Case Study - A Specialty Distributor's ERP Selection and Business Transformation to Go-Live
A specialty food-and-beverage distributor serving retail customers through route sales representatives had outgrown a set of systems that no longer talked to each other: order capture in the field, warehouse, routing, pricing and finance each lived somewhere different. John Hannan LLC ran the ERP selection, then stayed to lead the business-transformation program through mock cutover, training and go-live on Acumatica with a distribution-focused implementation partner.
The situation
Route-based distribution has requirements that generic ERP demos skip: presales and delivery routes, handheld order and delivery capture, customer-specific pricing and promotions, warehouse picking to route, and cash and returns reconciled by driver. Leadership wanted one platform, mobile field tools that the route team would actually use, and a finance and reporting foundation for growth, without stopping the trucks.
What we did
Selection - Requirements were built with the general managers, route sales, warehouse, purchasing, pricing, customer service and finance. An RFP and scripted demonstrations, using the company's own routes and orders as the scenarios, produced a shortlist and a decision for Acumatica with a partner that brought mobile sales and delivery capability alongside the ERP.
Program leadership - After the decision the engagement became the Business Transformation program, with John Hannan LLC as program leader and named consultants leading the cutover and the change-and-training workstreams alongside the client's IT and operations leads and the partner:
A steering committee cadence with workstream updates written so the executives could see status, evidence, open items and the decisions needed that day.
End-to-end testing and user-acceptance testing sequenced so that the field-facing processes were proven before training began.
A change-and-training plan timed deliberately late, so that training landed just before go-live: general managers trained first and then delivered the route-representative sessions themselves; warehouse and back-office followed; hands-on practice weeks used a dedicated environment loaded from real scenarios; weekly end-user communications ran through the final month.
A cutover plan with a full mock cutover in a separate instance: master-data cleanup with business-process-owner sign-off, configuration document sign-off, master-file loads and then open-transaction loads, an inventory count and reconciliation approach drawn from the company's external-audit exercise, a validation and reconciliation document for both mock and live cutover, and a lessons-learned session feeding the final plan.
The decision
Acumatica, with a partner that could deliver the field mobility the route team needed, chosen on scripted demonstrations against the company's own scenarios rather than feature lists.
What changed
The company approaches go-live with a plan its executives can read, a field workforce trained by its own managers, a rehearsed cutover, and reconciliation controls already in place. Post go-live, a hypercare help model with defined service levels and escalation paths hands support back to the client and the partner. For John Hannan LLC this program is the model for how a selection should end: not with a contract, but with the client's own people running a system they chose with their eyes open.
If your program looks like this, talk to John about your ERP program.