“I recommend aACE to any company that wants to have better control of their major workflows, especially finance.” –Michael McManus, IT Manager, Closet Works
Closet Works is a family-owned custom closet manufacturer located in the Chicago area. For over 30 years, they have produced and sold custom closets both directly to local consumers and nationwide through wholesalers and resellers. Despite being experts in organization, behind-the-scenes they were working with a mess of old databases that didn’t talk to each other. That’s why they turned to aACE in 2015 – and why they’ve been continuously refining their solution to better optimize their workflows ever since.
Before aACE, Closet Works had spent a decade working on their own custom FileMaker-based solution. It worked well for their unique design and manufacturing workflows, but didn’t handle accounting or inventory. For that they initially turned to QuickBooks, which didn’t communicate with their custom database. “Every order basically had to be entered in our system and [entered again] in QuickBooks,” says Michael McManus, the IT Manager at Closet Works. “It was a huge amount of duplicate data entry.”
Though Michael joined the Closet Works team after they had already gone live with aACE, he’s personally witnessed steady improvements over the years as they’ve continued to customize and adapt their aACE solution. “Since I got here, our finance and customer service teams have probably saved 20% of the time they used to spend,” he says.
Closet Works built a robust production solution tailored to their particular workflows. But disseminating data from their shop floor to the rest of the business was a headache – until aACE came in.
aACE seamlessly integrates with their custom FileMaker production system, enabling their production users to save time by automating much of that data transfer. “The production side of things is primarily oriented towards our CAD department,” Michael says, explaining the division of labor between the two FileMaker solutions. He notes that while it’s easier for the designers to continue using their production system, “The automation is key, because the proposals and estimates move back and forth” between aACE and the production system.
He adds that it’s essential for the information moving between the two solutions to be complete and accurate. aACE’s automation helps to ensure this level of quality. “When we sell an order, for example, that order needs to have all its information collected and pushed into aACE. And at the same time, our CAD people have to push the material list and pick list into aACE so that we can do the inventory management.”
aACE’s serves as the nexus that unites Closet Works’ core workflows, giving them the best of both worlds – a production system tailor-made for them, and an all-in-one solution that unites all of their business processes.
Closet Works has three divisions – their main brand; the Columbus Design and Install wholesale business; and closets.com, their ecommerce business. Prior to aACE, each of these business lines were managed in separate QuickBooks solutions with no way to generate unified reports on all three. aACE enables them to manage all three business lines as separate offices in a single solution, giving them a full picture of their entire operations. “We can report on just one division at a time or all of them on a single sheet, which is what my financial people want,” Michael says. “It’s been very good.”
Closet Works’ orders can be as unique as their closets – some require deposits while others don’t, for example, just like some are shipped out to wholesalers or resellers while others are installed directly in customers’ homes. Fortunately aACE gives them the flexibility to manage each order appropriately.
To support these scenarios, Closet Works’ customer records in aACE include a deposit percentage and a credit card. When an order is processed by a customer service representative or comes in through their ecommerce store, aACE automatically charges the card on file for the deposit. If that charge fails, aACE auto-generates an email to the customer alerting them to the problem – and sends a notice to the shipping department to ensure that the goods don’t leave the warehouse until the deposit has been received.
Onsite installs follow a similar process. Installers use a mobile app to mark the project complete, which prompts aACE to run the credit card. If the charge doesn’t go through, aACE sends a notice to the installers before they leave the customer’s home so they can secure an alternate form of payment. “That automation and the simplicity of setting it up makes things a lot easier,” Michael says. “I don’t have to write custom code for each process I want to run or each email I want to send. I think those notices are probably one of the coolest things about aACE.”
Knowing which materials they have on hand and how much they have to work with is vital for keeping Closet Works’ production moving. Custom pick tickets sync data between their production system and aACE, so when employees pick something in the warehouse, the corresponding inventory is automatically depleted in aACE.
Once a job is finished, aACE records the cost of goods sold based on data pushed from the production system. “When we close a job out, aACE does all the cleanup,” Michael summarizes. This keeps costs and inventory levels accurate without requiring production users to interact with aACE.
Automation of this nature has helped the company scale. “It’s been really good in terms of getting the company moving forward as we grow,” says Michael, adding that they expect to see a growth rate of up to 20% this year. “And I think taking better advantage of aACE’s automation processes has allowed us to get here.”
In addition to integrating aACE with their custom production system, Closet Works has leveraged a number of aACE’s out-of-the-box integrations to extend its functionality. aACE+ AvaTax enables them to instantly and accurately calculate sales tax based on the precise location of each sale. Likewise, the aACE+ Mailgun email integration allows them to attach every correspondence with a customer or vendor directly to the relevant records in aACE.
The strongest example may be how aACE’s seamless shipping integration has proven integral to Closet Works’ operations. As Closet Works has grown, the aACE+ NRG integration has helped them keep up with the rapid pace of new business. “We’ve had a huge increase in orders, and our NRG integration has been really useful in getting it done,” Michael says. “I’ve integrated aACE and NRG with a mobile app so that our shipping team can take care of all their shipping workflows from an iPad without needing to log in to aACE or NRG.” aACE+ NRG takes care of processing the payment for the goods when the shipping label is printed, and automatically communicates with the carrier as necessary. Michael emphasizes the importance of the integration to Closet Works’ essential workflows in the field, adding, “I couldn’t have done that without aACE and NRG.”
Because aACE is built in FileMaker, it’s extremely easy for an in-house developer to learn and begin customizing. This was certainly the case for Michael, who had worked with aACE for about a year at another company before joining the Closet Works team.
“Working with aACE makes all of my development a lot easier,” says Michael. “In many cases all the pieces are already there. All I have to do is create a new flow for them or edit the script a tiny bit in order to have aACE do exactly what I want.”
One example is aACE’s email templates, which Michael has customized for several purposes in addition to the credit card notifications. Rather than creating an entire template from scratch, aACE makes it easy to repurpose existing templates with a few small tweaks. “I can just fill in the blanks with a couple lines of script rather than having to write out, for example, the subject line, from, to, and all of the other substitutions that have to be in place. I put in 10 to 15 variables and we’re off and running, and aACE does everything for me at that point.”
“The modularity of things like that has made my life easier,” Michael continues. “It’s made it a lot easier to customize aACE to give us features that we didn’t have before, or just to take advantage of out-of-the-box features in aACE that we weren’t using before. When somebody says, ‘Hey, can we do this?’ I get to say, ‘Yes, it’s right there.’”
Here’s what Michael had to say about the Closet Works aACE implementation:
“Every company I’ve worked for of this size has used something like QuickBooks to take care of their finances, so every transaction had to be entered twice. That’s one of the primary reasons I recommend switching to aACE.
“I’d also recommend aACE to any company who wants to upgrade from legacy order processing interfaces, which can be incredibly daunting to train for because they’re so messy. aACE makes it much simpler to create orders across the board and to create products. There’s great flexibility there.
“One of the biggest benefits is getting real-time data availability rather than just the historical printed-out reports that most people are used to working with. It’s great to be able to just go into aACE and see how much we sold in a day versus asking for a daily report.
“Honestly, if you need some flexibility in a packaged software that does most of the things you’re doing now in a better way, I’d say that’s what you’re looking at with aACE.”
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.
Editor's Note: Shortly after this success story was published, Closet Works was acquired by The Container Store.
Duggal Visual Solutions is a global supplier of printed visuals, custom displays, and multimedia solutions for a wide-ranging clientele of image-conscious brands. Since becoming the first company to implement aACE 4 in the spring of 2010, they’ve seen exponential growth — and so has aACE.
At aACE Software, we’re proud to say that our product has been developed through years of working hand-in-hand with our customers, evolving feature sets in line with their real-world workflows. Nowhere is this more evident than in our decade-long relationship with Duggal, an aACE Enterprise customer that has helped us enhance our offerings over the years while easily customizing their own aACE solution to fit their one-of-a-kind workflows.
When the team at Duggal began looking for an ERP solution back in 2009, they were a much smaller company of about 100 employees. Over the past ten years they’ve grown to over 4 times that number — and aACE has been with them every step of the way. “It’s been a steady climb up,” says Matthew Pelfrey, Duggal’s Director of Process and Compliance. “We’ve bought other companies and brought in entire divisions. And without very much onboarding attention, we put [those new employees] in front of computers and they work with aACE. It’s intuitive.”
“I would say that new users pretty much get it within a week,” adds Rick Jacobs, Director of IT. “I think they find it to be very easy to learn and to use.”
As Duggal has expanded, they’ve also added new locations across the country. From Oregon and California to Manhattan and Long Island, the entire business runs on one single aACE solution located in Brooklyn. This growth hasn’t been without challenges. “Our expansion into California has made tax accountability much more important,” Matthew says. To that end, he’s working with the aACE team on a customized aACE+ Avalara AvaTax integration. “I think that’s a big win.”
Another challenge that comes with the expansion to multiple locations has been ensuring that everyone who needs to can access the many large image files that Duggal deals with every day. Enter aACE’s File Server Folder Launcher feature, which gives users access to the files they need right from within their aACE solution. “Everything goes through aACE,” Rick explains. “We come in, we start up aACE, and we’re in aACE all day.”
Unlike many other solutions, aACE wasn’t developed by sticking some software engineers in a conference room and asking them to dream up features that might appeal to hypothetical businesses. Instead, aACE has evolved naturally over time by working directly with customers like Duggal to identify, automate, and enhance the workflows they use every day.
The Commissions module is a shining example of this kind of collaboration. As the aACE team built version 5 of the software solution, they made improvements based on requests and feedback from aACE 4 clients like Duggal. The result has been especially valuable as Duggal’s sales team has grown. “It’s been a real game-changer,” says Rick. “There’s been a six-fold or seven-fold increase in terms of how many sales reps we have,” and aACE has easily kept pace with that expansion.
Upgrading from aACE 4 to aACE 5 gave the team “the ability to calculate commissions on the fly, to calculate them at any point in time, to make changes, refresh, redo… There’s a lot more flexibility and accuracy in that report now than there ever was before,” he adds.
Inventory management was another area of the system that Duggal helped improve. “It was a huge jump forward in giving us a way to audit our inventory process,” Matthew says of the switch from aACE 4 to aACE 5. “We can actually push all that inventory costing and audit it down to the penny, down to each and every transaction. We can track who generated it, whether they put the right costing in at the beginning, and whether it changed later on. The logging is really robust.”
He adds that these tools were developed over time; the aACE team made improvements throughout the life of aACE 4 before pulling out all the stops in aACE 5. “We’ve done a lot of work together,” he says of his relationship with the developers at aACE Software. “The Inventory Counter app using FileMaker Go was something that we sort of built hand-in-hand, but we also don’t lock ourselves into a specific workflow. We use the Inventory Counter app for some inventory, but not all of it. It’s just simpler to count certain things in different ways.”
Due to the nature of their work, each project at Duggal is unique — and most go through a series of changes before they’re finalized and sent out to the customer. They needed a software solution that could support multiple workflows, giving their staff the freedom to structure each individual project in a way that makes sense rather than forcing them to conform to a template mandated by their ERP. With some customization, aACE fit the bill so well that even its own architect was astounded at what it could do! “Michael [Bethuy, President of aACE Software] was always fascinated — stunned, actually — at the amount of transactions we have in our system. It’s literally thousands every day,” says Rick. “As our own processes have changed, aACE has changed with us. That’s been very vital.”
And because aACE is built in FileMaker, it was easy for the Duggal team to seamlessly integrate other solutions with aACE, including a custom-built production solution. “The communication back and forth between aACE and that production system has been flawless,” Matthew says. “And that’s a big plus not just for aACE, but for FileMaker. Being on that platform has been key for our success.”
In fact, the FileMaker platform played a role in making aACE more attractive than the other packages they were looking at back when they began their ERP search more than 10 years ago — and that remains true today. “The vast majority of machines at our locations are Macs, but we also have printing equipment and financial people who prefer or are required to be on PCs. Having a solution that everybody could access was an important determining factor in our decision-making process,” Matthew explains. “We looked at NetSuite, we looked at Global Shop, and a couple of smaller FileMaker-based solutions, but nothing impressed us as much as aACE did.”
Because Duggal’s order management processes are so one-of-a-kind, it took some trial and error to find a solution that fit. For a time, they even tried developing a custom order-writing solution that would integrate with aACE’s accounting functionality. “We spent about a year and a half preparing that and trying to get it right,” Matthew says. “It lasted about a month and a half.”
As it turned out, the new solution was cumbersome and didn’t quite fit the bill. But, Matthew stresses, there was an upside to the failed experiment: “We learned what we needed through the process of building it from scratch. And we realized that aACE [out-of-the-box] already gave us 85% of that.”
In the end, they incorporated the elements of the new solution that did serve them well back into aACE as custom features. “That was a major turning point,” says Rick, which caused them “to embrace aACE even more and tap into its abilities. We had great people struggling to get through the day [with the custom solution], whereas they were not doing that before when we were on aACE.” Shortly afterwards, Duggal upgraded to aACE 5, which brought even bigger possibilities. “Every one of us was stoked about aACE 5,” Rick says. “That was a very interesting moment for the company. We realized how good we had it.”
aACE is a comprehensive business management solution powerful enough to support most businesses out of the box – but sometimes unique processes require unique solutions. One of the key benefits to building aACE in FileMaker is that any of the thousands of FileMaker developers world-wide can get under the hood and, with very little training, begin making the product their own. This has proven true for Duggal. “We’ve been able to use FileMaker itself as a platform to hire our own developers, which has allowed us to expand the software as the business expands,” says Rick. “We’ve been growing with it as the central launching point for all sorts of new initiatives in the company.”
The team at aACE Software has welcomed this growth with open arms. “The great thing about aACE and the people that work there is that they’ve always been there for our developers with any questions. They’re great partners, and they’ve never been closed-off. They’ve always welcomed us hiring new developers to work with the system; they want that to be a thing.”
Even Duggal’s in-house developers have been pleasantly surprised by aACE’s elegant design, both in front of and behind the curtain. “One of our programmers, Yelena [Teplitskaya], learned how to become a FileMaker developer while working in aACE,” Rick says, “And today she’s our go-to person for customizing aACE. She works extremely closely with aACE’s developers and she loves it. She thinks the structure of aACE behind the scenes is fantastic; it’s extremely professionally done. She loves the guidelines that have been given and the way that all of the scripting has been done.”
“aACE 5 was built so programmers could customize it,“ Matthew adds. It was built in a way so that programmers, with just a little bit of help, can do some really phenomenal stuff.”
He adds that Yelena has taken the lessons she’s learned from aACE and applied them to other endeavors because aACE has set the bar so high. “The experience behind the way aACE does things has taught her more efficient coding, which is a great thing,” Matthew says. “The more efficient every action is, the more efficient the system is. And Yelena is one of the smartest people we have, so for her to praise aACE really means something.”
The ease with which data can be imported to or extracted from aACE makes reporting a snap. One particular custom report is so robust that Duggal’s CFO dubbed it the Crazy Awesome Report. “It breaks out our entire income statement by department, by time period,” Matthew explains. “It gives the CFO a lot of information, and he regularly gives that report to the CEO, Mike Duggal, as his monthly report. It’s been tremendously helpful for Mike in making steering-the-ship decisions. And creating that report with essentially the touch of a couple buttons vs. how we were doing it, which was hours and hours of Excel work, has made a huge difference.”
Before implementing aACE, Duggal had been using Sage — and a lot of manual work. “When we picked up aACE, our inventory was being ordered using handwritten forms in triplicate,” Matthew explains. “Our accounting software was Sage, but our Controller did everything in Excel. Everything. And our order-writing software was as basic a thing as you can possibly imagine, so almost nothing was being captured. So what aACE has allowed us to do is become the company we are.”
After 10 years, the partnership between aACE and Duggal is still going strong. “We realize more and more every day how rare it is to have a partner that lasts,” Rick says. “Truly the longevity of aACE itself, to be around for 17 years in the software business is pretty amazing. Each company has been growing together, and I think that’s fantastic. There were some growing pains in the beginning, but I think the flexibility, the tolerance, and the understanding on both sides has only grown. We have a great partnership.”
“The flexibility of the system, the eagerness to improve on the part of the team at aACE Software, and the fundamental stability of the solution have all contributed to the longevity of the relationship,” adds Matthew.
Like every long-term relationship, there have been some challenges along the way. “I believe we’ve been a demanding client,” Matthew admits. “And the aACE Software team, over the course of many years, have been able to deliver on some pretty ambitious requests. We’ve been happy with the relationship for the duration.”
“The support has been phenomenal as well,” Rick adds. “Any type of urgent matter gets taken care of extremely fast.”
“Any relationship that lasts this long has to have a good foundation,” says Matthew.
Here’s what Matthew Pelfrey, Director of Process and Compliance at Duggal, has to say about their aACE implementation:
“aACE is a digestible midsized company solution that can grow with you. Or shrink with you, if you need to downsize. If that should happen, you’re not on the hook for some crazy-expensive system, and there’s a sense of comfort with that.
“I would be hard-pressed to find a company that aACE wouldn’t fit. The production elements of the system can be as rich and complex as you want them. So companies that are more in the true manufacturing world can operate within the system. It’s a true ERP with inventory management, serialization and lot tracking. It is robust.
“Obviously we don’t have too much of a problem saying good things about the situation we’re in. We’re happy to be partners with aACE, happy to share in our growth and share in their growth, and we can’t wait for aACE 6 and 7. Every update is welcome. The aACE Software team works really hard to give us features that are helpful. They are true solution-finders.”
Do you or someone you know need a change from one-size-fits-all ERP tools? Check out our feature highlights to learn more about whether aACE business management software for Mac and PC can help accelerate your company.
