Spreadsheets everywhere
Costs by channel, SKU or customer account could not be reported.
Acumatica Manufacturing Case Study
How Portacool replaced a legacy finance system and its spreadsheets with Acumatica Manufacturing Edition.
About Portacool
Portacool has made portable evaporative coolers for more than 30 years, and it is the only U.S. manufacturer of its own evaporative media, sold as Kuul. Its coolers run wherever air conditioning is impractical, from farms and factories to NFL sidelines.
The Challenge
For years Portacool ran a legacy finance system that covered basic finance, purchase orders and sales orders. Data was exported to Excel, there were no dashboards, and financial statement data was retyped into a separate reporting package every month.
When demand surged during the pandemic, shipment times stretched from 40 days to 100, and the team could not see inventory or sales operations clearly enough to respond.
Portacool wanted one accurate, real-time view of the business before scaling past 5,000 units a month.
Costs by channel, SKU or customer account could not be reported.
Stock was counted with paper tags, then typed into Excel over four days.
Month-end results arrived only after the spreadsheets were consolidated.
A $600,000 invoice failed to send through EDI and went unnoticed for three months.
The Solution
Portacool chose Acumatica after evaluating Sage, Microsoft Dynamics and SAP. The deciding factors were its connections to other applications, screens each team could tailor, and cloud access for remote work.
Finance, manufacturing, inventory, warehouse and CRM run in one cloud system. Dashboards show production and sales in real time, with profitability by SKU, channel, region and customer account. Month-end close dropped from two weeks to two days.
Staff count stock with barcode scanners in an adapted Acumatica app, print a label, and see variances straight away. Counts that took four days now take less than one.
Lot and serial tracking follows each unit through production, with detailed costs by job, work center and item. When a customer calls about a part, the team sees the serial number, case history, bill of materials and revisions, plus the line, inspector, dock and truck it shipped on. Every unit can be traced from component to finished good.
Reports and alerts flag past-due accounts and failed invoices automatically, so collections are prioritized and a failed invoice is reissued the same day. Before, a $600,000 invoice sat unpaid for three months.
Inspection checks on five manufacturing lines are now electronic checklists, and documents are stored in the system. Portacool connected its in-house quality application through Acumatica's open API. Quality data sits with the rest of the business data.
Pacejet shipping, Avalara tax, the BigCommerce connector and SPS Commerce EDI all run on Acumatica records. Shipment processing is more than 40 percent faster with Pacejet.
The Result
With Acumatica in place, Portacool met demand from record U.S. heat waves and kept growing internationally. Its Kuul evaporative media now supplies data-center customers such as Microsoft and Amazon.
Automated financial reporting and a two-day close.
Real-time production data, MRP and engineering change control.
Barcode counts and automated inventory transactions.
CRM, case management and a customer self-service portal.