Success Stories

Activant Professional Services Provides Distributor a Smooth Transition from Acclaim to Prophet 21

This is the second case study in a series on Don Blackburn and Company's transition from Activant Acclaim to Prophet 21.

Transitioning from one business solution to another is never a one-step process. But, with the right support and expertise, it can be relatively painless. That's why Don Blackburn relied on Activant's Implementation team throughout the company's move from Activant Acclaim to Activant Prophet 21.

Blackburn, a leading provider of industrial automation products and services in Michigan, chose to upgrade to Activant Prophet 21 after more than a decade on Activant's UNIX-based solutions, XL and Acclaim. The management at Blackburn invested in the Windows-based solution for several reasons, of which the most significant was the need to increase efficiencies after the company was forced to function with less staff due to economic conditions.

Blackburn started the migration process by giving Activant an idea of how the company used their Acclaim solution. "We went through a rather extensive interview process," says Ron Clark, executive vice president of the company. "It was a very necessary part of making the transition."

Then, the company began preparing their static data - things like the item database, pricing information, customer lists, ship-to addresses, and imported it into Prophet 21 roughly a month before go-live.

The process of transferring the dynamic data - including processing information, sales orders, open orders, and purchase orders - from Acclaim to Prophet 21 started on a Friday evening. Blackburn staff sent a complete backup of their database to a team of Activant Professional Services staff members, and programmers wrote scripts so that the data could be imported directly into Prophet 21's SQL database. Less than 24 hours later, on Saturday afternoon, the data was transferred, and Blackburn was "live" on Prophet 21.

"Compared to when we first went live on XL 12 years ago, moving to Prophet 21 was easy," Clark testifies.

Catching on

It took Blackburn staff only a day or so to "really catch on to the basics" of the new solution. Within an afternoon, sales representatives were entering orders into Prophet 21, but occasionally, early on, users ran into situations that required new procedures that they weren't yet accustomed to. So, Clark and other members of Blackburn's management team held weekly meetings for several weeks after going live to discuss developing new procedures for their new solution. "We discussed things, and put procedures together for how to handle certain situations," Clark says.

In addition, if a Blackburn employee had an issue that couldn't be resolved within the company, they would simply enter a case through Activant's Web-based support. "We ran across a few minor issues with our solution, and, to my amazement, these issues were dealt with almost immediately by the Activant support staff," Clark says. "Whenever we had a problem, we would just open a case online and it would be resolved."

Within a week after go-live, Clark says that his employees were 95 percent as proficient on Prophet 21 as they were on Acclaim. A few months later, they were almost to 100 percent. "Overall," Clark concludes, "I was very satisfied with the transition and the implementation process. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend a move from Acclaim to Prophet 21 to anyone."

To learn more about why Don Blackburn Company chose to move to Prophet 21, please check out Part One - Selecting a Solution

For more information on Activant's enterprise software solutions, please fill out our Web Contact Form.

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