Construction ERP Case Study PURIS Builds an Infrastructure for Sustainable Growth with Acumatica + NexTec

Their Story

With an estimated 2.2 million miles of sewage lines and 1.8 million miles of potable water infrastructure in need of repair or replacement across the U.S., digging up aging pipes is a costly and disruptive problem. PURIS specializes in cost-effective, time-efficient, and environmentally sustainable trenchless pipeline rehabilitation. Their innovative solutions allow communities to renew their critical infrastructure while minimizing disruption to its residents and businesses.

Home to an industry-leading family of brands with over 150 combined years in business, PURIS brings deep technical expertise, in-house manufacturing capabilities, and vertically integrated operations to provide comprehensive, turn-key pipe rehabilitation services. Headquartered just north of Houston, in The Woodlands, Texas, PURIS has over 1,250 employees and 19 major regional offices across the United States and Canada.

“Basically, our portfolio of pipe rehabilitation technologies enables us to replace or renew aged underground pipes without having to dig them up, which is dramatically faster and more cost-effective for communities than a full open cut dig,” explains Brandon McNair, Vice President of Technology at PURIS. “Trenchless pipe rehabilitation is better for the community and the environment by reducing fuel usage and greenhouse gas.”

PURIS Faced Infrastructure Challenges of Its Own

PURIS’s commitment to innovation extends to its internal systems and technology infrastructure, which led the company to invest in Acumatica Cloud ERP to manage its business operations. However, the company’s choice of ERP implementation partners prevented it from realizing the full benefits of Acumatica.

“When I joined PURIS about four years ago, the company had already been through two failed Acumatica implementations,” McNair explains. “This was never a reflection on Acumatica itself, which is an excellent product. The issues stemmed from the Value-Added Resellers (VARs) the company engaged to implement and support it — they simply lacked the construction-industry experience and best practices needed to make the system work as intended.”

PURIS sought a fresh start with NexTec Group, a gold-certified Acumatica implementation partner with a deep understanding of construction with a proven track record in that space.

PURIS Renews Its Commitment to Acumatica with NexTec

“When I initially joined PURIS, the company was managing project accounting almost entirely outside the Acumatica system,” McNair says. “In construction, you generally have POC (percentage of completion) accounting and PURIS was conducting all POC accounting outside of the system. They were just using the base implementation of AR, AP, and GL in Acumatica to track these metrics and didn’t even have approvals set up in the system. This rudimentary process was accomplished via email, paperwork, and word of mouth in some cases.”

The root cause, McNair explains, was a previous VAR that didn’t understand the construction industry. “The VAR we worked with didn’t know POC accounting and didn’t understand construction. Their expertise was in manufacturing, but we never got that far with them — we still needed the core functions working properly first.”

Finding a Partner Who Understood Construction

McNair was introduced to NexTec through a referral. “My boss had a friend and he was like, ‘Hey, we’re using NexTec over here. They’re great. Give them a call.’”

“Within the next 6 months, NexTec was onboarded, and we (PURIS) were at the end of a major acquisition that more than doubled the company’s headcount from about 450 to approximately 900-950 employees virtually overnight. Being able to sustain that level of rapid growth, you have to have scalability in your systems and processes as paper processes do not work,” says McNair. “We needed a VAR partner that would challenge our current processes and push us towards the best-in-class industry standard.”

With help from NexTec, PURIS was able to get their Acumatica implementation back on track, going live with Acumatica on the accounting side in January 2023. The Acumatica projects module and revenue recognition customizations soon followed.

Projects: The Single Biggest Point of Turnaround

For McNair, the Acumatica projects module was the biggest transformation. The improvement in job cost visibility was dramatic.

“We went from being able to track a job in 7 to 10 buckets of cost to some 80 to 100 buckets of cost. This provided a much more granular and detailed output for tracking job costs. It was a night and day difference for the financial side of the business. Without Acumatica and NexTec, we never could have gotten there.”

When asked to name the single biggest benefit of Acumatica for PURIS, McNair doesn’t hesitate: “I’d have to say it’s projects. It’s our critical path. Everything else is supplementary to the process that brings money in the door and the services that we provide. Without that, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do today. I couldn’t imagine maintaining even a single project at that level of detail on a spreadsheet, much less our regional project managers running numerous complex projects at once.”

McNair admits this change didn’t come without some initial resistance. “However, by diving into each concern and evaluating the pros and cons of each approach, organizational buy-in was achieved! It’s about not being afraid to challenge internal assumptions, and leading people down the right path.”

Expanding Beyond the Core

Today, PURIS runs its core Acumatica AR, AP, and GL modules across accounting, billing, and AP departments daily, supported by approval workflows that simply didn’t exist before. The projects module is used company-wide by Regional Project Managers and Operational Finance Managers, who work together to track job costs and manage the Estimate to Complete process required for POC accounting.

NexTec also helped PURIS implement manufacturing for its dry liner production group. “Although we continue to make improvements, this implementation has been very successful in tracking the production orders and providing useful data that allows us to better manage this manufacturing operation.”

A Partner Who Speaks Up

For McNair, what sets NexTec apart isn’t just technical or product knowledge — it’s a willingness to be direct, even when the answer is, “I don’t know.”

“The knowledge, expertise, and professionalism that has come across from NexTec’s people, and their absolute transparency has instilled a sense of confidence in our team. It’s reassuring to know that we are working with the right partner that understands our business needs and makes them a priority.”

“This approach eased concerns during the recent migration of our customer relationship management software in which we transitioned from Salesforce to Acumatica.” In addition, McNair also credits NexTec’s manufacturing expertise with winning over a skeptical group at one of PURIS’s manufacturing facilities, which had been through a failed Oracle NetSuite implementation under prior ownership. “NexTec’s consulting team was pivotal in transitioning this team from managing this business on spreadsheets to Acumatica quickly and successfully.”

The Road Ahead

Today, roughly 150-200 employees across PURIS’s corporate office and regional locations use Acumatica daily, and PURIS’s Acumatica roadmap continues to expand. Beyond the ongoing Salesforce-to-Acumatica CRM migration, the company plans to extend manufacturing functionality to seven additional facilities across the country by the end of the year. McNair is also working to bring P&L and balance sheet generation — currently handled through a separate business intelligence tool the company has outgrown — back into Acumatica.

Looking ahead, McNair sees NexTec as a strategic long-term partner for PURIS and would recommend them to other companies without hesitation:

“Whenever I have conversations with other companies and they ask what makes NexTec stand out, the first thing I tell them is, ‘It’s the people,’ every single time. Even if they don’t have an immediate answer, they will research and respond with a viable solution. This level of trust and collaboration from our VAR partner is invaluable.”

McNair’s advice to organizations who are early in their own ERP journey is to not be afraid to challenge the status quo. “Ask a bunch of questions. Don’t let things sit. Just because somebody doesn’t want to do something a different way doesn’t mean their way is always the best option. Acumatica is going to help you — it’s a fantastic ERP system that has been critical to our company’s success. Asking the right questions upfront and having a trusted partner like NexTec is critical to achieving a successful implementation.”