Modern businesses need modern solutions. Especially in the current business environment, where constant change is the new business reality, every action that you take needs to create value and do so in less time than ever. Whether you’ve watched the constant evolution of your business, your competition, and the industry as a whole over the past few decades, or are seeing the last few years of transformation, you already know that it pays to stay ahead.
How Software Keeps You Ahead: Benefits of Continuous Improvement
For those in the manufacturing and distribution industries, your success is based on putting the products in the hands of your customers, meeting expectations of quality, speed, and price—while working to keep margins in line.
As we recently discussed in our article on the most important things to look for in a distribution ERP, the right solution can help you improve satisfaction, reduce order to cash times, keep warehouses running efficiently, and result in a better understanding of costs. But like your business model, software can’t remain stagnant.
Vendors need to continually improve their offerings, and for one of our partners, Acumatica, this improvement comes in a robust, twice-yearly release of new functionality. These two releases, R1 and R2, come out each Spring and Fall, and provide users with major leaps forward. Updates come in the form of a push strategy and a pull one, with some coming in response to user requests and others created to keep Acumatica ahead of the competition.
New Functionality in 2020 R2: What’s Acumatica Delivering in Their Fall Release?
So, what’s being added to Acumatica 2020 R2? Additions to the software were, as the company puts it, designed around three areas: Helping users work smarter, not harder, powering growth with best-in-class functionality, and delivering technology leadership on a future-proof cloud platform.
Usability: Helping Users Work Smarter, Not Harder
Acumatica provides a modern and intuitive user experience to make it easier for you to do your best work. Already considered one of the most user-friendly and functional ERP platforms by Nucleus Research, Acumatica continues to make workflows easier, reduce the number of clicks needed to find something, and ultimately save time with improved functionality.
Focused on saving companies money by saving users time, Acumatica’s second 2020 release was built on offering a streamlined experience with a fresh, modern design, and usability unrivaled in the industry. Here are just some of the additions:
- AP Document Recognition: With previous versions of Acumatica ERP, if users received emails with attached invoices from vendors, they had to manually enter AP bills based on those invoices into the system. In the latest edition, Acumatica now offers AP document recognition to automatically record AP documents from vendor bills.
- Easy Access to Recently visited Records: It’s not just the time spent completing a task, but the time spent finding information as well. More often than not, you’re working in the same record relatively frequently, and Acumatica now keeps up to 500 recently viewed records at your fingertips. Pair this with pinned activities in the CRM functionality, and you have easy access to your data at all times.
- Address Lookup and Enrichment: Address data quality is essential for many business operations, and Acumatica has made it easy to find, edit, and set up addresses using Bing and Google.
- Query Join Suggestions and Previews: Building reports has always been easy in Acumatica, but 2020 R2 is making it even easier. In Acumatica ERP 2020 R2, several improvements have been made that affect generic inquiries and reports.
Functionality: Module by Module Improvements Focused on Specific Tasks
Acumatica continues to strengthen its best-in-class product functionality with mission-critical capabilities and productivity aids. From financial management enhancements to updates for manufacturing and distribution, Acumatica has worked to improve the reliability of information and the accuracy of data.
Features Coming to Financial Management
The core of an ERP solution, financial management is often the hub into and out of which data flows. Often the biggest focus area for the Acumatica solution, here are just a few of the largest improvements put in place by the development team:
- Easier Intercompany Sales: For years, Acumatica users have requested improvements to the intercompany sales process. A process that used to require accountants on both sides of a transaction to create an extra entity, R2 has streamlined this process and made it easy to sell between companies.
- Centralized Account Management: From improvements coming to credit card payments to better usability in bank transaction processing, information simply flows more effectively in Acumatica 2020 R2.
- Intuitive Bank Reconciliation: In Acumatica ERP 2020 R2, multiple UI and functionality improvements have been introduced to bank transaction processing to make it easier for users to process bank transactions.
Improvements Focused on Manufacturing and Distribution
Each industry edition gets new functionality added, and for those in the manufacturing and distribution space, the biggest improvements are focused on quality, payment processing, and validation:
- Smarter Production Output Tracking: Keeping track of output and quality is key to the modern business. Acumatica has worked to deliver, allowing users to track production outputs and get your products to market faster with an embedded third-party quality module
- Streamlined Payment Processing: Used by a variety of industries, Acumatica’s 2020 R2 release helps you reduce bad debt and simplify collections with streamlined payment and credit card processing.
- Bill Validation: In Acumatica ERP 2020 R2, a user can now configure the validation of the accounts payable bill details to be sure that the billed amounts and quantities do not exceed the original ones agreed upon with the vendor in the purchase order.
Learn more about the additional features coming to industry modules on the release news page.
Platform Improvements Built to Facilitate Future Enhancements
Built on a modular and adaptable platform, Acumatica is designed for the way businesses operate today and in the future. Its flexible architecture allows for low-code or no-code customization and sophisticated capabilities such as data visualization, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).
These enhancements not only help users today, but position Acumatica to offer more robust enhancements in the future. Here are just a few of the platform enhancements announced by the company:
- Leverage AI and ML to create AP documents automatically
- Modify workflows visually using our sophisticated visual state automation engine
- Unify notification workflows using our powerful business events engine
- Track real-time data changes with unified notifications using business events
- Utilize OData 4.0 to securely access data without creating generic inquiries
- Respond easily to standard dialog questions in Acumatica from your mobile device with mobile dialog box support
Making the Most of ERP Starts with the Right Partner: Get to Know Kissinger
These are just a few of the exciting new features available in 2020 R2. With a 300-page document filled with new functionality, improved processes and use cases, there’s no way we could discuss everything in this short blog. That said, if you’re in the market for ERP, there are few places better to look than Kissinger.
It can be a bit daunting to figure out how your business will make the most of all these capabilities. We can help. We have worked with many clients on the assessment of ERP needs and the resulting customized implementation of Acumatica.
