In this Acumatica Manufacturing Success Story, Founded in 1975, but tracing its family roots in pewter manufacturing back to 1755, Danforth Pewter designs and crafts handmade pewter items for sale online, in its six retail locations and through wholesale accounts and kiosks. In 2013, after two decades of using the same financial software and hardware to run its growing business, the company’s aging hardware began to fail. Unable to upgrade its old software to new hardware and wanting an integrated system, Danforth Pewter executives chose Acumatica’s highly integrated ERP as their modern platform for continued growth.

CEO Bram Kleppner and Beth Morrissey, Vice President of Finance and IT, had run Danforth Pewter’s manufacturing and retail operation for the past 24 years on the same software and hardware, getting the very most out of their assets. Kleppner knew at some point, however, that the software and hardware would reach their end of life.

Kleppner chose Acumatica’s on-premises version because “we are in a small, rural northern Vermont community and our internet service isn’t reliable. If one guy with a snowplow hits a utility pole, our internet goes down.” With more than a third of their business from online sales, they can’t risk their financial system going down, Kleppner says. Moving to the cloud version of Acumatica will come later after they secure more reliable internet service.

Since implementing Acumatica, Danforth Pewter has become much more productive and efficient. “In the old system, I had to enter all the products twice, which took a lot of time,” Morrissey says. “We don’t have to do that now, and invoicing in Acumatica allows us to do batch processes, which we couldn’t do before.”