Acumatica Summit 2020 – The Round Up!
What Happened at Acumatica Summit 2020? Find Out!
Believe it or not, it wasn’t that long ago that Acumatica Summit booths fit in a hallway and the total number of attendees fit in a small room. In fact, that’s what all of us long-time Summit attendees were saying this year at Acumatica Summit 2020 as we marveled at the massive conference setting, with nearly 2,500 total attendees and a dizzying number of events that took place at the Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas over the course of one entire week.
Didn’t manage to make it to Acumatica Summit 2020? The SWK Technologies team has got you covered with all the info you need to know about the latest in Acumatica news.
SUNDAY
Acumatica Summit 2020 started off strong, with a wide range of events and get-togethers that included everyone from long-term Acumatica solution providers like us, to companies that were curious to learn why everyone’s talking about The Cloud ERP.
1st Annual Acumatica User Group Meet & Greet
As founding members of the all-new Acumatica User Group Community, this was the event we were most excited about at this years’ Acumatica Summit. Everyone else was pretty excited too – and the crowd for this event topped out at 200 User Group Sponsors, Members, and supporters!
Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill stopped by to say a few words about the new, global Acumatica user community and to show off his Acumatica User Group pin.
Welcome Reception and MVP Awards
After the User Group Meet & Greet, everyone from partners to ISVs to users and Acumatica employees got together to officially kick off the 2020 Summit on the tradeshow floor. MVPs received their awards and official congratulations from Jon Roskill, and we’re proud to say that SWK Technologies took home 3 MVP awards this year!
In fact, one of our team members did the math and figured out that there are only 83 Acumatica MVPs on the planet – and SWK Technologies is one of only 5 companies in the world that has 3 of them: Joel Gress, Michelle Hesketh, and Sharon Conkey. Congrats!
Summit After Dark
After the Welcome Reception, we were all ready to celebrate – and this year’s Summit After Dark party was hopping when we reached the barber-shop-turned-speakeasy where registered guests were ushered through a real barbershop, through a secret door marked “Janitor,” and into a prohibition-era backroom bar. We were definitely impressed.
MONDAY
On the first official day of the conference, Acumatica Summit 2020 attendees got to be the first to hear a long list of exciting news about what’s coming next for Acumatica Cloud ERP.
Keynote Day 1
The keynote packed the fancy Chelsea Theater at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas, where Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill announced the 2019 Customer of the Year (Power Storage Solutions — who was wearing their Acumatica User Group member pin for the occasion!) and the 2019 Impact Customer of the Year (FoodMaven).
After the awards, Roskill kept us enthralled during an hour of exciting news.
For Acumatica 2020 R1, the first of this year’s software releases, the Acumatica development team touched and enhanced every module in the product line — including inventory, fixed assets, core financials, etc. — to make sure the user experience was even better than it had been before.
The Acumatica team did one quick demo in the Day 1 Keynote to show off new capabilities in 2020 R1, which uses machine learning to automatically recognize and import text from expense receipts into Acumatica. To handle your expenses in Acumatica now, all you have to do is take a picture of your receipt. Wow.
The biggest announcements revolved around the industry editions: Commerce Edition, Manufacturing Edition, and Construction Edition.
- Commerce Edition
Acumatica has assumed responsibility for making sure the popular Big Commerce integration with Acumatica is always up-to-date and easy to use. Big Commerce delivers a seamless integration between your Acumatica ERP and your customer-facing website, making it extremely easy to connect your ERP with your website.
Of course, Acumatica still supports and champions the use of Magento, Shopify, Woo Commerce, and other eCommerce solutions too.
- Manufacturing Edition
In the manufacturing space, Acumatica had 2 great announcements.
First, Acumatica announced their acquisition of manufacturing experts JAAS Systems, which brings every JAAS member on-board the Acumatica team and grants them the resources they need to supercharge their popular manufacturing solution on the Acumatica platform.
Secondly, Acumatica announced a new partnership with the team behind BatchMaster software – a must-have if you’re involved in process manufacturing for food & beverage, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, and personal care products. The new BatchMaster tool for Acumatica will be available as early as August.
On the Acumatica blog, Batchmaster CEO Sahib Dudani stated, ““We look forward to bringing our 30 years of leadership and innovation in manufacturing software from BatchMaster Software to the award-winning Acumatica platform. Acumatica has deeply invested in our partnership and success, opening their arms, platform, and ecosystem to us—a testament to their commitment to the ISV community.”
In addition, the BatchMaster developers will also be releasing Quality Management for Acumatica. This formal quality control framework module will be available as early as March, and it promises to help you easily manage your quality control testing and certification requirements.
- Construction Edition
As the first real Cloud ERP for the construction industry, Acumatica always has interesting news in this space, and this year they announced a partnership with the well-known Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) to deliver a Benchmarker data aggregation tool.
The Benchmarker tool helps construction companies improve their performance by comparing their metrics with other nationwide construction companies in a like-to-like comparison that pulls in as many as 22 metrics for granular data mining.
Acumatica Payroll
Long-requested and finally here, the all-new Acumatica Payroll module is fully integrated with Acumatica, includes all up-to-date federal and state forms, and delivers enhanced functionality for construction companies that need to work with strict union requirements.
BDO Digital Partnership
As a tech company, Acumatica spends a disproportionately higher amount of revenue on R&D expenditures than their competitors, placing 74% of Acumatica employees in R&D roles.
Because of their heavy focus on R&D, Acumatica ERP and their platform, Acumatica Cloud xRP, has the ability to bring enterprise-level tech to the mid-market space – and enterprise tech providers are taking notice.
One large enterprise tech provider, BDO Digital, is now working with the Acumatica team to help Acumatica users harness technology in their own businesses. BDO focuses on IT optimization, business process optimization, and digital transformation – helping Acumatica users take advantage of the latest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI).
Smartsheet Integration Gets Better
And last, but not least, Roskill mentioned that users can now bring Smartsheet data directly into Acumatica, seamlessly.
As we said, the Day 1 Keynote was packed with news – and Day 2 held more news for the Distribution and Field Service Industry Editions. We’ll cover that in a minute.
Hakkasan Nightclub Extravaganza
After the excitement of Monday morning’s keynote, attendees were ready to party again, Vegas-style, on Monday night. Luckily, Acumatica delivered the party, with a world-class nightclub experience at the legendary Hakkasan.
Great food, great drinks, great dancing – since next year’s Summit will also be in Vegas, we’re wondering how they can top that experience!
TUESDAY
Monday’s news avalanche may have seemed like it held all the Acumatica updates, but Day 2 of the conference was just as jam-packed with excitement.
Keynote Day 2
Of course, Acumatica Summit isn’t Acumatica Summit without a jaw-dropping demo that showcases the Cloud ERP’s latest tech capabilities. As a tech company, Acumatica is always pushing the envelope when it comes to cutting-edge functionality.
In 2017, Summit attendees got to witness the first Alexa integration with Acumatica. In 2019, we saw HoloLens integrations and Google Cloud image-search AI in action… but this year was even more exciting.
Citing a “David Copperfield…big reveal,” Acumatica’s VP of Platform Strategy, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy slowly drew a black cloth covering off of a Universal Robots arm robot, and then called up a Mobile Industrial Robot (MiR), which woke up on a workflow command and drove itself into place next to the arm robot.
At that point, Ajoy simply entered an order for a laptop and the system seamlessly communicated with the two robots to direct the arm robot to pick and place the laptop on the MiR robot, so the MiR robot could deliver the laptop to the manned packing station.
It was a wonder of automation – and the crowd in the Chelsea Theater went wild.
But there was a lot more to see. In Day 2 of Acumatica Summit 2020, Acumatica also demonstrated and discussed:
- User friendly updates that streamlined data display on Dashboard tiles
- Mobile camera uploads into Acumatica
- An intelligent, dynamic action button that you can configure to simplify workflows
- Instantaneous, effortless, optimized appointment scheduling using WorkWave
- Time tracking from mobile, for field service (integrated with Acumatica Payroll from the Day 1 Keynote)
- Matrix functionality
- Wave and batch picking to speed up your warehouse
- Scanless, paperless picking capabilities using the Internet of Things (IoT)
- Drag-and-drop workflow customization
- Embedded PDF viewing and editing, direct from Acumatica (no need to save your edits locally anymore)
- Microsoft Teams integration that adds context to Teams chats
- Weather notifications and alerts from ClimaCell, direct in Acumatica
- AI image recognition and smart tagging that helps you find even complex and confusing images without manual tagging
And, as if that wasn’t enough, Acumatica also stated that all Acumatica users would get a 30-day free trial of Adobe Sign.
Phew!
Speaker Dr. Robert Ballard – Discoverer of the Titanic
The conference events finished Tuesday afternoon with a stirring presentation by the acclaimed oceanographer, Dr. Robert Ballard.
Ballard may be most famous for discovering the wreck of the Titanic, but he also discovered the wrecks of the battleship Bismarck, the aircraft carrier Yorktown, and John F. Kennedy’s PT-109.
In total, Ballard has been on 160 deep sea expeditions and is fascinated by the ocean floor. He has seen things most of us can never even imagine: blisteringly hot deep-sea chimneys, marine dwellers that can photosynthesize in the dark, and more.
Ballard’s decades of undersea exploration taught him a lot about project management and leadership, and his experience held a lot of great tips for business leaders and goal-setters in all walks of life.
WEDNESDAY-FRIDAY
The week of excitement wrapped up with days of in-depth training sessions, geared toward all learning levels and roles.
Though Acumatica Summit 2020 was only one week long, it was filled with a year’s worth of events – and we can’t wait until Summit 2021.
Curious to learn more about the newest additions to Acumatica 2020 R1? Want to get in depth with the updates in the Industry Editions? The SWK Technologies team is always happy to answer your questions. Just get in touch and we’ll get back to you.
