Sheoga Hardwood Flooring Takes Their Business to the Next Level with Acumatica

Sheoga Hardwood Flooring has been supplying its customers with quality solid and engineered hardwood flooring that it mills, finishes, and inspects in-house since 1982. A family-owned-and-operated manufacturing business located in Ohio, it employs a team of local, highly skilled craftsmen to help produce their American-made custom and prefinished hardwood flooring.

Though Sheoga was able to produce a beautiful, durable product for more than two decades, their growth was stifled with their reliance on Macola Technologies (bought by Exact Software in 2001). The outdated, disconnected solution delivered a host of inventory, sales, and accounting challenges, including a complete lack of operational visibility. Frustration with Macola and its inefficiencies led Sheoga executives to look for a new solution.

With the help of a consultant, they evaluated several ERPs, including Sage One, Oracle NetSuite, and Acumatica. The decision was an easy one: become an Acumatica customer.

“We like Acumatica’s ease of use, its flexibility, the setup, and ability to make changes to the system,” says Larry Yoder, COO. “It was far above what we had expected.”

Challenges Before Acumatica Success

Sheoga air dries its premium, furniture-grade lumber — harvested from the Appalachian region — for several months before kiln drying, equalizing, and conditioning it to a precise moisture content, storing the lumber in its temperature-controlled warehouse when the process is complete. Sheoga then ensures there are no defects and mills and finishes the lumber into its industry-recognized flooring and paneling product.

Unfortunately, the superiority of its manufacturing processes was not replicated by Sheoga’s inventory, sales, and distribution processes. Most — if not all — of Sheoga’s operational issues originated with Macola, including its inability to provide live inventory counts.

“It was not accurate and was always outdated. We were not consuming material until it was invoiced, and we were basically relying just on physical inventories,” Yoder explains.

Needless to say, working with outdated inventory fueled many inefficiencies.

“My biggest frustration with the Macola system was we had a tendency to always be late with sales orders because there was just no visibility, and there was just no tracking,” Yoder says. “All of a sudden, the order was due and there was nothing to trace it or to see that it’s going to be due next week. It was all just manual paper trails and that caused a lot of frustration.”

These manual paper trails resulted in inaccurate inventory lists, which meant the sales team couldn’t provide customers with order status information and orders were delayed. Accounts Receivable Manager and System Administrator Charmaine Kepes says salesmen sold product that was already spoken for because materials were not pulled from available inventory until they were invoiced.

But the challenges didn’t end there. Kepes couldn’t find or export data easily in Macola, which operates on on-premises servers. Salespeople couldn’t remotely access the system, so they called Kepes, who spent hours on the phone relaying what little information she had. She also spent hours creating new items in Macola, which were eventually turned into the quotes that were turned into handwritten orders walked to the shop floor.

It wasn’t uncommon to lose production orders, and the shop floor had to tell office staff when an order was complete. In addition to these continuous challenges, Nic Farrant, CFO, says the company’s reporting was created manually from multiple exports.

“Macola was by far the hardest that I’ve ever worked on trying to dig out information from the reports and each time that I needed something different, I would have to go to either Charmaine or we would even have to go to an outside source to help us create a new query.”

From Frustrated to Fulfilled with Acumatica

Deciding to implement Acumatica Manufacturing Management Edition was the beginning of a new era for the company. Sheoga implemented Acumatica with the assistance of its technology partner, Acumatica gold-certified partner Parallel Solutions.

“Jeff and Laura understood Macola, so they were able to take our databases and import a lot of information. It wasn’t that we had to start from scratch with data entry; they were able to pull in that information,” Kepes says.

The expert implementation resulted in transformational benefits, including access to accurate data. Says Yoder, “With Macola, nobody trusted the system. Going from Macola to Acumatica, there was a transition period where trust had to be earned. They had to use it, they had to be a part of it, and over a period of time, they realized these numbers were accurate; we can trust them.”

In addition to acquiring trustworthy data, the Sheoga team also:

• Gained real-time visibility into inventory, eliminating manual physical counts and enabling tracking of raw materials.
• Improved inventory management, providing in-stock and replenishment data while lowering inventory levels by 40 percent.
• Replaced Macola’s challenging Bill of Materials (BOM) with Acumatica’s real-time, easy-to-use, and customizable BOM, improving operations and providing critical KPI data.
• Streamlined, formalized, and automated shop floor operations.
• Acquired Acumatica’s product configurator that provides insights into top products by wood type, size, and stain color; proper pricing for all options and item numbers; and automatic transfer to a Bill of Material, ensuring inventory is updated for each order.

Implementing Acumatica’s manufacturing ERP has made a world of difference in how Sheoga operates. Not only have they gone paperless, but month-end closing and invoicing is much faster.

“If a customer calls and asks for a copy of an invoice, it’s very easy to actually send them a copy,” Kepes says. “I can just go to the invoice and hit forward or send. In our old software, I had to pull the invoice out of the drawer, scan it, save it, and then forward it from my personal email rather than from within the software. So that’s time that has been saved.”

She adds: “When a customer calls and asks, ‘How much do I owe?,’ I can pull up an aging in two clicks. It used to take me a few minutes to get to the right screen to get to the right information. Now I can just do it in two clicks.”

Kepes has also cut her accounts receivable (AR) aging duties from days to minutes.

“There was no statement function within Macola,” she explains. “Mid-month, I used to take half a day or longer to review the AR aging, determine which customers were past due, pull up the customer, print the aging, scan to a computer file, then attach the scan to an email to the customer. Sometimes it would take me two days to review and print. Now, I use the Statement function within Acumatica, and it takes me five minutes to prepare and send or print.”

For Yoder, inventory management is one of the biggest improvements, from seeing true inventory levels (which includes not having to manually enter inventory into Macola, nor waiting to do so after the kiln-drying process) and creating their own shipping dashboards to mobile access by all team members.

“Now that we have Acumatica, I’m able to literally work from anywhere. Just last week the owner called and asked a question. I was on the golf course, and I was able to pull up my phone and give him the information he wanted,” Farrant says.

Solid Future with Acumatica

With Acumatica’s user friendly cloud ERP solution acting as the subfloor of its operations, Sheoga has improved customer service with real-time data and an easy-to-use, intuitive data search system (that saves employees’ time) while reducing the amount of office staff needed to process data, lowering labor costs, and improving inventory management.

Ultimately, production is up, improvements are ongoing (e.g., Sheoga is working with Parallel Solutions to implement Acumatica’s CRM application), and Acumatica’s benefits are adding up to a solid future for Sheoga.

Says Yoder, “We have ambitious growth plans that we would not be able to have without Acumatica.”

Do you have ambitious growth plans for your manufacturing company? Acumatica’s team of experts can fill you in on how Acumatica’s manufacturing ERP software can grow your revenue, not your headcount and ensure a successful, profitable future.