Aabaco Plastics has been manufacturing flexible plastic packaging since 1952 – and until recently, they’d been running their business on the same SQL database since 1998. When that solution was discontinued in 2022, co-owner David Lee saw an opportunity to not only upgrade Aabaco’s software, but revolutionize its operations. He partnered with aACE to do just that, and here are the results.
Challenges & aACE Solutions
Unsupported Legacy Software Causes Distraction from the Core Business
As a small, family-owned business, Aabaco didn’t have many affordable options when they transitioned away from running their operations on MS-DOS in the late 90s. David settled on a SQL database with a Microsoft Access front end, and learned to code himself in order to make it work. “I’m the only IT-savvy person in the company, ” David explains, “So it was my responsibility to figure out what software we were going to go to after we left DOS. I had found a solution that was relatively inexpensive, but the basics of it were written by programmers, not business people. So there were a lot of things that you need to do in business that you couldn’t, because the programmers hadn’t thought of it.”
David largely supported the software himself, adding features and managing bugs to the best of his ability. “Every time Microsoft updated Access, certain things in the code broke,” he recalls. “For years we couldn’t use the calendar feature because they changed it and I would have had to go in and find every single calendar to update the coding. So there were all kinds of little glitchy things.”
Eventually, David went to the makers of the software and asked to upgrade. This turned out to be a time-consuming dead-end. “We worked on it for a year,” he says. “They dragged their feet. And then the company was bought and [the new owners] discontinued the software altogether.”
With a year’s worth of work down the drain, David was left with no choice but to search for a new solution. He looked at twelve software packages altogether before narrowing down the list to three – including aACE. “I was looking for something that fit our budget, that could be learned relatively easily,” David says. “I narrowed the list down to three and then talked to the staff at all three companies. It really became clear that aACE and the aACEsoft team were going to do the best job for us. And so we made the commitment, and it’s been wonderful ever since. The process has been good, the team has been great, and the software is everything we could have asked for.”
Siloed Information and Disconnected Data Entry
Like many of our customers, Aabaco had been relying on multiple separate solutions to run their business before finding aACE. “The biggest problem [with our old software], aside from the glitches, is that there was no integration,” David says. “Nothing was linked. For example, you couldn’t attach anything to an order or a purchase order. And our quotations were totally separate from the software. We were basically doing our quotes in Excel and then manually transferring all the data from there into the system. It made our workflow horribly slow.”
Even the simplest of projects turned into time-consuming headaches thanks to these data silos. “Let’s say we were working on a printed plastic bag,” David explains. “If you wanted to find the art file, you had to get out of the software, go to an art file library, find it, look at the art, try to remember what you just saw, and then get back into the software to do whatever you needed to do. ” All of this manual back-and-forth was frustrating for Aabaco’s staff, and it invited errors as users had to key in data over and over.
“None of these tasks were miserable by themselves,” David says, “But when you add it all up, we spent hours and hours each day” on menial work and endless follow-ups. “And then I’m not involved in things that would move the business forward, make us more money, make us better and faster,” he adds. “And the funny thing about it is, we have a reputation in the industry for having some of the best technical knowledge. We’re known for cutting-edge technology and know-how when it comes to our products and the resins and the equipment that’s used – all of that. Yet we were so far behind in software that it irritated me personally, as one of the owners of this company. Now that we’ve switched to aACE, it’s like going from a horse and buggy to a Ferrari.”
A Sales Department Operating Off Legal Pads
With no other way to track customer interactions, Aabaco’s sales team resorted to using paper and pen to keep tabs on their pipeline. “aACE has the Leads module, which is fabulous,” David says. “Before aACE, we had nothing like that. All of my sales people sat with a legal pad. They had to write everything down, then create a proposal in Excel, and then copy it into the software. It took a lot of time, and there was a lot of room for error.” Answering basic questions required navigating an information labyrinth.
“There was also no emailing from [within] the old system,” David notes. “We would have to save invoices as PDFs, open Outlook, and then write separate emails for each and every one.” And once an email was sent, there was no way to track the results of the conversation. “There was nothing that told you what the status was or that you were awaiting feedback or that you needed to contact the customer again,” he explains. “There was nothing that enabled us to figure out whether a lead was won or lost. Everybody had a written calendar book, and they had to make notes in it to remind themselves when to call someone.”
aACE changed all of that, ensuring that the Aabaco sales team can stay on top of their communications – and ditch the paper. “aACE has changed our ability to stay in contact with our customers, understand why we lost customers, and try to reestablish business that we hadn’t had,” David says. “All of that is a huge change for us, and all for the better.”
Results
A 40% Leaner, Less-Stressed Staff
All of that manual data entry and follow-up required a lot of man-hours. When Aabaco transitioned to aACE, they found that they could complete the same amount of work with a much leaner staff. So as employees left or retired, there was no need to backfill their positions, saving the company money that could be reinvested into the business. “Our office staff who handled that workload has been cut by 40%,” David says. As employees left, he adds, “Their workload was picked up easily, without stress. For our particular company, it was a quantum leap – a huge difference.”
And for the remaining staff, their roles became easier with aACE’s increased efficiency. “In our old system, every time we spoke to a customer we had to be sure to write it down in our daybook, and our daybooks were personal,” David explains. This meant that if a staff member was out sick or traveling, no one else could cover because no one else had access to that person’s list of customers and action items. “We weren’t optimizing our relationship with our customers,” he says. “We just weren’t.”
aACE fixed that, enabling Aabaco’s staff to track follow-ups, next steps, and deadlines in one place, so that everyone who needed to could easily access that information. “When you can do that easily, quickly, and without a lot of hassle, it makes it better for the customer because you’re staying in contact with them, but it also makes it easy enough for the sales staff that they want to do it,” David points out. “Making notes in a daybook and then making sure every morning that you look back at it and that you call at the right time of day or send an email at the right time – all of that stuff makes you less motivated. When it’s in the system and there are reminders and you can send an email with the touch of a button, I think it increases the staff’s motivation to stay in touch with the customers. And that’s proving to be true.”
If someone on Aabaco’s staff makes a mistake, aACE enables them to solve the issue in a snap. “Another thing I think is incredible about aACE compared to our old system is that you can fix any problem,” David says. “Any time we had a data problem in our old solution – for example, running checks and accidentally putting in the wrong number for the first one, meaning the number was off for every single check – there was no easy way to fix that in the software. We had to go into the SQL database, find all the relational tables that those numbers were in, and manually change every single one of them. It took forever. If we made a mistake on an invoice, we had to reverse and re-enter it. In aACE, all you have to do is go in and edit the record. That’s fabulous for us.”
Blind Shipping Made Easy
In the 70+ years that Aabaco has been in business, the plastics industry has changed dramatically. “Years and years ago, the business was more localized,” David explains. “Salesmen used to drive their cars over to us, pick up the product, and drive it to their customers. A lot of our distributors had trucks in the area. We sold in a five-state region around our facilities, and that was about it.”
“As technology and the industry started to change, we were able to expand nationwide,” he continues. “We do a lot of blind shipping and those kinds of things, and obviously the paperwork involved in that is critical. When we do blind shipping for a distributor of ours, it has to have their name on it. It can’t have ours anywhere. Everything has to look like it’s coming from that distributor. There was no facility for that in our old software, but aACE just handles it beautifully. Now for us to handle blind ships, it’s a matter of checking a box and maybe filling in one field. Everything else gets handled automatically. It looks great, it’s professional, and the paperwork that goes out is exactly the way it should be.”
And Aabaco’s customers aren’t the only ones who benefit. “It also helps our vendors, because our purchase orders are precise, accurate, and easy to read,” David explains. “They have all the information they need, and we don’t have to work hard to get it that way. That’s another efficiency in the workflow that makes a huge difference for us and for our vendors. We’ve always had very accurate purchase orders, but it took us a lot of work to do it before aACE. Now it’s a few clicks, and it’s wonderful.”
A Platform for Continuous Improvement
At the time of this success story’s publication, Aabaco has been live on aACE for about six months. That’s long enough to make a big difference in the company’s operations, but David knows there’s much more to the software than what he and his organization have implemented so far.
“We haven’t fully implemented the aACE+ Mailgun integration, but that’s going to be an amazing benefit for us,” David says as an example. “And the fact that aACEsoft is continuing to develop features and additional tools for that is exciting. We’ve just started to use it, and it’s almost miraculous. We use a lot of attached files. We need to have art files and technical data sheets and material safety data sheets, and all of those things need to be attached to orders and purchase orders and all kinds of things. To have it done automatically with the Mailgun integration, it’s a game-changer for us. Everything gets attached. There’s no room for error; it just happens. The basics of it are just fantastic, so we’re excited to see more.”
The Mailgun integration isn’t the only feature David is eager to implement; rate cards are also on Aabaco’s short list. The complexity of their specific pricing structure makes this feature both a challenge and a big, big win. “When we first started with aACE, we knew that figuring out rate cards for our particular industry and business was going to be the single most difficult hurdle,” David explains. “We’re at the very beginning stages of doing this, but the basic functionality of rate cards will make it possible for us to integrate pricing into aACE, which we were never able to do in the old software. We had to calculate it outside the system and then write code just to dump the numbers into the solution. With aACE’s rate cards, we’ll be able to have it all integrated.”
“Part of the problem is that our pricing for raw materials fluctuates monthly,” David continues. “It’s a commodity, so pricing is adjusted much more often than in many other industries. It’s all based on the price per pound of resin. So being able to make those kinds of changes en masse throughout the entire system should be another game-changer once we get it integrated. Part of the delay is on our end, because we know that this last piece is going to be the most taxing as far as our internal resources. It’s taking a lot of thought for us. But we’re getting there, and I’m confident that we’ll be able to implement it, which will change everything.”
As an example, David offers a hypothetical: What if the price of resin for a certain category of ziplock bags goes up by 5%, but the price for plain flat bags rises by 6%? In Aabaco’s customized aACE solution, they’ll be able to adjust pricing by category — something they’ve never been able to do before. “We used to have to do everything manually in Excel spreadsheets, line by line, cell by cell, quantity by quantity,” he adds. “If we had 100 sizes of plain flat bags, with six or seven different quantity breaks, every single cell had to have a separate formula, and it all had to be done manually. So you can imagine that time that it took, and the potential for inaccuracy. It was miserable.”
David has already been working with the aACEsoft team to customize Aabaco’s solution, ensuring it fits their precise requirements. “All the tailored customizations work fantastically,” he says. “So once we get rate cards fully customized, that’ll be another game-changer.”
In Their Own Words
Here’s what Aabaco Plastics co-owner David Lee has to say about his company’s aACE implementation:
“aACE is really helping us to become a modern company. Your software can hold you back, and we’ve been held back by the inefficiency of the old system for way longer than we should have been. Part of that was trouble with the previous supplier, but part of it was also that because we’re a relatively small business, we needed something that fit into a very specific budget.
With other solutions, any time you want to change something like a report or how something looks, you have to pay someone to do it. One of the great advantages of aACE is that as long as you have a basic understanding of coding, you can easily learn to take care of small items like that yourself. It’s just wonderful.
It’s very hard to imagine that a company could have more of a paradigm shift in how they operate than us. We went from something that was so inefficient and error-prone to having no glitches at all with aACE. It’s just a huge difference. The drill-down, drill-around capabilities and the listing abilities in aACE are just fantastic. The ability to get to literally any part of the software directly from the screen you’re on is one of the main reasons that I thought aACE would be the best fit for us. Getting from a lead to an order, from a purchase order to an invoice, or to any of the attached documents is so easy, logical, and consistent throughout the software.
The software is very easy to understand, which makes the learning curve much shorter. I’ve worked with big software like MAS 90, and the learning curve is substantial. It takes a lot to get it all. That didn’t happen with aACE. We did all of the tutorials. All of my staff, from Accounts Payables and Receivables, to my Controller, to my sales staff, to my customer service representatives, to my shipping and receiving people – everyone was able to complete the training, understand it, and use the system with very little required training from the staff at aACEsoft. That means that the training process, the knowledge library, and those kinds of things are obviously up to the task. That’s something that’s been wonderful for us.
The support we’ve gotten from aACEsoft end-to-end has been everything we’ve needed. With the previous software there was no help, and we had to figure it all out by ourselves. That’s non-existent here. The turnaround time for fixing things, tweaking things, making adjustments, or even just providing explanations about why something won’t work is just fantastic. It’s everything we could have needed. The aACEsoft staff is really, honestly, and truly motivated to help Aabaco Plastics be successful. There are plenty of people who will put that on a mission statement, but there’s a big difference between saying it and feeling it. When we talk to the staff at aACEsoft, we can feel that they’re committed to getting it right for us so that we can be as successful as possible. And that’s a relationship that can last a long time, that can be valuable to both of us. It’s the way business should be done.”
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.
