Kevins Worldwide is an in-house embroidery, screen printing, and promotional products company headquartered in Scranton, PA.
The 25-year-old company offers B2B and B2C customers fulfillment, distribution, warehousing and eCommerce web store management services.
Kevins hosts more than 40+ eCommerce websites for customers including Securitas, Universal Orlando, and Yards Brewing, which use the sites to internally let employees buy branded products and merchandise. Some customer websites are open to the public.
Kevins choose InfoSourcing as their Acumatica Certified Partner with experience in implementing Cloud ERP Solution for Print and Promotional Businesses, with their expertise Kevin’s was live end of 2016.
Challenges
To fulfill orders, Kevins operates from an 85,000 square-foot warehouse and owns multiple screen-printing presses. It carries over 800,000 apparel and incentive products, and all embroidery and screen printing are done on site. Having all operations in house allows them to process orders quickly and maintain the highest quality standards.
The company has grown quickly and has been a member of Inc. magazine’s list of 5000 fastest growing companies for three years in a row. Kevins sets itself apart with its responsiveness to customer needs. The company prides itself on quickly resolving problems in order to retain customers and repeat orders.
For years, Kevins used Everest accounting software with 3dCart to process online orders. But the two software packages weren’t connected so the team had to manually process hundreds of orders from 3dCart, and key them into Everest, its aging accounting system.
“Obviously, manually transferring data takes a lot of time and opens us up for a lot of mistakes,” says Craig Matusinksi, eCommerce & Social Media Director at Kevins Worldwide. Additional staff often had to help with the manual order processes, which reduced the time they spent cultivating new customers.
ERP Solution
As the number of web stores and transactions grew, so did the frustration level with the manual entry process. Also, executives grew tired of dealing with the limitations of legacy accounting software. Kevins’ executives began to look for a replacement, reviewing Acumatica, Epicor and SAP, and decided to implement Acumatica, says Kevin Tinkelman, managing director.
“For the investment dollars and energy, Acumatica showed a lot of promise,” he says.
The cloud-based software is built on .Net technologies, making it easy to connect to third-party applications, and its modern platform would help the company grow without limitations.
Kevins worked with Acumatica partner InfoSourcing on the implementation and integration with PrintShop, a third-party application InfoSourcing designed for printers, which manages print production and scheduling.
Harsha Sarjapur, the founder of InfoSourcing, also provided the critical custom programming needed to connect Acumatica to 3dCart. The custom plugin called “Order Sync” allows Kevins to process web orders automatically and ship them faster.
“Acumatica is our one-stop shop for everything from accounting to inventory to sales to purchasing and so on. For technology to work well without hacks or workarounds is rare, and Acumatica works really well.”
Craig Matusinksi eCommerce & Social Media DirectoR
Kevins Worldwide now has a complete all-in-one eCommerce solution. Most of its 100 employees use Acumatica daily and are thankful they don’t have to sign in and out of various programs daily just to do their jobs.
Acumatica allowed Kevins to eliminate its siloed applications and endless discussions about whose numbers were correct. “Everyone – production, purchasing, sales, inventory – now uses Acumatica, which gave us the ability to have one version of the truth in a central location, in one system that led to less discrepancies from area to area,” says Matusinksi.
In the eCommerce department, the team went from spending some 20 minutes painstakingly keying in large orders to having orders automatically transferred to Acumatica in seconds. The team now handles orders from twice as many web stores.
“In 2019, we added more than a dozen new web stores without needing to add staff to input transactions,” Matusinksi says. “Transaction information is automatically loaded into Acumatica, so our team is able to concentrate on higher-level tasks.”
Adds Tinkelman, “We are now starting to take advantage of process to get PO information from vendors and importing automatically in bulk, which is another huge time savings.”
Integrating Multiple eCommerce Platforms
The Acumatica integration with 3dCart custom programming took several months for InfoSourcing to perfect, was costly, and wasn’t something Kevins wanted to repeat when it decided to offer additional eCommerce platforms such as BrightStores or Magento.
Acumatica tapped its vast third-party ISV network and introduced InfoSourcing’s Sarjapur to a company called Celigo. Celigo offers a platform that allows companies to connect to thousands of endpoints from one easy-to-use interface easily.
Kevins worked with InfoSourcing and Celigo and created a solution that gave Kevins prebuilt API connectors for multiple eCommerce integrations with Acumatica, the ability to easily change eCommerce endpoints, and an easy-to-use application so they could handle errors and minor changes themselves.
As a result, Kevins streamlined its processes, and has more visibility and control
over their eCommerce operations. “I found it to be very user friendly, and any tweaks or changes that I’ve had to make have been very easy,” Matusinksi says. Also, with the health monitoring dashboard, it is “easy to tell if there is an issue – if all the orders came in correctly, and if they didn’t, what the problem was so that we can make the correction,” he adds.
One Version of the Truth
Obtaining data from Everest wasn’t easy; there was only one general inquiry. With Acumatica, Kevins has hundreds available.
“Acumatica is easy to learn, and I find it very intuitive,” Matusinksi says. “I really like the search functionality. You can do a simple key word search and the results are automatically categorized making it easy to find what you are looking for.” In Everest, you had to guess and hunt. Each Kevins’ team has its own dashboards where they can view information that’s important to them. “It’s a one-stop-shop,” Matusinksi says, “I can see everything I need all in one dashboard in about 15 seconds.”
Growth with Excellence Exceeds Customer Expectations
Acumatica combined with PrintShop and Celigo has helped Kevins maintain a very high level of customer service, a level they can carry into the future. “Our batting average of getting items out on time and correct doesn’t happen unless we have a solid and efficient data source,” Matusinksi says. “There’s no way we can meet our high standards if the system isn’t performing the way we need it to.”
The ability to spin up new webstores quickly and process orders without significantly increasing operating costs pave the way for Kevins to continue its fast growth while maintaining its high level of customer service. Acumatica’s unique pricing model is affordable and means all employees can use the system as needed without executives worrying about escalating per-user licensing costs.
“Acumatica’s scalability is a really big plus,” Matusinksi says. “We’ll be able to grow infinitely and the efficiencies we gain having a one-stop shop for everything from accounting to inventory to sales to purchasing and so on is rare. It’s also rare for everything to work well without hacks or workarounds, and Acumatica works really well.”
