Toughbuilt Automates Sales Order Processes with docAlpha

docAlpha eliminates manual data entry and document handling, streamlining routing, approval, transaction entry and vendor payments

The Challenge

As Controller for Toughbuilt, Martin Galystan was tasked with finding a better way for the Burbank, California-based manufacturer of gardening equipment to handle customer sales orders in a way that scaled as business grew. Founded in 2012, the company designs and manufactures tool belts, pouches, belts, knee pads and accessories distributed through major hardware retailers, including Home Depot and Menards.

Its growth since its inception created an urgency around scaling back office business processes to keep pace with business growth of 30% per year, on average.

To manage that growth, Toughbuilt adopted the Acumatica Cloud ERP system. It gave them the right tools to handle the job of managing data across the organization.

But, according to Galystan, the company knew it needed to complement its ERP system with intelligent process tools that would make the most of its small but growing workforce.

With 40 total employees, Toughbuilt wanted to maximize resources as it grew. Empowering its current customer support and sales operations team to tackle sales orders in a way that didn’t require continued expansion of its staff just to sort through sales orders and enter data was part of that strategy.

“Our focus for phase one is to tackle sales orders and cut down on data entry time,” Galystan said, “With 30 to 50 lines items per order, it can take 15 to 20 minutes to handle one of them manually.”

That’s when Galystan and members of his team attended the Acumatica Summit and discovered Acumatica partner Artsyl Technologies, their docAlpha transformation platform and the OrderAction intelligent process application.

The Solution

While Toughbuilt is in the final test stages before becoming fully operational with OrderAction, implementation, testing and outcomes to date have been very promising, according to Galystan.

“Now, with OrderAction, it takes two minutes max to get our sales order information into Acumatica,” Galystan said, “We cut down on a lot of wasted time for our workers to input sales orders.”

With 400 orders to be processed in a given week, Toughbuilt stands to save a tremendous amount of time and effort on sales order processing, so they can spend more time on reporting and analysis.

Beyond time savings, the fact that OrderAction delivers accurate data to Acumatica in a more timely fashion means that they can make better business decisions.

“Now, with Acumatica and OrderAction, we can automate the delivery of dashboard reports to our CEO, providing data and insights in real time,” Galystan said.

In terms of making a business case, Galystan suggested that ROI for implementing OrderAction is expected to be achieved within a year of implementation.

“Compared to hiring an additional staff member, OrderAction pays for itself within a year, with the added benefit of faster results and more accurate data,” Galystan said.

Data accuracy is both a function of eliminating manual keyboard entry, but also integration with Acumatica to validate any data extracted from sales orders again ERP system customer records.

As a result, Toughbuilt’s sales operations team will be able to keep up with sales orders, even as the company grows and the volume/velocity of business increases.