The Acumatica ERP Podcast Recap: Summit 2026 – Redefining Response in Construction Services

Acumatica Summit 2026 saw over 3,000 Acumatica Community members descend on Seattle, and our growing base of customers was the largest group represented. One of those customers was Patryk Kubiszyn, Vice President, Systems & Processes at Smith & Long.

For Patryk, the best part of Summit is the Acumatica Marketplace. His first experience with our marketplace was in 2024, where the vast array of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) exhibiting innovative, third-party applications opened his eyes to the massive number of solutions that seamlessly connect with Acumatica and that could help him solve his real-world business challenges.

“The marketplace actually blew my mind,” he says. “We found a vendor that solved that problem [poor communication of training material] for us [and] that integrated directly with Acumatica.”

Patryk was eager to spend time in the Summit 2026 Marketplace, but before he did, I was privileged to sit down with him and record Episode 8 of The Acumatica ERP Podcast. During our conversation, he talked about Smith & Long’s service promise and shared how the multi-trade construction services company powerfully transformed after implementing Acumatica Construction Management.

Smith & Long’s Response Mindset and Why the Construction Company Needed Acumatica

Smith & Long is a Canadian construction services company that handles multi-trade electrical (including high voltage installations, substations, pole lines, and maintenance), HVACR, plumbing, and civil engineering services. According to Patryk, the successful company operates with a “response mindset.”

“[It’s] not just about speed necessarily. It is about agility, about accountability, and most importantly, it’s about the precision of the solutions that we give our customers at the end of the day,” he explains. “So, the response is to make sure that when anybody needs something from us, even though we might not be able to give them the answer or the final solution today, at least we let them know that they’re being taken care of.”

Pride in its communication as well as in its ability to blend tradition with innovation likely played a part in the over 90-year-old company’s decision to invest in advanced technology. Patryk, whose role is to make sure the company can sustain scalability and growth, says Smith & Long’s two versions of an old system—that worked together but didn’t speak to each other—also played a huge role.

With data in too many places, decision making was difficult. “It’s stagnant…and you start building your processes or you’re starting to change your processes and shoehorning them to make sure they work with the system.”

Looking back, he says they were operating in the midst of chaos, but in the middle of it, he and the Smith & Long team didn’t realize how much of a bottleneck the disconnected systems had become for the business—until they did.

“It just dawned upon the company that for us to achieve our growth, for us to keep growing, we needed a system that was going to grow with us. And the old system was just not doing it.”

He adds that expanding the volume of transactions and changing their processes wasn’t going to ensure the growth they wanted but would, instead, add complexity. So, they decided to “revamp” their system and their processes with a whole new system that  had to be:

• Flexible
• Escalable
• Customizable (without slowing the business down)

As it turns out, Acumatica’s ERP software for construction fit the description to a ‘T’. “[Acumatica is] extremely flexible with what you can do on the front end and the backend low-code, no-code situation. It was a really great tool for us to jump onto, and when we could see how we could keep changing all of the workflows and processes in incremental steps as we needed for the business, it was a no brainer for us.”

Lessons in How to Ensure a Successful ERP Implementation

Finding a solution that checked all three requirement boxes was the first step in their digital transformation, and the second step was to implement it—something Patryk knew was not going to be easy.

“Changing an ERP system…is probably one of the most significant changes that any company can go through,” he says. “And knowing that there’s going to be a lot of challenges, we had to treat it more than just a software change. We had to treat it as an organizational change.”

What did this mean for Smith & Long? It meant doing something they already excelled at: communicating.

“[We] had to do a lot of communication and explaining why the business needed this change. It wasn’t just about changing the system for the sake of using something more modern. We had to modernize our processes. We had to become scalable. We had to become flexible. We needed to keep up with our growing business.”

Through departmental champions, it was made clear to every Smith & Long stakeholder that their old system was holding them back. They also provided exhaustive training, and during the training, they were able to incorporate employee feedback directly into Acumatica’s flexible solution.

“We were actually able to do these micro changes during the implementation,” he says. “[It] made the adoption a lot smoother for us.”

So did the benefits that came with implementing Acumatica. One of the biggest benefits was Smith & Long’s ability to make objective, data-driven decisions based on accurate, centralized information and not based on manual processes and gut feelings.

“Taking out a lot of that manual effort to pull the data together…has probably been the biggest impact and certainly has helped with the growth year to year since we’ve been able to launch.”

Another benefit was the acceptance of change in the company. The result of this change management process is a company that now is requesting and implementing changes and is willing to quickly shift gears, which has helped enable the team to become more adaptive and able to support their clients who are exposed to new technologies and requirements.

“Acumatica, in a way, has more than just opened the door to reporting and decision making. It has built this cultural enablement to adapt with them.”

Optimizing Acumatica and Utilizing AI for Long-Term Success

The Smith & Long team is now fully operating on Acumatica, but they’re not standing still. Instead, they’re looking to optimize Acumatica by continuing to deepen their workflow improvements and tapping into our automation capabilities.

“By having everything in one system, we get to concentrate on the one system,” he says. “Whether it’s financial, operational, CRM, customer-facing portals, etc., it’s really easy to now stitch things together, see what is working, what is not working, and make those changes.”

Patryk’s goal is to elevate Smith & Long employees from focusing on data entry to adding value with the help of Acumatica’s extensive tools, including using business events and being able to rewrite their generic inquiries, dashboards, reports, and workflows.

“It’s really going into that next level, and every year, as [Acumatica] is releasing the new, major releases, there’s new tools, and modules are ever changing, so a lot of these quickly make it into our processes, and we’re really taking advantage of it wherever we can.”

They’re also taking advantage of Acumatica’s integrated AI features, such as our AI Agents to connect their data dots and anomaly detection to help flag information or processes they didn’t even know they needed to pay attention to. Benefits like these have Patryk excited about the future of AI, who says his arms are wide open to Acumatica’s ongoing innovations.

“[I’m] very eager to continue seeing the integration, not only for automation and time saving but also for better data reporting.”

Thank you to Patryk for sharing his views about the benefits of implementing Acumatica ERP (the right way) and for providing insights into how ERP and AI advancements are helping businesses like Smith & Long thrive. Listen to the entire episode to hear everything he had to say and subscribe to The Acumatica ERP Podcast to learn even more about practical innovation for growing businesses.