For more than 22 years, R&R Millwork, a build-to-order (BTO) manufacturer of commercial cabinetry and store fixtures, used a legacy version of Sage for Financials, Procurement, Manufacturing, Projects and Sales. Due to the system’s aging architecture and gaps in functionality, R&R Millwork was forced to develop time-consuming, manual workarounds.
“We were running our business kind of the old-fashioned way,” Devin Harwell, president of R&R Millwork, said.
As a BTO manufacturer, R&R Millwork depends heavily on profit recognition. Its lead times can span months and full revenue cannot be recognized until a job is completed.
The company had built a cumbersome spreadsheet to track profit recognition, which involved a level of guesswork and left a lot of room for error. This made it difficult for R&R to get accurate profit data month over month.
The company also relied on manual processes to complete its purchasing transactions. If inventory was running low, someone from the shop floor would walk to the offices to notify the purchasing team. The purchasing team would then call the supplier to place the order, negotiate pricing and make shipping arrangements. Then, the team would manually enter a purchase order into Sage.
R&R’s accounting team had the chore of combing through paper copies of purchase orders and manually closing out the company’s invoices one by one. On average, there were hundreds of purchase orders that needed to be closed out each month, requiring about three hours of the lead accountant’s time.
These antiquated and inefficient processes prompted R&R Millwork’s search for a new enterprise system. The company needed a solution that could accurately track profit recognition, automate its business functions and give it better visibility into the status of projects and purchase orders.
Enter Nextworld system
After Nextworld approached R&R, offering to test its system, the team determined that Nextworld was simple to use and gave it the flexibility to define workflows, reports and dashboards that fit the company’s specific needs.
Additionally, R&R saw the value of becoming an early adopter and leveraging the ability to influence Nextworld’s product roadmap and have a high-touch relationship with the support and implementation teams.
In the end, R&R’s Nextworld implementation took just four months. The implementation team completed the project remotely and kept R&R Millwork on time and budget.
Among the current benefits that R&R Millwork takes advantage of is Nextworld’s profit recognition functionality, along with a feature that auto-books profit recognition entries at each period close. This allows it to incrementally track actuals against budget amounts for different jobs, saving its accounting team and the president an estimated combined two days or more at the month-end close.
Furthermore, since implementing Nextworld, R&R has seen significant time savings across its organization, particularly in the areas of purchasing and accounting.
R&R used Nextworld to create custom automation for its purchasing process. The company uses Nextworld’s reorder point functionality to receive notifications when inventory is low and an order needs to be placed.
The purchasing team then uses the item catalog to select items and put them into a shopping cart. That action automatically sends an email to one of its 100 suppliers with selections reflected in a purchase order.
By streamlining the entire purchasing process, the company saves a collective four hours per day.
R&R Millwork has also automated the creation of bills of material and work orders generated by the company’s computer-aided design (CAD) system. The accounting team only needs to import the file and a bill of materials and work order are automatically created, saving its lead accountant nearly two hours per week.
These automations have helped R&R’s accounts payable and purchasing teams achieve a time savings of approximately 70 percent.
Finally, the entire team at R&R Millwork takes advantage of customized dashboards within Nextworld.
“Nextworld allows me to run the company with the information that I would like to see,” Harwell said. “[My dashboard] gives me things like cash balances, new orders, where materials are in the process — all of the things that I need to see on a daily basis.”
He added: “We’ve had about 30 percent overhead savings as a result of using Nextworld.”
Since the implementation, Harwell and his team can focus less on repetitive tasks and more on customer satisfaction. The company also has plans to implement new functionality and features for additional benefits.
“This partnership that we’ve had has paid off big dividends for R&R Millwork,” Harwell said. “We’ve increased efficiency, gotten the ability to be more competitive and we want to continue to use more and more of the Nextworld system.”
