A 50-Year-Old Reloading Equipment Manufacturer Modernizes Its ERP, Its Sales Workflows and Its Approach to Internal Change Management
Dillon Precision Products, an Arizona-based manufacturer of ammunition reloading equipment for the shooting, hunting and competitive shooting industries, was preparing for its 50th anniversary when its Director of Operations, Austin Jenkins, made the call to replace a legacy ERP the company had run for more than a decade. The deciding moment came when a new general manager with a financial background asked Austin to walk him through how a basic margin report was being produced. The answer required showing him the legacy system. The conversation that followed ended with a single instruction: this needs to change.
What followed was a nine-month implementation that Austin scoped, scheduled and hit on the date he set, working with SWK Technologies to deploy Acumatica Cloud ERP. The same playbook is now bringing the rest of the Dillon family of companies onto a single platform.
“We would not be successful without [SWK]. I see us having a very long relationship together.” – Austin Jenkins, Director of Operations, Dillon Precision Products
An Objective Evaluation
Austin ran the ERP selection as a cross-departmental decision, not content to throw it all on IT. The internal team had a long-standing relationship with their existing VAR and had significant respect for them, but Austin was committed to evaluating the next platform on its own merits. By the end of the exploration phase, the consensus across departments was unanimous: Acumatica was the right fit. Dillon signed with SWK Technologies at year-end.
Austin wanted a reseller that understood Dillon’s business, took the time to learn its day-to-day and brought enough cross-module depth that one phone call covered accounting, manufacturing and operations questions without a handoff outside the relationship. “After the first couple of conversations with your team, it was very apparent that you guys were as invested in our success as we were,” Austin told the SWK team.
Treating the Internal Team as the Customer
After more than a decade on the legacy system, Dillon had built a way of doing things that worked and any change to it carried friction. Austin handled the user adoption challenge by reframing it, approaching his team as Dillon would a customer. He listened to the day-to-day work each department actually did, asked each one what its end goal was and used that goal as a fixed reference point through the rest of the project. “Stick the end goal in a peg board,” as he described it. “That’s your guiding light.”
SWK’s project manager, Leia, ran the implementation through Rocket Lane with structured task lists, weekly checkpoints and 15- to 30-minute one-on-one calls where Austin could surface whatever was in front of him that week. The format gave him a single point of accountability and a place to be honest about what was working. When questions came up that crossed different fields, SWK pulled in accounting and manufacturing specialists from inside the firm rather than sending Austin elsewhere.
A Quiet Go-Live
Austin set a nine-month target at kickoff and built the implementation calendar around it. Data preparation took the bulk of the effort going into go-live, with the team focused on keeping legacy issues out of the new system rather than carrying them forward. The day itself arrived with a couple of minor hiccups that the joint team resolved on the spot. By 5 p.m., Austin was at home thinking it had to be a setup — that some storm was coming he had not seen yet. The storm never came. By the third day after go-live, Austin called Leia and told her the team was “past the hand-holding phase.”
Sales Workflows That Used to Be Manual
The integrations available in Acumatica eliminated the manual data entry that had defined the sales team’s day. Amazon orders, ecommerce orders, shipping rate calculations and customer confirmation emails moved from manual processes to automated workflows running through the ERP. The orders the sales team used to type into a screen are now in the system on arrival. The hours that came back went into customer relationships and into getting product out the door faster. “It was hours of work before,” Austin said. “Now it’s a click of a button.”
The drill-down available in the Acumatica financial management suite replaced a reporting cycle that previously moved through spreadsheets, screenshots and email. Senior leadership pulls its own reports against the general ledger and clicks into any line on a financial statement to see exactly what makes it up. The new GM whose questions started the project no longer waits on Austin to produce them.
A Template for the Rest of Dillon
Dillon Precision is the core company, but the business also runs Dillon Optics and a third sister company on separate systems. In January, Dillon Optics went live on Acumatica using the implementation playbook that came out of the first project. Every workflow Austin’s team built for Dillon Precision became a template the next company could inherit and the accounting team that previously operated across multiple platforms now logs into one.
A working dialogue with the SWK team identified RateLinx as the next opportunity to expand the Acumatica footprint, with a shipping integration scheduled to go live shortly. As Dillon prepares new product lines that it expects to broaden the company’s reach well beyond reloading and into the wider shooting industry, the foundation is in place to manufacture them, cost them accurately, and scale.
SWK Enables Success for Dillon Precision
Austin Jenkins, Director of Operations, Dillon Precision Products: “You guys set us up for success. I see us having a very long relationship together.”
