American Infrastructure and Metalworks (AIM) is a metal fabrication company serving the precast industry. Founded in April of 2023, they recognized that they would need a comprehensive ERP software solution to manage their many moving parts. When QuickBooks and its plugins didn’t fit the mold, the AIM team turned to aACE – and found that much like their products, the aACE Complete Edition was actually a tailor-made fit.
Challenges & aACE Solutions
Demystifying the Cost of Goods Sold
Prior to founding AIM, much of its core leadership group had worked together at other companies, where they had encountered a variety of business management and manufacturing solutions. “We were using a couple of different systems,” explains John Phillips, President and CEO of AIM. “I’ve used IQMS (now DELMIAWorks), I’ve used SAP, E2.” According to John, switching to aACE “…has been very instrumental in being able to analyze productivity and our costs associated with each product.”
Calculating the cost of goods sold (COGS) can be one of the most complex accounting functions a business performs, and as John and his team have discovered, many solutions simply aren’t up to the task. Fortunately, aACE has robust tools that simplify this vital but often challenging workflow. “Now we can drill down on a specific product that we made on a specific batch and see what our margin was,” John explains. “Or we can evaluate an entire group of products that we made and analyze our production process. aACE gives us good financial data that’s traceable, which is a key component that allows us to do what we do.”
”Getting aACE to function the way that it is for us right now is something I’ve been dreaming about for probably 10 years in manufacturing,” John continues. “To get a system that could actually drill down on a specific product and see if we’re actually making money on it when we have such a wide variety of product lines. And it might be a one-off piece that we’re making, or we might be making 2,700 of the same part.”
“We’re also doing them at different production run times,” he adds, “So we might make 30 of one part and then two weeks later make 5 more of the same part, and then a month later we could make 87 of them. Now we can look at the data from all of them and get an average cost across the board of that one SKU so that we know where our pricing needs to be, because our pricing fluctuates based on the market and our costs. I’ve never had a system that allowed us to really drill down on the cost associated with a specific product like aACE does.”
Tracking Time for a Growing Workforce
As AIM began bringing on more staff, they realized that they needed a tool to track those employees’ time throughout the day. “QuickBooks didn’t do a very good job at all of managing our employee time and applying it to a job properly,” says John.
“I like being able to see day by day, employee by employee, what they’re working on,” adds Daniel Balderas, Operations Manager. “It’s intuitive, it’s easy to work with, it’s not very complicated, so it’s definitely easier to get more analytics and more data out of it.”
With multiple ways of tracking time – including timesheets, the Time Clock, and the Job Shop app – aACE makes it easy to know exactly what your staff is doing, when they’re doing it, and how long it’s taking. This enables businesses to make sound decisions about where to allocate resources and how best to grow their company.
Tracking the Life Cycle of a Product
AIM needed a way to track orders from the lead to the balance sheet – with a stop on the job shop floor. Fortunately for them, aACE was designed and built to do just that. aACE ensures that each project is easily trackable at every stage. And its inherent ease of use makes the first step, to set up new customers or update returning ones, a breeze.
“I think when it comes to setting up customers, aACE is really, really good,” says Yamid Phillips, Owner/Project Manager. “When creating leads and orders, the system is pretty user-friendly. I love the aspects where we can attach documents, and whatever I’m looking for is precisely there with the record I’m looking at.”
Yamid also appreciates how easy it is to see a quote’s status at a glance. “If I go to follow up on a quote and it’s in Pending mode, I know that we have not been awarded that job,” she explains. “So that’s an indicator for me to go back to the customer and find out what happened. And if it’s Open or Closed, that means that we did get the project and it’s either in the works or already shipped. It’s nice that I get a kind of red light/green light with that, so I can tell which quotes still need to be followed up on.”
aACE’s seamless integration between the CRM, order management, and production processes ensured that the order number would be passed into the production portions of the solution, keeping things more consistent. “I think the lifeline of the product, going from lead to quote to sales order and then becoming a fabricated product – I like that the number stays consistent,” Yamid says. “I’m not continuously looking for, let’s say, a different quote number versus a sales order number. That would ultimately get really confusing for our team.”
Results
A Tailored Fit Without Customization
Many of AIM’s products are made-to-order, and they take great care in ensuring that each piece they manufacture is a perfect fit for its destination. When it came to their business operations, they needed a solution that would function the same way.
AIM is using aACE Complete, the subscription cloud-based version of the solution, which doesn’t allow for customization. But because aACE includes many different configuration options out of the box, the AIM team still felt as though they had a system that had been personally tailored to their workflows. John observes, “Now that we’ve got it set up the way we do, it’s working really well.”
While no part of AIM’s aACE solution has been uniquely customized, they did have one challenge that required some developmental tweaking on the part of the aACEsoft team – and which resulted in an improved solution for all aACE customers.
“85 to 90% of our items generally need a separate production order generated,” Christina Easton explains. “[The aACEsoft team] assisted us with making it so that when aACE generates that production order, it has the same number as the sales order. That has been life-saving for us. In our previous system, I’d have to go track down the production order number, which was different from the sales order number. It was hard.”
This slight modification to the numbering scheme for separate-but-related production orders was a great idea that could benefit many other aACE users. Therefore, rather than having AIM switch to the customizable but costlier-up-front Enterprise Edition of aACE, the aACEsoft team incorporated that change into the next minor update of the out-of-the-box aACE system. This is just the latest example of what has always been aACE’s core strength – the fact that its developers work hand-in-hand with real customers to design and refine the solution.
The AIM team also had some complex reporting requirements, which aACE was fortunately prepared to handle. “Most of the rest of [the implementation] has actually just been reports. A lot of reports – a lot of very big reports – but every time I have a weird request for the aACEsoft team, they’ve been like, ‘Okay!’”
“We very much appreciate the support and the willingness to try to help adapt the system to our needs,” John adds. “We’ve only been operational for two years, but we have a large amount of finished good items – I think we’re over 7,000 SKUs right now of different product lines. And there can be 30, 40 different parts that go into each one of those. When you add in outsourcing, there’s just a lot of data in there to try and keep up with and keep organized.” John also notes that some of the additional reports that aACEsoft added “…made us capable of seeing a lot better information on the reporting side. That’s vital for us to make good decisions as business managers.”
“The additions that were made to the software at AIM’s request are additions that we felt all of our customers would benefit from,” explains Michael Bethuy, President of aACE Software. “Working with our customers in order to evolve the solution is part of our secret sauce. It’s not unusual that someone using the out-of-the-box software comes to us with something that is both minor enough from a customization perspective and major enough from a benefits perspective to add to the product on a minor release (non-integer version) basis.” That kind of collaborative implementation is what sets aACE apart from many competing solutions, and it’s what enabled the AIM team to have an entirely out-of-the-box solution that felt customized to their specific needs.
Increased Visibility into the Production Process
“The traceability of aACE in the way it’s set up for us now is life-saving,” John notes.
Like many manufacturers, AIM has a complex production process that includes many moving parts – including some steps that are outsourced off-site. This can lead to difficulties in knowing which stage any particular product is in at any particular point in time. “The Job Shop app makes it easier to tell which job you’re currently working on or what you’re supposed to be doing,” says Daniel. “We have some outsourced processes that need to go to either two or three places, and aACE makes it easier to keep track of what item is at what location.”
The CRM portion of the software also helps the production team track each project. “The way we build our product is in three to four pieces sometimes, so it’s a good thing to have [the finished product] with the same number as the sales order but also be able to identify the different components,” Daniel explains.
“One thing with us is, we have a lot of different products” with a lot of different components, John adds. “So for one product, we could have three or four different parts that are being put into that finished product that we’re producing. But then there are also the buy-out parts that we purchase. There are also sub-out parts, which we fabricate here but then they go out for coating, come back, then something else goes out for a different coating, that comes back, and finally we’ll assemble it all together.”
“And then there are different stages of time that we need to keep track of,” he adds. “Right now at the moment we have 250 line items being done, and each of those have between three and eight sub-parts. So there are quite a bit of items there that aACE is keeping track of.”
World-Class Support Based in Idaho
aACE is the backbone of a business’s operations, so when questions arise, it’s vital that users get answers as quickly and thoroughly as possible. That’s why the aACEsoft support team is based in our Boise, ID headquarters – instead of in a call center halfway around the world. “Personally I’ve been happy with aACE’s support,” says Daniel. “They’ve answered just about every question we’ve ever had, and they work with us. Good communication back and forth, even through email. The response time is good. They’ve been very helpful for us.”
“We’ve interacted with the support staff a lot,” says John – “And they’re very helpful for us very needy people,” interjects Christina with a laugh. John continues, “We’ve been very needy because we’ve pushed the system to do things it’s not used to doing.” With a support team that understands AIM’s unique implementation, any issues that come up are easily troubleshooted.
“I’ve been working with Shannon and Michael and Brian for a while, and they’ve always been super helpful any time I have a question,” Christina adds. “I really appreciate that I can get ahold of someone if I need an answer to a question. I’ve really appreciated how collaborative everybody [at aACEsoft] is and how helpful they are.
In Their Own Words
“I’m happy with it, personally,” says Daniel. “I’m very happy. It’s an easy system to work with, user-friendly, and it doesn’t take a lot to learn.”
“I really appreciate that you can attach documents to pretty much anything,” Christina says. “Journal entries, orders, all of the things – I really appreciate that. And probably in the near future we’ll be attaching certificates to orders.”
“The traceability, the ability to add documentation is amazing compared to other systems,” John adds.
Having experienced multiple systems’ onboarding over the course of their careers, the AIM team knows how difficult it can be to implement a new solution. That wasn’t the case with aACE. “Because we’ve done at least one or two system starts, we understand that it can be a little rough,” Christina says. “aACE was one of the easier ones to get up and running, especially since with some of the bigger companies you get [passed around to] different people. They have no idea about the processes you’ve been working on to get started, and they usually don’t really care.”“I’ve been looking for a system like this for 10 years,” John reiterates. “A system that can give me specific data on specific products and accurately tell me whether we’re making money on each individual piece. I’ve had solutions before that couldn’t do that. aACE really does give me true values and I really, really like it.”
Interested in learning more about what aACE can do for your SMB? Read our Feature Highlights to see how aACE can help you take your operations to the next level.
