Wayne Safety Upgrades Operations and Warehouse with Acumatica and CONTAX

Wayne Safety, a Toronto distributor of personal protective equipment, replaced its 30-year-old DOS-based ERP with Acumatica Cloud ERP. With CONTAX as its implementation partner, the company went live one month ahead of schedule, turned a disorganized warehouse into a structured bin and pick-path operation, and gained real control over pricing, credit and margins.

At a Glance

The Customer

Wayne Safety is a Canadian wholesale distributor of personal protective equipment and safety and industrial products, serving customers across the country in industries such as construction, medical, janitorial and food processing. The company has 10 to 50 employees and is planning to diversify its product mix.

The Challenge

When Jelica Greenwood joined Wayne Safety as Director of Operations, she saw on her first day that the business needed a new system. "There was a lack of control and a lack of transparency," she says.

The company ran on Masterworks, a heavily customized DOS-based ERP that was being retired. It had no warehouse integration: it could record that an order was placed and picked, but nothing more, so finding stock depended on people remembering where they had put it. "There was no visibility in the warehouse and where things were," Greenwood says. Inconsistent function keys and screens made training and standard procedures nearly impossible.

The old system also couldn't calculate the true cost of goods or enforce standard pricing. Customer service could override prices at will and credit holds weren't enforced, which put margins and cash flow at risk. When Greenwood looked at the company's margins, she found they weren't accurate.

The Solution

Wayne Safety evaluated several ERP systems, including Microsoft and NetSuite, and chose Acumatica for its cost-effectiveness, ease of use and fit for a mid-sized distributor. It chose Toronto-based CONTAX as its implementation partner for its Acumatica expertise and its knowledge of distribution best practices.

A Warehouse Transformed

The warehouse went from items stored wherever there was space to lanes, bins and a pick-pack-path process that everyone follows. Staff use scanners and defined procedures, and inventory errors fell by 15%. "Now we have lanes, we have bins, and we have procedures that we follow," Greenwood says. As one employee with 35 years at the company put it: "I know where everything is now."

Acumatica's consistent navigation and search also changed training. New hires practice on a dedicated test site and learn the system in minutes rather than weeks.

The Results

• Live on Acumatica one month ahead of the original schedule
• 35%+ improvement in order management, with streamlined workflows and less manual work
• 15% fewer inventory errors, without relying on anyone's memory of where stock is
• 15% better cash flow from automated credit holds and stronger receivables control
• Month-end close more than 5 days faster, with real-time reporting
• Pricing locked down and true costs captured, so sales and management trust the margin figures

"We're capturing all our costs for any one particular purchase order, which allows us to have a much better estimate on our overall costs of our products. Our sales manager has much more confidence in our sales figures and our margins," Greenwood says.

What's Next

With a modern, unified platform and CONTAX as its partner, Wayne Safety is ready to use Acumatica's AI-driven purchasing and forecasting, diversify its product mix and respond quickly to market changes. "Acumatica has everything a medium-sized business needs," Greenwood says. "It is terrific out-of-the-box."