Key Benefits
- Streamlined payment approval process
- Seamless integrations for industry specific needs
- Team can access in real-time from anywhere
- Trusted, strategic advisor
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In 1948, Henry Mast, Sr. arrived in Michigan U.S.A. from the Netherlands with a dream and $500. In 1951 he opened a colorful legacy that has been known to clients since 2003, as the Masterpiece Flower Company. It has grown into a multi-entity, industry-leading, still family-owned and operated wholesale greenhouse company that specializes in cultivating live plants, floral potted plants, and cut flowers, catering to both national and regional resellers.
Craig Fredricks, the Controller for over 35 years, was approaching retirement and wanted to make sure the business was set up for the future before he left. At the time, their Sage 300 system had been customized by Arris Consulting and was still working well, however it wasn’t keeping up with the times. Understanding the competitive advantage that cloud based ERP software brings, Craig and Greg Feather the CFO at Masterpiece Flower knew they needed a more modern solution.
Breaking Free From On-Premise
The biggest challenge Masterpiece Flower struggled with was managing its financials in a clunky and outdated on-premise system. Not only did they have to pay annual maintenance fees, but when Sage updates were released, the company found the updates were costly projects that didn’t bring a lot of value with only a few new features that truly benefited them. The upgrades simply weren’t worth their time or money to install them.
Hiring the Right Partner
With Arris Consulting as their long-time ERP partner of over 20 years, it was an easy decision to continue working with them. Masterpiece Flower was always very impressed by Arris’ strategic guidance, so when the company wanted to explore a new cloud ERP system, they didn’t hesitate to reach out for recommendations. Doing their due diligence, the Arris team researched system options based on the company’s needs and goals and came back recommending leading cloud based ERP software, Acumatica. Craig and Greg had confidence in their guidance due to their trust in Jeff and the Arris team across the board. Plus, Arris was already familiar with their systems & workflows and how Masterpiece Flower managed the intricacies of their business.
“We’d been working with Arris for years and they know our business. They know that we’re made up of multiple companies that use the software. I’ve had a good relationship with Jeff for years, and we decided together that since I was going to semi-retire, while I was still here, to move to the Acumatica platform. We had Sage before and even though we could use Sage as a software support, we always went to Arris for help because they would get things done. They knew that if you’ve got a problem, that it had to be fixed and in a timely manner,” recalls Craig.
Modernizing Financials in the Cloud
Acumatica, unlike other cloud solutions, provides the flexibility for customers to choose between SaaS or private cloud. For Masterpiece Flower, migrating to Acumatica was a key piece in their broader strategy to transition all business applications from on-premise to the cloud. With their custom application, MSync, managing growing operations and using EDI with major retailers like Home Depot and Meijer, Masterpiece Flower decided to deploy Acumatica, MSync, and PICAS (the grower app used by Henry Mast) in their private cloud. This decision aimed to streamline integration and centralize their key applications into one single platform.
Craig states, “That’s the way the entire industry is going, and our goal is to move away from maintaining servers or applications on specific workstations and move off physical servers to cloud-based servers.” Masterpiece Flower wanted a web-based solution so that everyone could access it from wherever they needed to work, whether that’s in the greenhouse, at home, or in the office, and they’re loving this benefit.
The Path to ERP Success
Arris’ implementation approach set Masterpiece Flower on the road to success. Craig states, “Arris got us to the endpoint when they said they would. In a project that size, to be able to say, ‘We’re going live this date,’ and then do it, and then it works – I don’t think that’s the norm. That’s an unusual thing.” The implementation went smoothly and with zero issues as Arris executed a seamless migration from Sage 300 to Acumatica. They skillfully integrated Masterpiece Flower’s payroll system and add-on solutions, like Cash Basis Reporting from Sprinterra and financial reporting by Velixo, allowing for a union of all their historical and KPI data, providing enhanced and immediate insights.
The transition was so swift that the Masterpiece team gained instant access to their comprehensive financial reporting. This enabled them to generate board reports immediately for in-depth real-time analysis, which was critical. “We all know new ERP implementations are challenging and I wouldn’t have wanted to do it without the Arris team. We had zero hiccups. It could not have gone smoother.”, Greg added.
The training on the new Acumatica solution was also smooth and straightforward and having the Arris team, true software & accounting experts, as their partner played a significant role in this. Haley Arndt, Corporate Accountant at Masterpiece, commented “The training was excellent. They would hold your hand if you needed it, but they could tell when you didn’t and train in a different way, which was nice”. Greg, CFO at Masterpiece Flower added, “Acumatica is so user-friendly and easy to use that with everyone on our team having a finance background, it just made sense.”
Powering Progress with Acumatica
One of the key benefits of implementing Acumatica is the way it’s transformed Masterpiece Flower’s check run process. “A big benefit is that the owners can now access the reporting and approve payments from anywhere. When the approved check is printed, it automatically adds their signature to it, so they no longer have to come in for check signing day. We don’t have to juggle schedules or change dates on checks because they came in on a different day. It’s just all done within the system, and they can do it from wherever they are,” noted Haley.
The Art of Tailored Financial Reporting
Masterpiece Flower was using Sage Intelligence with their previous Sage 300 system, which Arris had tailored a lot of financial reporting templates for. These reporting templates were maintained in Excel and allowed them to export critical financial information from Sage 300 and drop it into other reports for easier viewing. Although Acumatica’s cloud based ERP software offers multi-entity consolidated reporting capabilities, the team really liked the templates they were using and hoped to continue using them with the new Acumatica system.
They were thrilled that Arris was able to migrate these reporting templates from Sage to Velixo, so Masterpiece Flower could continue to pull real-time financial information from Acumatica and keep their reporting the same as what the team was used to. This seamless transition relieved Greg of a considerable amount of stress, especially considering the importance of these reporting templates to their operations.
“The fact they set it up according to how we asked, that makes their job and our job easier,” noted Greg. “For my benefit, it was having the financial statements be the direct replica of what we had in Sage, as that would’ve taken a long time for us to reproduce those. I was able to take the new Velixo reports and drop those into our usual workbook and it was pretty seamless to have that whole process complete. It would have been a lot more work [without Arris].”
Saving Time with Seamless Integrations
Masterpiece Flower uses the standard Acumatica import functionality for pulling in account receivable documents and payments from the PICAS grower application used by the Henry Mast Greenhouse entity and the custom application used by Masterpiece Flower entity. Acumatica provided a robust import functionality that enabled them to streamline and improve the import processes when compared to the same processes on the Sage 300 platform. Masterpiece Flower’s support calls went to zero on failed imports as soon as they were running on Acumatica.
Greg says, “There are a lot of things specific to our organization and we felt that Acumatica imported everything very well that we needed.” He continues, “We have a lot of things that go through another program that helps our company communicate with major customers like Home Depot and others, and we can interface Acumatica with that. That was fairly seamless, integrating into our homegrown system.”
Greg credits the Arris team for such a seamless implementation and for the success they continue to experience today. He says, “I would never have wanted to do this without Arris. We trust them implicitly”.
Nurturing Growth with Arris Consulting
The continued support and strategic relationship Masterpiece Flower has with Arris is instrumental in not only where they are today, but also where they plan to go in the future. Greg says, “They are our strategic advisors. We know that if we have an idea of something we want or need to get out of the system, they will find a way to do it.”
The Masterpiece Flower team’s embrace of Acumatica fueled by their strong partnership allows the company to streamline operations and scale long-term. If the team needs help in adapting to an industry change, a shift in offerings, or enhancing its competitive advantage, it can rely on Arris to provide smart strategic guidance. Haley explains, “Arris is really reliable. I reach out to Raymund, and he responds within an hour and has a solution within two hours, and that’s if it’s complicated. If it’s a smaller item, he has a solution even faster.”
Long-term success with Acumatica Cloud ERP is all about having the right partner. Greg concludes, “It’s a great day when we don’t have to talk to them. We can go months without connecting and that’s a sign of their expertise – things are running so smoothly that we don’t need to call!”