Onyx Racing Products manufactures custom bicycle hubs, wheel sets, and spare parts, with a list of inventoried items stretching into the thousands. Since 2011, Onyx and its parent company, Christianson Systems, have used aACE to manage their operations and streamline their workflows. Read on to learn why Onyx’s General Manager Daniel Orellana says that aACE saves his company “about 20 man-hours daily”.
Challenges & aACE Solutions
Launching a New Division
Christianson Systems manufactures pneumatic conveyor systems used by farms across the globe. Started by three brothers in 1979, the company was still operating largely with paper records when it was sold to James Gerhardt, who began looking to modernize its operations. He found aACE in 2011, and Christianson became one of the first companies to go live on aACE 4, the then-newest version of the solution.
Around that time Christianson saw an opportunity to enter the racing bike market, and Onyx Racing Products was born. First ORP operated as part of Christianson, but as the product line grew it was spun off into a separate division. Both scenarios bring unique accounting challenges; fortunately, aACE was there to handle it all.
“Onyx joined up with aACE under our parent company, Christianson,” back in 2011, Daniel explains. “Christianson Systems is an agricultural manufacturer. We make farming equipment to move grain, eggs, and any other kind of harvest across the farm and into the packaging facility, and we ship that equipment worldwide. aACE was an easy way to manage the insane level of bills of materials, production orders, purchases and things we have to make. Onyx was then created as a side business to get us into the cycling industry.”
As that side business grew into a separate division around late 2014, aACE’s multi-entity accounting features helped them keep track of finances for the two companies. “We use one system with all the same account numbers for both companies,” says Robin Amberg, Christianson’s accountant.
Using aACE’s Offices feature, Christianson and Onyx are able to separate out certain aspects of the two businesses as needed while still maintaining visibility into the bigger picture. “Our Christianson site is under one umbrella, and Onyx is under another,” Daniel says. “aACE’s accounting tools let us split everything and look at our margins, our labor overhead, and everything down to almost the individual employees.”
Even within a single aACE solution, the two entities can be managed differently according to their own unique requirements. “We don’t have the inventory features turned on for Christianson, so only Onyx’s inventory is managed in aACE,” Robin explains. “Sales are also tracked separately. Onyx’s sales post to a different GL account than Christianson’s. And if I need to, I can run certain reports on just Christianson or just Onyx.”
aACE’s other accounting tools help Robin stay on top of not one but two thriving businesses. “The Avalara AvaTax integration has been very good,” she says. “It used to take us longer to do the sales taxes and reporting because we had several different tax profiles built into the system. Sometimes we would find that the tax amounts were off because of extra local taxes we hadn’t accounted for. Now we’re down to just the AvaTax profile and it just posts the tax correctly. It’s been really helpful in doing the monthly and quarterly reporting.”
“Tax management through Avalara is a cinch,” Daniel agrees.
And because aACE is a full quote-to-cash solution, it’s easy for anyone in the company with the right access permissions to track down the information they need. “Robin handles most of the invoicing and bank reconciliation,” Daniel says. “One thing I’ve helped her with is the forensic side of it, when we have to figure out when an order was initiated versus when a payment was submitted and things like that. aACE links it all together, and anybody from either office can look back and see the payment application, where the inventory came from, where the purchase orders associated with that order came from, and see exactly how all the costs add up to the final invoice.”
Managing Complex Bills of Materials
When Christianson first implemented aACE, they were only using a fraction of the solution’s capabilities. “Originally, aACE was just storing item codes with prices attached,” Daniel explains. “Bills of materials were only loosely being entered into the system, so there was a lot of on-the-fly editing for every sales order we made.” When Daniel joined the team, he saw that aACE had much more potential. “When I came in for Onyx, we restructured the way that aACE was being used. We started using bills of materials, options and alternates, the packing and shipping tools, et cetera.”
But as Onyx began taking off, it required a new approach – one that aACE was easily able to accommodate. “Fast-forward a few years, and Onyx was spun off as a new division,” he continues. “Rather than being primarily larger, low-volume orders” like Christianson, the new company received “a very large volume of small orders with a lot of customization and a lot of variables in each order.”
Onyx’s success brought more complexity. “We very quickly began amassing a large number of line item codes that we were selling,” he says. With so many customizations available, rarely did two builds look alike. “Different variants meant that we could have up to 3 or 4 million options. aACE really came in handy with that because of its ability to handle all those bills of materials and house all the different variables attached to master assemblies.”
With so many choices, Onyx’s production orders can start looking more like a family tree. “We have a joke with the aACE Software team that we’re down to the fourth or fifth generation of grandchildren in our line items,” Daniel says with a laugh. “It’s actually impressive what aACE can handle. We’re up to 277 assemblies on the Onyx side. Within that, if you start adding the options together I think we’re pushing just past six million different variants of those assemblies.”
Luckily aACE was built for just that kind of complexity.
Daniel can’t help but marvel at the amount of data aACE is able to handle easily and effectively. “Our bill of materials can be six, seven layers deep,” he says. “We offer different options and alternates when it comes to size, color, volume – so 2,800 inventoried items becomes 200,000 variants that can then be put into our 277 master assemblies, and it just keeps compounding. It’s an insane amount of data that aACE is processing and managing for us, and it’s always been extremely accurate. We do our hard counts on inventory to make sure that things are being processed the way they’re supposed to, and so long as we follow our standard procedures as we put things through the system, we can account for every item.”
“I’ve worked with other, more manual systems for sales and inventory management, and they just don’t compare,” Daniel adds. “I’ve used Lightspeed, I’ve used Quickbooks, I’ve even used Excel spreadsheets. It’s just been incredible to see how aACE works.”
Duplicate Data Entry and Manual Hand-Offs
Before aACE, Christianson and Onyx operated based on manual order entry and task assignments. This process was slow and prone to errors. Says Daniel, “We’d spend our time entering the order, then we’d have to figure out what we had in stock by looking at the inventory numbers. From there we’d determine what we needed to produce and in which color variants. Then we’d manually assign tasks to our production staff using miscellaneous emails and note cards.”
All of that took valuable time out of the work day. “A large distributor-level order for us could be an hour of order entry followed by two to three hours of assigning tasks to our production staff,” Daniel says.
But aACE cuts that time dramatically. “Now the order entry gets done automatically through our WooCommerce integration, which probably cuts down about 75% of the time it used to take,” Daniel explains. “And as soon as we open the order, we’re hands-off. The inventory handles itself, and the production side self-populates and assigns it to our individual task groups. All of our production staff have gotten used to working off the Job Shop app on a tablet.
“So it’s a huge time-saver, and it’s improved our quality and accuracy,” he sums up. “We used to have numerous situations where we’d end up with a product that was the wrong color or the wrong item was colored or things like that because there was so much back-and-forth with four or five people handling the same order. Now it all just passes through aACE and it’s hands-off.”
On the accounting side, Robin has found that aACE has helped her streamline her own workflows as well. “I like the fact that you can duplicate records,” she says. “For a lot of my monthly adjustments or accruals, I can just duplicate them each month and just change the dollar amount or the amount of the adjustment. It’s nice that I don’t have to create a whole new record when I’m doing the same journal entries every single month.”
aACE’s payment processing integration has also helped Onyx and Christianson pick up the pace. “We used to have to manually enter all the payments for receivables,” Robin says. “It used to be a full-time job for the A/R person. Now we’ve got it down to just the Stripe and PayPal payments; aACE automates the rest. It’s gone from a full-time job to maybe 6 hours a week on average.”
Results
Speedrunning the Shipping Process
With orders coming in from around the world, Onyx needs a shipping solution that’s fast without losing accuracy. Enter the aACE+ NRG integration.
“We ship internationally, not just domestically, and we have a large volume of orders,” says Daniel. “Some of them are repeat shipments to the same customer. Some of them are drop shipments to end customers. There’s all sorts of stuff. But the NRG integration has really cut out about half of the time it used to take our shipping manager to manually process shipments, copy and paste addresses, and then handle the inaccuracies that result from using those methods. I’d say that alone saves us three to four hours every day.”
The time savings don’t stop once the shipment is created. “The beauty of it is that it’s also integrated with our email, so when we complete a shipment we’re hands-off from there,” Daniel adds. “aACE notifies the customer and gives them the tracking information while we move on to the next project.”
Scalable Solutions for a Growing Company
As Onyx has grown over the last 15 years, aACE has been there to support them every step of the way. Its digitized workflows and smart automation has allowed Onyx to scale its operations without needing to go on a hiring spree by ensuring the employees they already have aren’t bogged down in busywork rather than higher-value tasks that require a human touch.
“Essentially, across the Onyx division we’ve saved roughly 20 man-hours daily” by implementing aACE, Daniel calculates. “We have a lot of operations that pass through three or four individuals. We’re shaving four to five hours off of their workdays through the automations and inventory management and such.”
He notes that because everything from line item codes to task groups are already in aACE, there’s no more need for manual data entry with every project – nor the time-consuming error corrections that are necessary when employees are rushing to handle every detail the hard way. “We’ve essentially made it nearly 100% accurate and saved half a workday for each employee, which allows us to allocate their time towards other tasks,” Daniel says. “It’s made us quite a bit more efficient within our workspace.”
That efficiency has helped Onyx become more independent from Christianson. “When we first started the Onyx division, the owner and engineer were shared between both companies, and we had three full-time employees on this side,” Daniel explains. “Now we’re up to 10 dedicated full-time employees and only the engineer and myself are shared between the two companies.”
“As our sales volume has increased, all those little tasks that add up to creating our products have required a lot of management to be efficient,” he continues. “Instead of handling one order a day, we’re handling 30 or 40 – and in much larger volumes. And yet we only had to multiply our staff by three to accommodate an order volume that had increased 30-fold. So aACE has really helped mitigate a lot of the growing pains as we’ve integrated more and more of its tools into our workflows. And even now, I’d say we’re only using about 60% of what’s available to us.”
A Supportive Software Ally
Of course, any software solution is only as good as the team behind it. Daniel was just as quick to praise aACE Software’s staff as he was the solution itself. “One thing that stands out to me is the assistance we’ve received on setup,” he says. Because Christianson and Onyx started out on aACE 4, they’ve gone through two rounds of recustomization when upgrading to aACE 5 and aACE 6. While many aACE customers choose to skip an integer version (e.g. go straight from aACE 4 to aACE 6), Onyx and Christianson chose to implement the newest versions as they became available. Each time the aACE Software team worked hand-in-hand with their staff to ensure the new version did exactly what they needed.
That support has continued throughout the 15-year lifespan of Christianson and Onyx’s aACE solutions, with the two teams collaborating on additional customizations to continually optimize the software for their workflows. “We have some customizations in place for production order generation, and a little bit of customization in our invoicing for customers who have unique needs,” Daniel explains. “We also have some customization in our e-commerce integration for our SKU mapping and some unique characters that we have to account for.”
And when hiccups arise, the aACE Software Support team is right there to help. “The support time is great,” he says. “Typically when we send in a ticket, we get a response acknowledging it within a couple of hours. They let us know who’s been assigned and give us a timeline for when that person will get back to us. And the resolution to most of our problems has been quite rapid. Usually it’s within a day or two of that first acknowledgement – unless it leads to new customization.”
“Working with the aACE team is great, because they’ve been able to take what we think are very intricate or confusing workflows and give us guidance on how to streamline things,” he adds. “It’s been a very nice tool, having their staff on hand to help us. That’s a huge resource that I can’t quite quantify into dollars or time.”
In Their Own Words
Here’s how Daniel Orellana, General Manager at Onyx Racing Products, describes the results of his company’s aACE implementation:
“We use aACE for our sales team, our accounting team, our purchasing team, our inventory team, and our engineering team. Plus on the Onyx side we use the Job Shop App. On the Christianson side we have a lot of welders, cutters, painters, and the like who never look at a computer, but in the Onyx division pretty much everyone has some sort of digital footprint.
“aACE is quite impressive. It’s pretty amazing that it brings in everything from our e-commerce platform and puts it into an order that’s readable by our accounting, sales, and assembly staff. Plus it schedules all of our internal production and handles all of the inventory transactions. It really streamlines a very intricate process.
“I know there’s quite a bit more tools and features and aACE that we’re not using yet. We’ve started using the email integration, and we’re lined up to start using the Mailchimp integration for our newsletters. But it’s already made us so much more efficient.”
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.
