NexTec employee Sharon Fuchs is a 25-year veteran of the food and beverage industry. She’s passionate about food and anyone who knows her considers her a foodie.
“I love walking the production floor,” she explains of visiting prospective customer sites. I love being in food manufacturing [facilities] and showing customers the value of what we can do for them in transforming their business.”
Like Sharon, many of our NexTec team members come from the industries we serve, including food and beverage manufacturing, construction management, medical supply and device manufacturing and more. Our sales team, developers, product experts and customer account managers understand the challenges our customers face and what it takes to compete.
That’s why you should work with us. When dealing with complex software solutions that impact your business performance, it’s critical to have the best cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (or Cloud ERP) consulting team on your side.
Below, we discuss what you should look for in a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) and why NexTec may be the right fit for your business.
Why a Quality ERP Consultant is Important
A VAR offers personalized ERP services based on their industry and technology knowledge. As licensed ERP consultants, VARs help software vendors sell their software product and assist customers in implementing, testing, training employees and maintaining the software product.
It’s a win-win situation, but companies seeking a qualified and quality ERP consultant must recognize that VARs come in all shapes and sizes. In other words, VAR expertise and abilities can vary widely. For example, many VARs strive to become technology experts so they can understand the intricacies of the software they sell, work hard to hone their implementation skills and offer additional services as well as customized features for the core product. But there are VARs who overstate their expertise, abilities and dedication, rendering even the best software product ineffective.
Let’s look at an example of what could happen if a company selects a low-quality implementation partner who doesn’t understand its unique requirements.
The VAR—after a brief consultation—begins offering complex solutions, including customizations that are time-intensive, costly and complicated to implement. As the process moves forward, challenges arise because the solutions are not compatible with the company’s needs. The end result is a long list of excuses, jerry-rigged fixes, endless scope changes and a project that never reaches go live.
To ensure you don’t pick an ERP consultant that overpromises and underdelivers, make sure to do a thorough evaluation of your options. Part of the evaluation should include finding out if the VAR can deliver the following:
- An ERP solution that integrates with your company’s existing business model.
- An ERP solution that is regularly updated and improved as well as scalable.
- Services that cover data migration, training and support.
- A network and system maintenance plan that includes if/when your ERP solution goes offline.
In addition to these deliverables, the right ERP consultant should boast a sterling reputation and be willing to work closely with you and your team to provide a solution that automates and simplifies your business processes. The VAR’s team of solution architects, developers, project leaders and service staff should consider themselves a part of the team, devoting themselves to helping you utilize the software so that you meet your goals and exceed customer expectations.
And the VAR must have the resources needed to complete the implementation project from start to finish—something Omni Cart Services, Inc., a company that provides cleaning and repair services on shopping carts and other support equipment, discovered during its own much-anticipated ERP implementation. The Omni Cart team chose Acumatica Cloud ERP as their ERP solution and a local Acumatica reseller to help them implement it.
Unfortunately, the implementation did not progress as Omni Cart had hoped. Says Keith Wolf, President of Omni Cart, “[The reseller] just didn’t have the resources to service us properly.”
The company wisely chose to break off their relationship with the reseller, turning to Acumatica for direct assistance, but even though Acumatica personnel had the knowledge Omni Cart needed, Wolf and his team wanted a VAR that would learn their business and help them use Acumatica’s cloud ERP solution to the fullest.
“We found NexTec Group, and they’ve successfully guided the implementation to fit our business needs,” Wolf says.
The NexTec Difference
NexTec has almost 30 years of experience helping businesses select, implement and optimize their software. Our implementation expertise has netted us a 90% retention rate, with 50% of our clients switching to us after working with another partner—like Omni Cart.
Says Wolf, “[NexTec is] responsive, knowledgeable and has a systematic approach to the implementation that really works.”
We are, and we do. Our passion is doing great work, ensuring that the technology we help implement matches our customers’ unique challenges and produces measurable results. And our team members pride themselves on offering friendly service that stems from pride in our company and from their own experiences in the industries they serve, like Sharon.
“I always say in my demos, I don’t write code, but I read recipes. So if I’m in a new city I will do a food tour or check out new restaurants. Some people follow rock stars, I follow chefs. So it’s a natural fit for me to play in this space,” she says.
As a gold-certified Acumatica partner with one of the largest Acumatica teams in North America and the biggest and most experienced Sage X3 team in the industry, we are here to support your key business initiatives and to drive tangible growth across your organization. We’ll work with you to develop a strategic plan that makes sense for where you are now and where you want to be in the future.
To learn more about why we believe you should choose NexTec as your professional consulting partner, we hope you’ll contact us today. We’d love to chat.