3PL that
may send it out after they get around to building the order, and getting the shipping routed. We
control that now.”

The previous company had nine people managing the Hedstrom Fitness account for shipping
and logistics. Hedstrom Fitness has two people in its warehouse and another person routing
and printing labels.

“They are more efficient, if not more so,” Williams says.

The company has reduced the need for paper and document storage, much of which was used
to communicate with its shipping partner.
“We still might go through a couple reams of paper a month as opposed to boxes and boxes
of paper,” Williams says.

“Previously there was a lot of paper documents that needed to be printed because we used 3PL companies.”

Now, since the company has brought fulfillment and shipping in house, the paperwork is stored
digitally in Acumatica. The paper trail is all in one system, and orders are easier to process and
take less time.

“Acumatica took my process from maybe five minutes per order down to maybe
a couple,” Williams says, explaining she needed to access several applications to check an
order status and then input shipping carrier information when customers had their own specific
shipping carriers.

Increased Online Sales
Hedstrom Fitness executives are pleased with their decision to implement Acumatica
Distribution, which has increased its web sales.

“Acumatica has been an integral part in helping us move from a third-party logistics company
that was managing our warehousing and shipping processes, to bringing that function in
house,” McArdle says. “This has helped us grow our web sales as we are able to effectively
communicate promotions, and offer same-day shipping.”

Hedstrom Fitness also serves its customers more efficiently with less time out of stock, he adds.

“We look at an out-of-stock scenario as a potential lost sale. So, by reducing our lead times,
we have reduced our commercial customers out-of-stock times as well as provide a better
customer experience. Overall, our growth has come from improving efficiency, so we
have more time to call on and service customers rather than be bogged down with tedious
processes that do not generate sales.”

The team recommends Acumatica highly. “Acumatica is the way to go if you want to work
smarter, not harder,” says Williams.