I work for Gilcrest Manufacturing, a global leader in cleanroom panel manufacturing. I joined as an apprentice in October of 2022, with no knowledge of IT or business systems, the implementation of Acumatica was in the works, but we eventually went live in April of 2023. We had a fair few teething issues and with the combination of our VAR and internal team we overcame them and are seeing the benefits of implementing Acumatica.
First, I was only a departmental superuser for the Contracts team, in which my base role is, delivering training on the system as well as performing my duties as a contracts coordinator which included managing contracts for various pharmaceutical clients, and drawing cleanrooms using our panels in AutoCAD. My involvement with Acumatica grew rapidly, and by January of 2024, I was the business lead for Acumatica, searching for process improvements and exposing bottlenecks for this purpose. In March of 2024, I started a Business Analysis apprenticeship to aid my skills of requirements engineering, process modelling, software design, and process analysis.
I have led various development projects and made even more mistakes! The team at Gilcrest gave me the ability to support the wider business through the development of customizations, training documents, workshops I have hosted, and most importantly been supportive through any mistakes I have made, whether that is restoring a snapshot instead of creating one, or a customization gone wrong.
Mark Souch, our Head of Manufacturing, is also our internal Product Owner for Acumatica, we work closely and due to my blue-sky-thinking he brings me back down to the realm of reasonable, and coaches me to increasingly foster a continuous improvement culture.
Sarah Fowke, our Managing Director, is the project sponsor for all projects within Acumatica, she has set me various challenges, without which I would not be where I am today.
The Acumatica Community is a very welcoming and special place, it seems not too long ago when I was posting about struggling with import scenarios and how to perform mass updates on BOMs, now I am in the position to help others with the same problems I had, talk about swings and roundabouts!
Thank you to
And a huge thank you to the whole Gilcrest Team, without all the bugs, errors, joys, and dashboards, we wouldn’t have got here together!
Ecclesiastes 11: 4-5, paraphrased, if you wait for the perfect conditions, you will never get anything done!
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