Introducing VantagePro from Aktion Associates
In the world of architecture, engineering, and professional services, time is essential. In a fast-paced industry like these, efficiency and productivity are the keys to success. Aktion Associates has developed a suite of tools to help you unlock the full potential of Deltek Vantagepoint, making your business more efficient, productive, and well-informed than ever before. In this blog post, we’ll explore how the new VantagePro tools from Aktion can elevate your business and take it to new heights.
Introduced this year at the 2023 Deltek Project Con Conference, Aktion now offers over 15 pre-built tools that allow you to customize your Vantagepoint ERP according to your needs, making accessing and managing data incredibly efficient. Instead of manually importing or copying data across different applications, VantagePro automatically handles it. Cutting down the time you need to spend on manually importing and exporting data can lead to increased productivity and accuracy.
Here are just a few highlights of some of these powerful and innovative tools from Aktion Associates.
Master Services Agreement Hub
This custom-built hub offers you the most complete way to manage, review, and analyze your master service agreements.
User Maintenance Hub
The perfect tool for managing your company’s user accounts, this customizable solution is designed to help streamline many of the tedious tasks associated with user maintenance.
Professional License Management Hub
For organizations looking to streamline the legal requirements of their employees. This hub is custom-designed to ensure your employees have the right license for any state.
Dashboard Package Featuring Phocas
The Dashboard Package enables decision-makers to gain accurate, actionable insights into their data quickly. With the provided visualizations and reports, users can identify trends that may not otherwise be visible in raw data.
If you want to improve your efficiency and productivity and make well-informed decisions, Aktion’s VantagePro tools can take your business to the next level. Call us to take advantage of the customizable data hubs, effortless connections, and user-friendly interfaces for increased efficiency, and enhanced productivity. Take the first step today to elevate your business.
Learn more about VantagePro in this brochure.
Introducing VantagePro from Aktion Associates
In the world of architecture, engineering, and professional services, time is essential. In a fast-paced industry like these, efficiency and productivity are the keys to success. Aktion Associates has developed a suite of tools to help you unlock the full potential of Deltek Vantagepoint, making your business more efficient, productive, and well-informed than ever before. In this blog post, we’ll explore how the new VantagePro tools from Aktion can elevate your business and take it to new heights.
Introduced this year at the 2023 Deltek Project Con Conference, Aktion now offers over 15 pre-built tools that allow you to customize your Vantagepoint ERP according to your needs, making accessing and managing data incredibly efficient. Instead of manually importing or copying data across different applications, VantagePro automatically handles it. Cutting down the time you need to spend on manually importing and exporting data can lead to increased productivity and accuracy.
Here are just a few highlights of some of these powerful and innovative tools from Aktion Associates.
Master Services Agreement Hub
This custom-built hub offers you the most complete way to manage, review, and analyze your master service agreements.
User Maintenance Hub
The perfect tool for managing your company’s user accounts, this customizable solution is designed to help streamline many of the tedious tasks associated with user maintenance.
Professional License Management Hub
For organizations looking to streamline the legal requirements of their employees. This hub is custom-designed to ensure your employees have the right license for any state.
Dashboard Package Featuring Phocas
The Dashboard Package enables decision-makers to gain accurate, actionable insights into their data quickly. With the provided visualizations and reports, users can identify trends that may not otherwise be visible in raw data.
If you want to improve your efficiency and productivity and make well-informed decisions, Aktion’s VantagePro tools can take your business to the next level. Call us to take advantage of the customizable data hubs, effortless connections, and user-friendly interfaces for increased efficiency, and enhanced productivity. Take the first step today to elevate your business.
Learn more about VantagePro in this brochure.
Document Management for Distributors: How Aktion Helps You Stay Organized and Efficient
In today’s distribution industry, every transaction creates documentation—sales orders, invoices, purchase orders, shipping confirmations, and more. When these documents are scattered across filing cabinets, email inboxes, or multiple systems, it slows down operations and creates costly errors.
That’s why distributors are turning to ERP document management solutions to keep their businesses running efficiently. At Aktion Associates, we’ve partnered with UnForm, a leading document and image management solution, to help distributors simplify, automate, and modernize the way they handle documents.
The Challenge: Outdated Document Workflows
Many distributors still rely on paper-based or manual processes to manage critical documents. These outdated workflows create major roadblocks:
In a fast-moving industry where margins are thin and customer expectations are high, inefficient document management can hold back growth.
The Solution: Digital Document Management with Aktion + UnForm
UnForm integrates with nearly any ERP or business application to capture print output and transform it into usable, accessible data. With Aktion’s expertise in the distribution industry, we help businesses implement UnForm to create digital document workflows that improve accuracy, reduce manual effort, and keep everything organized.
Here’s how distributors benefit:
Why Document Management Matters for Distributors
Effective document management for distributors is more than an IT upgrade—it’s a competitive advantage. When documents are always accurate and accessible, your team can:
Distributors using document automation solutions like UnForm with Aktion Associates are running leaner, moving faster, and delivering better service.
Take the Next Step Toward Distribution Efficiency
Keeping documents updated and organized is essential to running your distribution business efficiently. With Aktion Associates and UnForm, you’ll gain a modern document management solution that integrates seamlessly with your ERP—helping you reduce errors, save time, and streamline operations.
Bid chaos is real. For too many construction firms, estimating and bid tracking still rely on time-consuming, error-prone spreadsheets. One wrong formula, missed update, or version mismatch, and you’ve just built a bid on shaky ground. It means delays, cost overruns, and bids that don’t reflect true job costs.
And when you’re relying on spreadsheets to drive your bid strategy, it’s not just slow, it’s risky too. Margins shrink, confidence drops, and every estimate feels like a guess.
But there’s a better way: modern construction finance and job costing software gives you real-time visibility, automated workflows, and accurate data at your fingertips. Think of it as swapping your trusty but fickle Excel for enterprise-grade control.
According to Procore, contractors using integrated takeoff and estimating tools report 52% fewer non-recoverable change orders, 16% less rework, and up to 48% more construction volume handled, with no added headcount. It’s a direct result of having clean, centralized project data instead of spreadsheet sprawl. When your numbers are right from the start, you bid faster, win more, and protect your margin.
With Sage Intacct Construction, you transform chaos into clarity: build bids faster, forecast costs more reliably, and take spreadsheets out of the equation for good. This blog explores four ways Sage Intacct Construction replaces spreadsheet stress with firm numbers and fewer surprises.
In construction, speed matters, but accuracy wins the job. Estimating with spreadsheets might feel familiar, but it slows your team down and introduces risk. Between copy-paste errors, version control issues, and disconnected cost data, bids take longer to build and are more likely to miss the mark.
With Sage Intacct Construction, estimating isn’t guesswork.
Your teams gain instant access to real-time project costs, historical data, and financial insights that eliminate duplicate data entry and improve forecasting. Because everything runs on a centralized cloud platform, estimators can access real-time data without waiting on accounting or sorting through old files.
To improve your bid-hit ratio and profitability, you need to clearly understand your true job costs. Job cost accounting software can provide the information you need about labour, materials, overhead, and profit margins without guesswork.
👉 Instead of manually calculating markups or rekeying data into separate systems, Sage Intacct Construction lets you build smarter, faster, and more confidently. It uses cost codes, job types, and real-time cost visibility to price bids with precision.
It’s hard to win work and even harder to make it profitable if you’re bidding blind. Too many firms rely on static spreadsheets and disconnected systems to estimate project costs, without a clear view of how labour, materials, overhead, or past project performance actually stack up.
That’s where Sage Intacct Construction changes the game.
With real-time job costing, you can break down actual costs by project manager, cost code, job type, or customer, so you’re not just hoping your markup covers your margin. You’re bidding based on facts, not assumptions. Whether you’re targeting new work or evaluating which projects deliver the best ROI, having a clear view of true costs gives you the edge.
When your costing data is scattered, you either miss the win or win at the wrong price. Intacct brings it all together in one system: connected, current, and built to scale.
👉No more rekeying numbers from finance. No more back-and-forth between ops and estimating. Just clarity, consistency, and control, all in real time.
One of the biggest hidden costs in construction isn’t labour or materials—it’s miscommunication. When teams work in silos and spreadsheets, details slip through the cracks and deadlines get missed. Numbers don’t match. Deadlines get missed. And, too often, teams waste time reconciling information instead of moving the project forward.
With shared access to real-time financial data, everyone, from estimators to project managers to finance, can work from the same source of truth. Budget changes, cost updates, and approvals flow through connected, cloud-based workflows that eliminate version confusion and reduce delays.
No more “Which spreadsheet is the right one?” No more chasing updates over email. Just one source of truth: one system, one process, and one team working in sync.
👉 By connecting workflows across departments, Sage Intacct Construction helps you respond faster, collaborate better, and keep projects moving, without the spreadsheet nightmare.
Bidding more doesn’t mean winning more, especially if you’re guessing at costs, chasing outdated data, or spending time on jobs that aren’t a fit. A healthy bid-hit ratio isn’t just about volume. It’s about focus, precision, and knowing which projects are worth your time.
Sage Intacct Construction gives you the visibility to make better bid decisions and back them up with real numbers.
By analyzing historical job data, tracking true costs by job type or customer, and reviewing performance across estimators or project managers, you can spot which bids are most likely to convert and which ones are eating up your resources. Instead of relying on instinct or spreadsheets to guide your bid strategy, you’re working with live, accurate financials.
As Sage puts it in their eBook to improving your bid-hit ratio: smart bidding starts with knowing your numbers and putting in effort where it counts.
👉Whether you’re trying to boost win rates, protect margins, or simply avoid chasing low-return jobs, Sage Intacct Construction helps you bid smarter, not just faster.
Spreadsheet chaos doesn’t have to be your norm. From faster bids and accurate job costing to stronger collaboration and smarter pursuit decisions, Sage Intacct Construction helps you replace guesswork with real insight to win the right work, not just more work.
This blog was inspired by Sage’s eBook, Improve Your Bid-Hit Ratio: Top 5 Essentials of a Winning Bid Strategy. While this post focuses on four key areas where Sage Intacct Construction reduces spreadsheet chaos, the full guide offers even more practical insight, especially for construction firms looking to sharpen their bid strategy.
From Reactive to Proactive: Building a Culture of Cyber Resilience
Cybersecurity Awareness Month Spotlight
October marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a timely reminder that true protection isn’t about reacting to the latest threat — it’s about preparing for what’s next.
In today’s landscape, attacks are faster, more sophisticated, and increasingly targeted at small and midsize businesses. Automation, AI-driven phishing, and credential theft have made it easier than ever for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities. The organizations that thrive are those that move beyond basic protection and embrace cyber resilience — the ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from threats.
From Defense to Resilience
Traditional cybersecurity focuses on blocking attacks. Cyber resilience goes further — it prepares your people, processes, and technology to adapt and respond under pressure. It’s a proactive mindset that turns uncertainty into readiness.
Being resilient means:
This shift from reactive to proactive is what separates those who survive an incident from those who come out stronger because of it.
Aktion’s Six-Phase Cybersecurity Roadmap
During the “Before the Witching Hour: Fortify Your Digital Defenses with Aktion” webinar, Aktion’s cybersecurity experts outlined a clear, six-phase approach to building resilience — one that replaces chaos with structure and fear with confidence.
Each phase builds upon the last to create a layered, sustainable defense strategy:
The goal: ensure that when the lights flicker, everyone knows what to do.
Turn Awareness into Action
Knowing your risk is the first step — addressing it is the next. Aktion’s Cybersecurity Risk Management Checklist was designed to help organizations assess their current posture across all six roadmap phases.
Use it to identify where you stand and where to focus next. It includes checks such as:
Unchecked boxes reveal potential vulnerabilities — but they also mark opportunities to strengthen your defenses and improve readiness.
Building a Culture That Lasts
Cyber resilience isn’t a one-time project. It’s a culture built on awareness, accountability, and continuous improvement. Every employee plays a role in keeping data safe, every system adds to the defense, and every process supports faster recovery.
As Cybersecurity Awareness Month reminds us — awareness is the beginning, but resilience is the goal.
Download the Aktion Cybersecurity Risk Management Checklist to see how your organization measures up and take the next step toward a stronger, more secure future.
Between project delays, change orders, and job site curveballs, the last thing construction firms need is outdated software. Acumatica Construction Edition is built for mobility, real-time visibility, and fast decision-making, so your projects can keep moving from anywhere, on any device.
Unlike generic ERPs, Acumatica is purpose-built for construction. That means:
From Procore to ProEst to Excel and BuildingConnected, Acumatica integrates with the tools your team already knows. That means less retraining, fewer headaches, and smoother adoption across the office and job site.
Acumatica’s real-time dashboards and reporting give you a clear view of:
With everything in one place and updated in real time, you’re always equipped to catch issues early and stay on top of every project.
Whether you’re a growing GC or a seasoned contractor, Acumatica grows with you. Host it in the public or private cloud, expand without per-user fees, and customize the platform to fit your workflows. Built-in AI and automation reduce manual tasks and help you make faster, smarter decisions.
Acumatica Construction Edition is already trusted by contractors across trades and specialities, from general contractors to HVAC, roofing, excavation, and more. It’s modern, flexible, and ready for whatever your next project throws at you.
Whether you’re managing one crew or coordinating dozens of subs across multiple job sites, Acumatica gives you the tools to stay on schedule, on budget, and ahead of the usual job site headaches. It’s construction software that actually fits the way construction works.
This blog summarizes the Acumatica Construction Edition brochure, focusing on what matters most to busy construction firms. For the full feature set and customer examples, download the full Acumatica Construction Edition brochure.
For years, VMware has been the backbone of virtualization for organizations of every size. It was reliable, flexible, and accessible whether you were a Fortune 500 company or a regional business with a single rack of servers. That balance shifted in 2025, when Broadcom restructured VMware’s business model to focus more on the enterprise market, leaving many small and mid-sized businesses to re-evaluate their long-term strategies.
A License Model That Raises the Stakes
One of the biggest changes has been VMware’s move from a 16-core to a 72-core licensing minimum. For smaller environments, this adjustment translates into annual support costs that can climb from around $2,000 to $10,000 or more.
Other updates have reshaped how customers consume VMware technology:
Partner Program Realignment
Broadcom has also streamlined the VMware partner program, reducing the number of smaller resellers and emphasizing Select, Premier, and Pinnacle partners with advanced VMware Cloud Foundation capabilities.
This realignment ensures consistent enterprise expertise across VMware’s partner ecosystem, but it also means that many customers are now working with larger providers instead of local or regional IT firms. For some organizations, that can translate into:
Why It Matters
Broadcom’s strategy is designed to maximize the long-term value of its $69 billion VMware acquisition. The focus is clearly on enterprise-scale customers. For small and mid-market organizations, this signals that VMware may no longer be the most cost-effective or flexible choice over time.
The impact isn’t just financial. It’s about having the right level of support, predictability in operations, and flexibility to align IT decisions with business goals.
Exploring Alternatives
The positive outcome of this disruption is that it has accelerated interest in alternative platforms. Several options are already proving themselves as strong candidates for organizations looking to transition:
We’re already seeing increased adoption of Hyper-V, Scale Computing, and cloud-native migrations. Even Microsoft 365 services are filling roles for smaller organizations where VMware once served as the backbone.
A Moment to Plan With the Right Partner
Migrating away from VMware, or even optimizing how it fits into your environment today, isn’t something that can be done overnight. It takes planning, testing, and a clear roadmap. The landscape is shifting quickly, and waiting too long can mean facing higher costs, renewal surprises, or fewer partner options.
At Aktion, we understand the challenges this creates for small and mid-market organizations. Our team works every day with businesses navigating infrastructure changes, whether that means evaluating public cloud options, designing a hybrid strategy, or moving to hyperconverged platforms.
We believe the right path forward isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s about understanding your workloads, your budget, and your growth goals, then building a technology strategy that supports them. VMware remains a powerful solution for the right use cases, but the broader message is clear: organizations need to be proactive. Aktion is here to help guide you through the uncertainty, evaluate alternatives, and create a roadmap that keeps your IT aligned with the future of your business.
Margins are thin. Expectations are high. And one pricing mistake can wipe out the profit on an entire order.
For distributors juggling contract pricing, tiered discounts, and rebate programs, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks, especially when you’re relying on spreadsheets or legacy ERP systems not built for this level of complexity.
If your team is spending more time fixing errors than optimizing margins, it’s time to rethink your pricing infrastructure. In this blog, we’ll break down what’s driving today’s pricing chaos and how Infor CloudSuite Distribution helps you bring control, visibility, and profitability back to the process.
Today’s distribution landscape demands precision. Inflation, rising customer expectations, and tighter margins have made it harder to maintain profitability, especially when pricing and vendor programs are managed through manual workarounds.
Distributors are feeling the squeeze in the form of credit memos, inconsistent pricing, and lost rebate dollars. Yet they’re still expected to deliver accurate, flexible pricing across contracts, customer types, product categories, and timelines. Many also manage complex rebate programs with manufacturer-specific rules and cutoffs. But when those moving parts live in spreadsheets, custom reports, or bolt-on tools, risk creeps in, and as we’ve seen in our blog on disconnected systems, the cost of inefficiency adds up fast.
Disjointed systems lead to:
For distributors looking to scale, these aren’t just minor annoyances; they’re margin killers.
Pricing problems often start small: a one-off override, a missing rebate code, a manual price entry error. But over time, these small errors compound into significant operational and financial pain.
Manual processes create room for mistakes at every step: Sales reps may use outdated pricing, finance teams might struggle to track rebate accruals, and operations end up buried in credit memos, corrections, and back-and-forth emails just to keep things afloat.
But it’s not just time lost. It’s trust lost. Customers notice when pricing isn’t consistent. Suppliers get frustrated by missed rebate deadlines. And leadership is left guessing about true profitability because reporting can’t keep up with the complexity.
According to a 2024 distributor survey, 87% of distributors say rebates are critical to profitability, but only 43% track what they’ve earned from each manufacturer. That gap reflects just how easy it is for money to slip through the cracks and how urgently better systems are needed.
If your pricing system relies on manual fixes and crossed fingers, you’re putting both revenue and relationships at risk.
Infor CloudSuite Distribution was built for this kind of complexity, not as an add-on or workaround, but as a core capability. It gives distributors the tools to manage pricing and rebates with confidence, accuracy, and transparency.
Here’s how it makes a difference:
When pricing isn’t a guessing game, everyone benefits: your customers, your suppliers, and your bottom line.
If your team is constantly chasing pricing corrections or struggling to manage rebate programs manually, it’s time for a change. Infor CloudSuite Distribution gives distributors the tools to simplify complexity, protect margins, and operate with confidence.
Check out the Infor CloudSuite Distribution brochure or explore the top five reasons to move from SX.e to CloudSuite.
If audits feel scary and cyber risk keeps you up at night, this fast‑paced session is for you. On Thursday, October 16, 2025, 12:00–12:45 PM ET (9:00–9:45 AM PT) we’ll walk through a six‑stage, no‑nonsense roadmap that takes you from reactive firefighting to resilience—just in time for Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
Why a Roadmap (Not Just More Tools)
Tool sprawl, ad‑hoc projects, and last‑minute audit scrambles can turn your environment into haunted‑house IT. A structured roadmap fixes that. Each stage builds practical proof points (artifacts, reports, and remediations) that leadership and insurers actually care about – without detours or rework.
What You’ll Learn in this 45 Minutes Webinar
The 6‑Stage Risk → Resilience Roadmap
1) Discovery & Awareness — See what attackers already know.
Phishing Snapshot/Simulation, Dark Web Credential Check, BECA (Employee Secure Score). You’ll get quantified people/credential risk and an executive‑level readout.
2) Credential & Access Hardening — Close the crypt.
MFA rollout (incl. admins), password manager adoption, RDP/attack‑surface cleanup. Reduce privileged pathways and stop easy break‑ins.
3) Email & Communication Security — Keep the door shut.
SPF/DKIM/DMARC alignment, auto‑forward rule audit/monitoring. Block spoofing and silent exfiltration through inbox rules.
4) Data Resilience & Recovery — Raise your data from the grave.
Test restores, validate RPO/RTO, ensure cloud/endpoints are covered. Prove recovery is possible before ransomware strikes.
5) Baseline Security & Compliance — From hocus‑pocus → to hard evidence.
Tenant baseline (e.g., M365/Azure AD), firewall cleanup, public storage exposure checks. Produce artifacts auditors and insurers accept.
6) Resilience & Strategic Prep — When the lights flicker, everyone knows what to do.
Vuln scan + remediation sprint; Incident Response plan (roles, comms, call trees); tabletop test outline; policy pack mapped to CIS v8 IG1.
Register now (Oct 16, 12pm ET)
Who Should Attend
Why Now
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month – a perfect time to align leadership, budget, and projects around a clear plan. This session is short, practical, and geared toward immediate next steps, with take‑home checklists and a 30‑minute optional follow‑up briefing.
Event Details & Registration
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Walk into any plant office and you’ll see dashboards, spreadsheets, and reports everywhere. But ask five people which numbers actually matter, and you’ll get five different answers. And herein lies the real problem—while we don’t lack data, we lack clarity. When every department tracks its own version of “success,” decisions slow down, efficiency slips, and opportunities get missed. The truth is that manufacturers don’t need more metrics; they just need the ones that move the needle.
Metrics, when used effectively, don’t just measure performance; they drive decisions that boost efficiency, competitiveness, and profitability.
The right key performance indicators (KPIs) help manufacturers:
Not all measurement is good measurement. In fact, some of the most common mistakes manufacturers make are:
As Acumatica highlights in their eBook, tracking for the sake of tracking just creates noise. Metrics should clarify, not confuse.
Acumatica further states that KPIs should be grouped by function to provide clarity across the business—from finance and operations to sales, production, and supply chain. Here are a few of the most impactful examples:
The full guide dives into more detailed breakdowns, including purchasing, warehouse operations, and quality control, plus how to calculate each metric.
Here’s the catch: metrics don’t matter if they don’t lead to action. A pretty dashboard won’t cut costs or improve output. What makes metrics powerful is how you use them:
Manufacturing leaders don’t need more spreadsheets. They need a focused set of KPIs that create clarity, improve decisions, and drive results.
This blog was inspired by Acumatica’s eBook, Manufacturing Metrics That Matter. While this post highlights some of the most impactful KPIs for finance, operations, sales, and production, the full guide goes more in-depth for each of these topics and offers detailed definitions, formulas, and best practices to help manufacturers move beyond dashboards and turn metrics into action.
