How Lifeway Mobility Deployed Acumatica ERP Software Across Seven Offices in Under a Year
When a company grows through acquisitions, every new office comes with its own set of tools, processes, and data formats. Consolidating that patchwork into a single view of the business is one of the hardest operational challenges an acquisition-driven company can face. Spreadsheets pile up, reporting takes days instead of minutes, and no one is fully confident the numbers are right.
Lifeway Mobility, a Connecticut-based provider of accessibility solutions, hit that wall after just a few acquisitions. Each new location brought legacy systems that couldn't talk to each other, and the growing tangle of disconnected software threatened to slow down the very growth strategy the company was built on.
In this article, we're highlighting how an Acumatica customer, Lifeway Mobility, replaced six disconnected software packages with a unified cloud ERP platform, deploying it across seven offices in under a year with new locations going live in as little as 30 days. This story is shared for educational purposes to help ERP buyers understand what's possible with Acumatica.
Company Overview: Lifeway Mobility
Lifeway Mobility supplies ramps, stairlifts, wheelchair lifts, ceiling lifts, transfer aids, elevators, and bath safety solutions to individuals and businesses across multiple states. Founded in 2015 by Tim Burfield, Paul Bergantino, and Dave Hess, the company saw an opportunity in a healthcare niche historically fragmented by small, independent suppliers.
Backed by a private equity firm, Lifeway has grown primarily through acquisitions. Over its first five years, the company expanded from its Connecticut and Rhode Island base into Indiana, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Minnesota. With approximately 100 employees, field service teams installing equipment in customers' homes, and plans to become the leading accessibility solutions provider nationwide, Lifeway needed systems that could scale as fast as the business itself.
The Challenge: Six Disconnected Systems Across a Growing Network of Offices
Because each Lifeway office was established through acquisition, every location arrived with its own legacy technology stack. There was no standard platform across the company.
The resulting patchwork was significant:
Most offices used QuickBooks as their system of record, but none were connected
CRM tools varied between HubSpot and Sugar depending on the office
Order management relied on separate platforms like Med Force or Proxy
Scheduling lived in Outlook or Google Calendar
Document management was scattered across Dropbox and other web-based providers
At headquarters alone, employees toggled between six different software packages. Getting consolidated statements and reporting across the portfolio required manual exports from each system, followed by hours of work to reconcile data that was never formatted the same way.
As Bryan Mullen, SVP of Shared Services, put it, there was no way to get an apples-to-apples comparison across the business. The status quo wasn't going to cut it for a company with plans to double in size.
Evaluating ERP Platforms for an Acquisition-Driven Business
Lifeway Mobility's requirements were shaped by its growth model. The company needed a platform that could absorb new acquisitions quickly, support field service teams working in customers' homes, run entirely in the cloud to eliminate local IT infrastructure, and scale without per-user licensing costs.
The team evaluated options and came within hours of signing with Oracle NetSuite. But before the deal closed, a local Connecticut partner, CAL Business Solutions, suggested they look at Acumatica.
Despite Acumatica's lower name recognition at the time, several factors won the team over, including:
Usage-based pricing that gave Lifeway the flexibility to scale affordably
A mobile application purpose-built for field service workers
Cloud-native architecture that aligned with the company's strategy to be location-agnostic
The ability to deploy new locations quickly after each acquisition
For a company that planned to keep acquiring, the platform's ability to onboard new offices without lengthy implementation cycles was just as important as the technology itself. Lifeway needed an ERP solution that could move at the pace of its deal flow.
Why Lifeway Mobility Chose Acumatica
Lifeway Mobility selected Acumatica's Financial Management, Advanced Inventory and Order Management, Customer Management, and Field Service Management modules, working with Acumatica ERP partner CAL Business Solutions for implementation.
According to the Acumatica-published case study, the first office went live in just five months. After confirming the platform operated as expected, Lifeway began lighting up additional locations at an extraordinary pace, standing up a new office every 30 to 45 days. All seven offices were live within a year.
To put that speed into perspective, Mullen had previously overseen a CRM deployment at a Fortune 50 insurance firm. That project took two and a half years to deploy a single office across a similar six-location footprint. With Acumatica, Lifeway deployed all six in one year, and later added its Minneapolis office remotely during the COVID pandemic.
The Results: 5 Benefits of Deploying Cloud ERP for a Multi-Location Business
After replacing six disconnected software packages with Acumatica, Lifeway Mobility gained the operational visibility, field mobility, and scalability its growth strategy demanded. These five outcomes highlight how a unified platform transformed the business.
1. Real-Time Visibility That Turned Hours of Work Into a Single Click
Under the old system, consolidating data from multiple offices required manual exports, reformatting, and reconciliation. By the time a report was finished, the information was already stale.
With Acumatica, data consolidation that previously took hours now happens with a single button click. Leadership tracks four key metrics in real time: new business opportunities, estimates and their value, new orders or activations, and completed orders. These metrics trend on a day-by-day and week-by-week basis, giving leadership the visibility to make faster, more confident decisions across all seven locations.
2. Field Teams Equipped With Everything They Need On-Site
Lifeway's business depends on field employees who deliver and install accessibility equipment in customers' homes. Before Acumatica, those teams often arrived without complete information, leading to phone calls back to the office, time spent searching for documents, and occasionally installing something that didn't match customer expectations.
With Acumatica's mobile application, field technicians now arrive at each job site with photos, change orders, installation instructions, and all relevant information at their fingertips. The result is fewer errors, less wasted time, and a significantly better customer experience. Mullen estimated that hours of work on a weekly basis have been eliminated, allowing technicians to spend more time focused on the customer.
3. Rapid Deployment of New Acquisitions in 30 to 60 Days
For an acquisition-driven company, the speed at which a new location can be brought onto the platform is critical. Legacy tools and processes at newly acquired offices need to be replaced quickly, or the data fragmentation problem just keeps growing.
With Acumatica, Lifeway can bring a new organization onboard and have it fully integrated within 30 to 60 days of closing a deal. That kind of deployment speed turns ERP software from a back-office function into a strategic growth asset that directly supports the acquisition timeline.
4. Zero IT Footprint and a Seamless Pivot to Remote Work
Each of Lifeway's seven locations operates with zero local IT infrastructure. There are no on-premises servers, no VPN connections to manage, and no hardware to maintain. Everything runs through Acumatica's cloud platform hosted on Amazon Web Services.
That architecture proved its value during the pandemic. Lifeway deployed its largest office, the Chicago branch, entirely remotely during the coronavirus outbreak. All training, data migration, and post-launch support happened without anyone being on-site. The Minneapolis office was later deployed the same way. The company pivoted to work-from-home without a moment of interruption.
5. Affordable Scaling Through Usage-Based Pricing
As a company planning to double its size, Lifeway needed an ERP platform that wouldn't penalize growth with escalating per-user licensing fees. Acumatica's consumption-based pricing model was a deciding factor, giving Lifeway the flexibility to add employees, offices, and acquired businesses without triggering unpredictable cost increases.
The platform also eliminated six separate software subscriptions and the IT overhead that came with maintaining them. By consolidating onto a single cloud-based system, Lifeway reduced technology costs while gaining significantly more capability.
Why Lifeway Mobility's Story Matters for ERP Buyers
This company's experience highlights a challenge that any acquisition-driven business will recognize: Every new office you add is also a new set of disconnected tools, processes, and data formats that make it harder to run the company as one unified operation.
This Acumatica testimonial shows how a purpose-built cloud ERP platform can turn that challenge into a competitive advantage. Six disconnected software packages became one unified system. Reporting that took hours became a single click. New acquisitions that could have languished on legacy tools for months were live on the platform in 30 to 60 days. And when a global pandemic forced the entire company to work remotely, the transition was seamless.
For businesses growing through acquisition, the right ERP platform is more than just an operational upgrade. It's the infrastructure that makes the growth strategy possible.
Disclosure: Lifeway Mobility is an Acumatica customer that implemented the platform with a different Acumatica ERP partner. This story is shared for educational purposes and does not reflect a Stellar One member engagement.