Acumatica Summit 2021 Was Packed with Exciting Announcements and Sneak Peeks into What’s Coming Next for Acumatica Cloud ERP

 

After a year and a half away from Acumatica Summit, we have to say: we were extremely impressed by how hard the Acumatica team has been working on their Cloud ERP. We were especially impressed by all the exciting features coming out in September for 2021 R2.

In case you missed Acumatica Summit 2021, or in case you want some notes so you can remember all the announcements for this year, the SWK Technologies team will use this blog to recap everything announced at both Acumatica Summit keynotes.

Acumatica Summit 2021 Keynote 1, July 19

This keynote focused on how Acumatica’s ethical stance and dedication to rapid digital transformation for customers during and beyond the pandemic is paying off in big growth for the ERP. The Day 1 Keynote also held some stunning announcements from Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill:

• Acumatica has had ZERO security or crypto-ransom incidents during the pandemic
• 8 Billion transactions ran through Acumatica Cloud ERP last year
• Hundreds of thousands of users log in to Acumatica every day
• Acumatica maintains SOC I and II compliance
• The company now has 8,000+ customers

• Acumatica has delivered 99.6% uptime over the past year, even with extreme growth
• Acumatica is the top-rated ERP in 2021 by G2, scoring higher than all other ranked ERPs for Momentum and Customer Satisfaction

• For the 8^th year in a row, Acumatica has been named the fastest-growing ERP globally by IDC

Digital Resiliency: The Key to Ongoing Success

One of the main points of Roskill’s Day 1 Keynote was the theme of Digital Resiliency, which is the mandate for 21^st Century businesses to be prepared to handle whatever may come, from pandemics to supply chain shortages to all other unexpected events.

As Roskill eloquently put it in his Day 1 Keynote, Digital Resiliency is powered by the Digital Transformation Journey that empowers companies to move “beyond basic process digitization and… transform into mature, efficient, and connected businesses.”

The steps of the Digital Transformation Journey include:

• Modernizing business and IT processes to free up time and focus to grow the company
• Expanding user engagement (employees) so they, in turn, can better drive customer engagement
• Achieving competitive differentiation through the increased customer attention that was enabled by freeing up time and focus and empowering employees

The Keynote continued by interviewing diverse companies that used Acumatica Cloud ERP to help them achieve success in their own Digital Transformation Journey, so they could maintain resiliency against enormous odds during shifting situations throughout 2020.

Future-Proof ERP

Digital transformation is critical for success, but as Roskill made clear during the Day 1 Keynote at Acumatica Summit 2021, reliable digital transformation requires a Future-Proof ERP – one that business users can trust to meet their ever-evolving digital and technological needs, right now and tomorrow. That is why Acumatica continues to invest heavily in the Acumatica Cloud xRP technology stack, on which Acumatica ERP is built.

Since the xRP platform forms the foundation for all Acumatica processing and power, the future-focused tech company knows that the way to ensure they deliver a fully resilient, fully transformational Cloud ERP that will future-proof the customer’s ERP investment is to consistently provide the most powerful, fast, and cutting-edge cloud platform to run that ERP.

Considering how much Acumatica Cloud ERP has outstripped its competitors for growth in the past 8 years, it is clear that this focus on the Cloud xRP platform has been a successful strategy for future-proofing the ERP (and ensuring customer satisfaction).

In addition to learning about how much Acumatica has grown and powered Digital Resiliency in the past year, keynote attendees got an inside view into some of the most exciting integrations coming in Acumatica 2021 R2.

Microsoft Teams integration

A new Teams button in Acumatica shows the status and availability of Teams contacts directly from the Acumatica screen, and empowers seamless Teams communication by phone, video, chat, etc. This helps you avoid the time waster of switching back and forth between application windows.

Not only is Acumatica one of the first ERPs that integrates with Teams (which is surprising, considering how ubiquitous Teams has become in our COVID-positive world), it also helps you keep track of all your Teams communications easily with the Activities tab that records all Teams communications.

Adobe enhanced integration

At Acumatica Summit 2020, Acumatica announced that the Cloud ERP was integrated with Adobe, to make storage and viewing of Adobe documents easier. Now, you and your employees can also annotate and update PDFs directly from within Acumatica. This functionality works with text, sketching / drawing, highlighting, and more.

The enhanced Adobe integration for Acumatica not only enables you to annotate your PDFs directly from within Acumatica, it also stores versions of your documents for you, so you have a clear record and audit trail for all changes. Additionally, this functionality integrates with Business Events (notifications) in Acumatica, meaning that when you change a document, you can also auto-notify team members impacted by your changes.

Interested in watching the Day 1 Keynote yourself?

You can! Watch it here.

 

Acumatica Summit 2021 Keynote 2, July 20

On Day 2 of the Acumatica Keynotes, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy introduced the 3 themes that the upcoming Acumatica 2021 R2 delivers on:

1. Seamless personalization that matches the needs of your industry, your processes, and your tools
2. Investment in Acumatica modules to make each module in each Industry Edition stronger and more flexible for your requirements
3. CRM capabilities that help you do more with CRM and better engage your customers

Each of these themes is geared to meet the mandates of today’s rapid digital transformation initiatives. These themes also help Acumatica-run businesses get more out of their ERP and the Cloud xRP platform to drive digital customer engagement around the clock.

New Features Coming to Acumatica 2021 R2

As one of the most senior members of the Acumatica Community, the team at SWK Technologies is impressed with the new release announcements and sneak peeks Acumatica unveiled at Summit 2021. The Day 2 keynote was so filled with new features and capabilities that the presentation ran over by 45 minutes!

Here is just a small sampling of the whirlwind of new features coming soon to Acumatica ERP.

Future Technology enhancements

As usual, the Acumatica team has made a number of improvements that are on the bleeding edge of development. Acumatica was the first ERP with:

• Power BI integration
• Outlook integration
• Alexa integration
• RPA integration (robots)

…and now they are the first ERP to offer “bot” integration, so your boring, repetitive tasks can now be scheduled and handled by software bots. Not sure how this impacts your business? Consider this: the example we watched in the keynote was of a bot handling monthly state and county tax filing.

How much time and effort would your business save if you never had to handle routine monthly tax amount filings for your state again? A lot of time. That’s how much.

In addition, the new Acumatica 2021 R2 will offer Zoom Info integration, which helps you track down contact information for a prospect you have never met and add that info directly to your CRM.

Acumatica 2021 R2 also integrates with Apple Watch.

Enhancements also include:

• The ability to write and use Excel-style formulas from right within your ERP (wow!)

• Leveraging Machine Learning to predict which customers may not pay on time direct from the Customer 360 screen

• Using Machine Learning to predict which transactions might become anomaly transactions

Usability enhancements

Aside from the “gee-whiz” features in the new Acumatica ERP, the newest release will also come with a wide variety of usability enhancements that make every user’s day-to-day work experience easier and faster.

These updates include:

• New flexibility with meter tiles, allowing you to update nearly every parameter for the dashboard meter tiles, as well as charts, funnels, and other widgets

• Click-to-sort filtering for data tables on your dashboard
• Link tiles that lead directly to any area of your Acumatica system, saving you steps
• A new colored button for Acumatica screens showing the next logical step

• Toolbar consolidation that makes your toolbars easier to access using a compressed dropdown screen for options (notice the “…” at the top of the white toolbar box in the picture below)
• The ability to add Action buttons to your Acumatica screens simply by favoriting the button in your toolbar menu

• Side pop-up that replaces the old screen overlays for processing tasks and error messages, so you can stay focused

• Users can now instantly add new widgets, favorite screens, and workspaces to their mobile Acumatica layout

• DAC Schema Browser is now available to help you easily look up metadata for streamlined Generic Inquiry creation (this will be very exciting to Acumatica power users)

The Acumatica team also shared their strong roadmap for usability enhancements, which included:

• Reporting improvements with segmented analysis by 2023
• In-browser report designer launching in 2023
• More and more low code / no code features rolling out across the modules and product through 2023

CRM enhancements

In CRM this year, Acumatica has added the ability for Business Events (notifications) to create CRM activities (tasks). It has also integrated with SendGrid to make email follow-up easier by tracking email clicks, unsubscribes, opens, and other email data from within the Acumatica system.

Payroll enhancements

Since the introduction of the Payroll module announced at last year’s Summit, we were excited to hear that Acumatica has added ~900 new features to Payroll, including ship codes, projects and tasks, dashboards for employers and employees, and performance enhancements resulting in a 2-3x speed increase.

Industry Edition enhancements

For the bulk of the Day 2 Keynote at Acumatica Summit 2021, Acumatica team members paired up to present demos of the numerous additions and enhancements across a wide range of Acumatica Industry Editions.

There was a lot to learn here, and we do not want to bore you with details that do not apply to your business. To save time, we will provide a quick breakdown of new features below. If you would like to know more about new capabilities in your Industry Edition, simply reach out to the SWK Technologies team to learn more.

Distribution and Retail-eCommerce enhancements

• Upsell and cross-sell capabilities now integrate seamlessly into eCommerce front end
• Personalization requests for custom orders made on eCommerce site flow instantly into ERP back end
• Matrix attributes keep your inventory manageable on the back end, while making it easy for customers to find what they want on the front end
• Substitution buttons make it easy to manage stock and complete orders quickly, even when inventory is unpredictable
• Set up common search keywords in ERP back end to support better search and find on the eCommerce site front end
• Directed paperless picking supports fully mobile picking and sorts location picking by priority

Manufacturing and Construction enhancements

• At-a-glance notifications are marked by urgency, so Project Managers and Production Leads understand where to focus their attention immediately
• Lot and serial numbers are now included on all items as built, so you can identify the precise parts used in each Finished Good (FG)
• New PO type for Project Drop Ship helps you ship items directly to a site for faster construction management
• Capable to Promise functionality crunches the numbers for you to determine whether it is possible to deliver an order on time based on stock, production scheduling, and more
• New visual production schedule, including daily scheduling and capacity scheduling, helps you view production at a glance
• BatchMaster quality management module announced at Summit 2020 is now certified

Also, Acumatica mentioned in passing that the ERP now supports process manufacturing. This is big, big news.

Interested in watching the Day 2 Keynote yourself?

You can! Watch it here.

 

Want to Know More About Acumatica Cloud ERP? Ask SWK Technologies.

As proven experts in Acumatica Cloud ERP and some of the most senior Acumatica partners in the world, the SWK Technologies team are the people to trust for honest, reliable advice about your Acumatica investment. Whether you are considering a new ERP and want to switch to a modern solution, or you want to get more from your existing Acumatica ERP, SWK Technologies is here to help.

Ask Us Anything. We’re Here for You.