Thermal Energy Corporation (TECO) provides mission-critical resources to the world’s largest medical complex, The Texas Medical Center. These resources, such as chilled water and steam, are used in buildings throughout the medical complex for refrigeration, sterilization, space heating purposes and more.
To say TECO’s operations are essential to the medical community in Houston, TX is an understatement.
As a non-profit, TECO is governed by a Board of Directors that was looking to take strategic steps to enhance efficiency, better allocate resources, maintain transparency and simplify its operations.
That’s why it began looking at a modern cloud-based ERP solution to replace its legacy system.
“We’d been using a legacy ERP application,” says Jared Schneider, TECO’s Controller. “The vendor was sunsetting the product, so the time was right for us to upgrade our financial management application to a modern ERP and take advantage of the advanced technologies.”
The Challenge
TECO’s ERP conversion story isn’t unique. Unfortunately, many companies using legacy ERP solutions to run their operations are increasingly faced with the task of upgrading to a more modern system as their legacy software reaches end of life or no longer meets their growing requirements.
In TECO’s case, the company’s legacy application didn’t support many of the modern workflow efficiencies the organization needed. “For example, it didn’t support certain functionality without using a third-party add-on,” says Schneider.
TECO also dealt with cumbersome workarounds in its legacy software when it came to applying retainage on vendor invoices and pulling necessary monthly financial reports.
The Solution
The team at TECO narrowed their search for a new business management system to Acumatica Cloud ERP and a competitor. After extensive demos of both products, the TECO team decided to implement Acumatica with the help of NexTec’s ERP implementation specialists.
“Both applications have very similar functionality. Acumatica was less expensive, but that wasn’t the main reason we chose it. NexTec Group had been our technology partner for years – we trust them and want to continue that relationship. NexTec recommended Acumatica, and that cemented our decision,” says Schneider.
Another key selling point for TECO was Acumatica’s ability to be deployed on-premises. Because TECO provides critical utilities to its customers, data control and security are essential. As such, TECO’s leadership team requires that all the company’s applications are hosted on its own secure server. Unlike other ERP solutions, Acumatica supports on-site hosting.
The Benefits
Since going live on Acumatica, the TECO team has been able to streamline its workflows for financial reporting, vendor invoicing and more.
Previously, Schneider would spend hours producing monthly financial statements and regenerating reports due to last-minute entries or corrections. With Acumatica and a reporting tool called Velixo, Schneider has been able to reduce the time it takes to produce monthly financial statements by 90%.
On top of that, Acumatica’s flexible role configurator allows the team at TECO to create role-specific reports and dashboards, which has taken the burden off Scheider who was previously tasked with creating reports for each department.
And Schneider is putting the time he’s saving to good use. “It means I’m available. I’ve got time in the day to think strategically, take on special projects, and tackle long-range planning tasks. In short, I’m able to focus on strategy instead of transactions. It’s hard to put a price on that.”
Check out the rest of TECO’s customer story here. Ready to learn more about NexTec’s ERP services or Acumatica? Reach out to us. We’d love to chat.