For over 20 years, MediPurpose Inc. has been a leader in the medical device space, creating sharp instruments that prioritize safety and comfort for both doctors and patients. Yet while their products are revolutionary, they found that their old business management solution was anything but. After nearly 15 years on NetSuite, the MediPurpose team wanted a change from the inflexible processes and impossible-to-reach tech support. They switched to aACE – read on to learn why they’re so glad they did.
Challenges & aACE Solutions
Finding Better Support
As NetSuite users for many years, the MediPurpose team was well-versed in the solution’s ins and outs. But when they did have a question or needed help solving a problem, answers were hard to find. “When I first joined the company, we’d been using NetSuite for the longest time – more than 10 or 15 years, I think,” explains Cheryl Yi, Vice President at MediPurpose. “The features were mostly user-friendly, but whenever we would reach out to NetSuite [or third-party] support about any errors, defects, or problems, they just weren’t responsive at all.”
MediPurpose had been assigned a NetSuite partner, a third-party organization ideally meant to provide closer one-on-one support than NetSuite could offer themselves. It’s not an uncommon model in the software space, and under the right circumstances it can work well. In MediPurpose’s experience, however, this often led to confusion or even dead silence. “Our NetSuite partner had no clue about the technical stuff, so we were mostly just lost,” Cheryl says. “Every time we had any small issues we just had to work around them ourselves.”
That lack of support made the annual price increases increasingly hard to swallow. “The worst part is, you get so used to their system and then every year they raise the prices,” Cheryl continues. “After a point, it becomes unsustainable.”
Since they were already used to providing their own workarounds, the MediPurpose team began looking for a solution that was inherently customizable. Patrick Yi, the company’s Chairman and CEO, focused on FileMaker – and through them, found aACE. The difference was like night and day. “The people we work with and the support we get [from aACEsoft], more than anything, has made it a good experience,” Cheryl says.
Drop Shipping Improvements
Some of MediPurpose’s products are drop shipped directly from third-party suppliers to their customers. In NetSuite, that workflow became a pain point on the Accounts Payable side that required workarounds. “If I recall, the drop ship feature that we used in NetSuite was designed for us to drop ship to end customers,” Patrick says. “NetSuite didn’t have the drop ship part of the purchasing side. By that I mean getting our supplier to drop ship a product to our customer, rather than us drop shipping to our customer’s customer. Either there’s no such drop ship feature in NetSuite, or we never found the right feature to use.”
“We just pretended it was another warehouse,” Cheryl adds, explaining that they had to mark the inventory as received and then shipped out again in order to account for it in their system. “We just ‘received’ the inventory and then we ‘sent out’ the inventory” without ever physically possessing it.
“This is a new feature that we have now in aACE,” Patrick continues. “And now we’re taking it a step further.” After using the functionality for some time, MediPurpose found that they hadn’t set it up as efficiently as they could have. “Because we didn’t use something like this in NetSuite before – so the first time we were using it was in aACE – we realized that the way we were using it wasn’t quite right for us from the accounting side of things,” Patrick explains. “Manually we had to do a few things to make sure that the process went well.”
That’s where the aACEsoft team stepped in. “I’m always asking myself, ‘Why can’t the system think for me and do it for me?’” Patrick says. “So along those lines, we started thinking about how this could be automated in some fashion. There were already some tools in aACE to allow a purchase to automatically initiate an invoice, but we wanted it the other way around – for an invoice to initiate a purchase.” He took that idea to the aACEsoft team and they ran with it, collaborating with MediPurpose on a feature that is currently being tested. “So this is a good example of a function that was not there in NetSuite,” Patrick concludes. “We started using it in aACE, we found that there were certain gaps, and aACEsoft was willing to do the necessary modifications.”
Lot Tracking Inventory Improvements
As a manufacturer of medical supplies, tracking inventory lot numbers is a vital part of MediPurpose’s operations. But while NetSuite has the capability to do that, the MediPurpose team was never able to properly utilize that feature. “We had lot tracking, and we had even enabled a feature that required users to enter a lot number when processing sales orders,” Cheryl explains. “But we ran into an issue where there were a lot of errors because the warehouse had somehow messed up the lot numbers, so there weren’t enough lot numbers to send out. We had to roll back that addition in NetSuite because of that.”
Fortunately, aACE’s robust lot-tracking feature is fully integrated throughout the sales, inventory, and shipping modules, with a user-friendly interface that promotes accuracy. “We had that data in NetSuite but then we had to remove it,” Cheryl says. “But now we’re doing it in aACE and we haven’t had any problems.”
Results
A Browser-Based Solution for a Multinational Company
With a footprint that stretches from the Americas to Singapore, MediPurpose needed a solution that could follow them anywhere. “Our main market is in the U.S., but Patrick, Adeline [Yi, Vice President] and I are all in Singapore,” Cheryl explains. “Our company is remote across the world. We also have an employee in Florida and a customer service representative in El Salvador.”
When MediPurpose first implemented aACE in 2021 they were using version 5.0, which was available as a desktop application; this worked well for them at the time because they were based in the United States. But the release of aACE 6.0 brought with it a new browser-based version of the solution, which became crucial for MediPurpose as their executive team relocated. “When we moved to Singapore, that meant that our resources were spread more evenly between the U.S. and Asia,” Patrick says. “That’s when the browser-based version, which we have now with aACE 6, became very important.”
True Flexibility for a Tailored Fit
After spending years working around NetSuite’s rigid workflows, Patrick and his team were looking for something that could be more easily tailored to their unique processes – without the cost of a fully-custom solution. With a robust out-of-the-box feature set and near-endless flexibility under the hood, aACE proved to be the perfect middle ground.
“A system like this is like a house,” Patrick opines. “You never have a perfect house – you start living in it and you find things that make you think, ‘You know, if only I could have it this way and not that way. I would rather have this, not that.’ And so it’s the same thing with any system like this, including aACE. The problem with NetSuite was that we obviously also felt like that, and we wanted to do things differently. We tried to explore within NetSuite how we could use it with certain configurations, but after a while we basically got stuck because there’s only so much we could do within certain confines.”
“With aACE,” he continues, “If we get stuck we just call aACEsoft and say, ‘If only we could do this.’ And many times the aACEsoft team’s response is, ‘You know what, that’s something our other customers might want to do as well. Can you help us design this functionality?’ And they’ll either customize the solution for us or roll it out with the next version of aACE or the next Maintenance release.” In fact, many of aACE’s features were developed hand-in-hand with customers to solve real-world business problems.
“That’s good because the software is always ever-growing,” Patrick says. “It’s moving forward with new functionality that we need or would like to have. And it’s either rolled into a new release or customized for us – at a very reasonable cost, I must say, and in a reasonable amount of time. That never happened with NetSuite.”
Automated Lead Management
One example of aACE’s flexibility can be found in MediPurpose’s lead management workflow – something Patrick cites as one of the biggest improvements to come out of his company’s switch to aACE from NetSuite.
When a lead comes in through MediPurpose’s website it automatically flows into their aACE solution, where it can be assigned a pre-determined list of tasks. “That was done through an integration in aACE and a little bit of programming on my side,” Patrick says. “That’s a big part of why we went to aACE: having the ability to do the necessary small programming to have features like this. That wasn’t possible in NetSuite. It was strictly out-of-the-box.”
While aACE’s out-of-the-box lead management engine fit MediPurpose’s needs better than their old solution, it still didn’t quite fulfill their exact requirements. After years of frustrating workarounds, Patrick was pleased to discover how easy it was to bridge those gaps in aACE. “The leads management workflow out-of-the-box was better than NetSuite, but as we started to use it we realized that we needed further functionality,” he explains. “That was part of the customization that we did.”
“There was already a functionality in aACE called Tasks,” Patrick continues. “You could link tasks to leads and even set up groups of tasks. So when a lead comes in, aACE can populate it with a Task Group.” Because MediPurpose offers two different product lines with their own distinct follow-up workflows, they set up two Task Groups. aACE automatically selects the correct one and attaches it to a lead based on how the lead is coded. This ensures that the MediPurpose team can immediately see the correct next step for each lead they receive.
In Their Own Words
Here’s how Patrick Yi, Chairman and CEO of MediPurpose, feels about his company’s aACE implementation:
“There’s always a balance between out-of-the-box functionality and customized functionality. When you go back 20 years ago, in terms of making your own software exactly the way you need it, there was bespoke software or out-of-the-box packages and you could either have one or the other. You could not have the benefits of both. It seems to me that we can have this in aACE. It meets, say, 80% of our functionality out of the box, and then we have that additional 20% that we can ask aACEsoft to add to the solution.
“Sometimes the aACEsoft team will say they can add a feature to the out-of-the-box solution, but it won’t be until version 7, 8, 9 – a long time away. If it’s just something that would be nice to have, we can wait and that’s fine. But if it’s something we need now, they can add it to our solution as a customization. So we actually have the best of both worlds: a bespoke out-of-the-box software. And we can contribute to its evolution into a better piece of software that benefits us and everyone else using it, or we can have it tailored to our requirements right now. I think that’s one of the key benefits of aACE.
“I think the most important thing to us is that we like the team. We’ve worked with many of the aACEsoft people now and all of them are very professional and very proud of the work they do in aACE. I think that shows in the way they communicate with us, and in the products and services they offer. So we appreciate that very much.”
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.
