Questions AUGForums.com Live Suggestions

Hi Ryan and Tim:

I have enjoyed the live meeting of 3/4/2021 a lot since I learned a lot, and since I can use this material for selling: https://www.intercs.com/why-acumatica see the bottom of the webpage. Also I see now that AUGForums.com/live has an unique purpose: a live interactive sharing of implementation of business cases in Acumatica. Community.acumatica.com will never have this. I have also posted this live meeting in linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/strati-georgopoulos_working-from-home-just-got-easier-ugcPost-6769722271775936512-bzaZ

I was wondering how we could see the chat of the live meeting. Is that still available? If so, can you list it in the live webpage or in the live discussion forum. Please also list the document that you had made with your notes.

I saw the discussion forum for the live meetings.

During the live meeting, I didn't see the link to the streamyard meeting for interaction. Did I miss it?

Thanks for all the hard work.

I hope that you get rewarded for this.

Toon Six

ToonSix@intercs.com

Topics proposed for future meetings:

1. The hybrid of Discrete Manufacturing and Field Services
   1. For instance, a prospect makes custom windows for large buildings, and installs them
      1. I have tried to make a webinar for this but, I was not happy with my webinar.
         1. https://www.intercs.com/acumatica-project-manufacturing
2. The Acumatica ERP Foundation and Customer Portal
   1. For instance, a Beverage wholesale distributor distributes beverages (beer, wine, spirits) to retail outlets, hotels and restaurants
      1. Requirements
         1. Finance and Distribution
         2. Truck routing
         3. Customer portal where end customers can:
            1. Order
            2. See invoices
            3. Pay invoices with 30 day credit
            4. See payments
            5. Enroll in end customer marketing incentive programs
            6. Add alcohol license and certificate of occupancy
         4. Accept online orders from BevMedia.com
         5. QMS
         6. Digital product catalog on their website. No cart and checkout
      2. I am trying to put a good proposal together
      3. I have the following issues:
         1. Solution:
            1. Acumatica ERP Foundation
               1. Finance
               2. Distribution
               3. Warehouse Management
               4. CRM
            2. Nexvue Prime FoodService application
               1. Handles truck routing
               2. Issue: Prime FoodService item price is not recorded as item end price in Distribution. It is not available in custom portal
               3. NexVue is aware of this
            3. QMS: eWorkplace
            4. Acumatica Customer Portal
               1. Payment via EBizCharge of Century Business Solutions
               2. Upload/enter alcohol license and certificate of occupancy
                  1. Is Electronic Signature possible in customer portal
               3. Issues:
                  1. NexVue item price is not in the customer portal
                  2. No customization possibility
                  3. Retailer marketing incentive programs:
                     1. If business logic and calculations are needed, no customization possibility
            5. Accept online orders from BevMedia.com
               1. To explore Acumatica Ecommerce edition connector or use Celigo.com
            6. Digital product catalog on their website
               1. Using maybe BigCommerce B2C without product pricing and shopping cart
3. Recovery from the COVID 19 impact on business
   1. A lot of businesses have seen their revenue drop by 50%. They need to recover. They are not going to spend $30K -$50K/yr on a cloud ERP. They want to recover first their lost customers and get new customers. How to approach them?
   2. Proposed approach
      1. For the short term:
         1. Just offer them Acumatica CRM and maybe Hotspot to get their lost customers back and to get new prospects
            1. Offer them also integration with MS Office 365 and MS Outlook
         2. Issues:
            1. Can we sell just Acumatica CRM and integration with MS office 365, outlook and HubSpot?
            2. What is your experience with HubSpot? Expensive? Are the activities including emails, with customer contacts transferred to Acumatica CRM?
      2. For the long term:
         1. Add all other needed Acumatica suites and modules
      3. My short proposal can be seen at: https://www.intercs.com/covid-19-recovery
      4. What do you propose, and why?
4. Hybrid of Discrete Manufacturing and Construction
   1. I think that Aktion Associates has a customer for this. I am interested about the customer requirements and the solution
5. How to compete against SAP Business One, JD Edwards, Epicor and Infor
   1. A much deeper dive is needed than what is in the Acumatica portal
      1. Examples of customizations with those competitor ERPs that will take months vs weeks in Acumatica
      2. User navigation: difficult to navigate in SAP; examples

Thanks for all your hard work.

Toon Six

ToonSix@intercs.com

Hi @TimRodman, 

@Toonsix raises a couple of good points for discussions, I would like to see one on "how to add value" this is the differentiator between winning and losing a deal and it would be good to hear how other people present value and how they can make themselves stand out from the competition. This is a subject close to my heart so with the upcoming time zone changes with Spring / Fall your podcast may be at a more favorable time.

Another point @Toonsix raises is when to engage with the ecosystem, there is the obvious need at the sale but I have seen some people be greedy and rather than use the ecosystem they try and ram a square peg in a round hole. Also the phase 2 and 3 of the customer lifecycle after go live and how the ecosystem can help you make a) customers stickier and b) add extra recurring revenue through referrals and c) in some cases make extra consulting revenue. It would be good to share which ecosystem partners work for who and get real life feedback on what works and again how to pitch the "value" to the customer. 

@TimRodman - please check your family tree and tell me if there is a distant cousin in Australia who could do promotion for MYOB Advanced like you do for Acumatica!

Again @TimRodman, fantastic work bringing this together!

KC

I'm 20 min into the March 4 broadcast and I've already discovered a ton and have several ideas on how to apply them! This is great!  Is there anyplace you have posted those generic inquiries so we see how you've implemented some of this cool functionality?  I think that would add a great deal to the broadcast if we could really see the how and not just the what.

And sorry Carl, but I strongly hope that's not the path they choose to go down. Business software can be a real scummy industry and Acumatica mirrors, or at least gives the impression, that it follows some of those industry bad practices.  'Red Flags' probably best describes our initial impression of Acumatica.  The community needs to decide if their goal is 100% about adding value to the experience of using Acumatica software, or if the goal is extracting money from the customers who use or potentially use Acumatica software.  I hope most of the partners think those are the same goal, but you are fighting an uphill battle and the impressions it gives to the end-user.

But I am and end-user and understand every business has to think about that stuff..we do! I just always think of the millions of small business who are sticking and struggling with QuickBooks because of how horrible and frustrating the ERP sales experience is without a dedicated IT staff.  They've been overpromised and squeezed before and only a lively community of free, no strings attached, technical help (like Tim has been doing for years) is going to convince them to try again.  Sorry, minor rant over 🙂

Really great content. Not an idea for a talk, but is there a method to submit questions in advance? I have a scheduling conflict with a BI training and your next BI/Excel (presumably ODATA) live event. I recently created a Inventory report that looks at Issues and Returns and transformed the 'Returns' to a negative in PQ in Excel so our field staff could review Inventory compared to our Project Inspection Sheets. Works fine for me, but when my users open it, they are prompted to setup the ODATA connection again and data wont refresh.

For Reporting Party on Thursday -

Report One: Profit and Loss report that looks at the 'Balances' Actual Amount fields in Projects (so not WIP data) that: 1) Allows for multiple selections of Projects, 2) Returns data broken out by each project, 3) Then sums those projects, 4) Allows for specific date range filtering. Context: We are a non-profit 'construction' company. Many of our projects are grant or agency funded. We need to be able to report back to the funders P&L across specific projects, sum up the overall P&L and report on specific date ranges. We were promised this report over a year ago and our support company hasnt delivered. Acumatica has said use the ARM reports, the support company said to use the Report Designer style reports. I have tried to get it to work in BI, but having some issues with breaking out each Project, then summing them in the same report.

Report Two: We use progress billing - we need a Pro Forma and GL Invoice that invoices on qty and allows for free-text. I have gotten close with report designer, but my qtys only work at 0% complete or 100% complete. So no partial qty.