Mud Bay began in 1988 with a simple farm store in Olympia, Washington. Initially, they sold many items including hog food, fertilizer, and even locally grown oysters straight out of Puget Sound. After seeing massive growth from the late ‘90s into the 2000s, they opened stores in Oregon and changed their business plan from simply just a retail chain to a high-quality pet supply distribution business.
Mud Bay relied on an outdated Point-of-Sale (POS) system, which served multiple functions including retail transactions as well as demand planning, purchasing, inventory, pricing, warehouse management, and COGS. As time went on, they realized that their system was growing with them, and their tool had eventually become a risk to their company.
They soon also realized that along with the need to replace their POS system, they also needed a distribution-focused ERP that could handle their pricing, WMS needs, and demand planning. Ultimately, their business separated the frontend POS from the backend ERP system and opted for a best-of-breed strategy.
Mud Bay is a retailer with 64 stores and a Distribution Center, they were looking for a strong wholesale system. Since Mud Bay does self-distribution on nearly half of its product lines through its Distribution Center, the ability to operate its supply chain as a distributor was not only desirable but critical to future success.
The things that stood out with CloudSuite Distribution over other solutions, were the clean and fast UX/UI interface, the multiple options to do data maintenance including robust bulk data maintenance capabilities, intuitive demand planning, the extensibility of the system through their APIs, and the powerful workflow capabilities with Infor OS.
The primary project owners and stakeholders have a longstanding professional relationship with members of the Aktion team from their previous positions. When Mud Bay decided to look at Infor CloudSuite Distribution, they reached out directly to the Aktion team to initiate discovery. Infor had offered other partner options but because of their relationship with Aktion and the positive results that were achieved previously, they chose Aktion as their partner of choice and chose Infor CSD as their preferred ERP
The relationships between Mud Bay and Aktion have grown deeper as time has gone on. The team of implementers and trainers involved in the project have become a part of the Mud Bay team. This collaboration has paved the way for future success by reducing the level of frustration and stress during the Go Live process. “Aktion knows our setup and challenges, they know our strengths and weaknesses, and most importantly, they know the people. We cannot speak highly enough of the people at Aktion and their support as we took baby steps to get going with the Infor solution and gain the competence to drive the new system on our own.” Christi said.
If you’re wondering what kind of impact a modern, cloud‑based ERP could have on your organization, Aktion brings the industry expertise, honest guidance, and technical depth to help you get there.
We don’t just implement software — we help you build the operational backbone that supports your next stage of growth.
Aktion Customer Success and Insights Team—industry specialists who partner with customers to document the outcomes of successful implementations and the stories behind them.
