Motorsport safety equipment specialist replaces Sage 100 with a browser-based ERP and doubles web sales in the first year.
HMS Motorsport has spent 30 years supplying motorsport safety equipment to drivers across NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula Drift, HSR historic racing and sports car and vintage racing. The company imports and distributes helmets, belts, seats and base layers, including Schroth belts from Germany and Schuberth helmets — the brand Max Verstappen wears in Formula One. HMS also manufactures custom belts for professional drivers and produces the radio electronics that go inside Schuberth helmets, which HMS sells back to Europe for global distribution.
Roughly 70 percent of the business is imported product. Two retail stores, six ecommerce websites and about 150 dealers round out the sales side. That mix of retail, distribution and manufacturing inside a 13-person company created an operational profile most ERP vendors were not built to handle.
“We were looking for somebody that could lead us down the road, that could take the time to understand our business so that they could make the necessary recommendations.” — Joe Marko, President Emeritus, HMS Motorsport
The Challenge: A Legacy System with No Path Forward
HMS was running Sage 100 hosted first through Rackspace and then through Parallels. It was slow, went down often and made clean reporting difficult. Exports to Excel came out with merged cells and disjointed structure. Getting usable data out of the system took real effort.
Joe Marko, HMS Motorsport’s President Emeritus, had a longer history with the software than most customers. Thirty years earlier, in his prior career as Director of Systems for Sheraton Corporation, he had bought and then discarded MAS 90 — the same product line that eventually became Sage 100. “It was technology that was from the early eighties and I said, ‘that can’t be our future,’” Joe stated.
Attending Acumatica Summit helped HMS see a different way forward. They saw a product that had a clear path into the future and Joe could speak directly with developers on the show floor to dive deeper into the roadmap on a function level. Three summits in, the team was convinced.
Why Acumatica and Why SWK Technologies
HMS needed a browser-based system that could be accessed from home, from a phone, from the trackside sales truck, or from any PC. It needed to handle multi-currency purchasing in euros and pounds against sales in dollars, complex pricing for 150 dealers with annual commitments and a mix of retail POS, ecommerce, distribution and light manufacturing.
HMS also needed a partner willing to sit with a small company and untangle a complicated operation. SWK Technologies took on the project with a team that included project manager Christina, developer Chandra and consultant Justin. “They were shocked at how complicated our little operation is,” Joe said. The team also learned early that HMS did not fit the standard model. All 13 employees at HMS are users, not just a back-office finance group.
The Results
Doubled Web Sales After the Shopify Connector Went Live
HMS migrated its six ecommerce sites onto Shopify and connected them to Acumatica Cloud ERP through the Shopify connector. The migration took about four months. Comparing January of the prior year to January of this year, HMS saw a 100 percent increase in web sales.
Financial Modeling Cut in Half with Velixo
Tariffs and currency conversion had forced HMS into large, hand-built pricing models. Using Velixo against Acumatica data, Joe cut the size of the pricing models by roughly half and rebuilt them in less time than the old workbooks required.
A First-Ever Company Budget
HMS had never run a formal budget. Once the company converted to an employee ownership trust, that changed. The finance team built a monthly budget in Acumatica, linked comparison budget data to actuals and produced year-to-date reporting inside a day and a half. What used to be inaccessible is now standard.
Clean Data and Real-Time Reporting
Exports to Excel now come out clean, without merged cells or manual clean-up. Users can log in from any device, which suits a small company where owners, purchasing, CRM and finance all touch the system daily.
100 Percent User Adoption
Christina, the SWK project manager, was surprised by one thing early on. HMS had no internal resistance to the change. Everyone wanted off the old system. “We worked very hard to make sure that everybody understood that this is going to make all of our lives easier and everybody’s got to be on board,” Joe said. One purchasing manager, Zach, dug so deeply into the platform that the rest of the team nicknamed him “Zach-cumatica.”
That level of adoption changed how HMS engages with SWK support. Calls to Eric on the SWK support team are not for basics. They are for the last ten percent of a problem HMS has already worked through on its own. At the Acumatica Summit, Joe sat down with SWK’s Brian Rutledge and Justin for 30 minutes and resolved three of the five open items HMS had brought to the show.
Looking Ahead
HMS is already on Acumatica 2025 R2. The team upgraded early to get the new UI, the expanded generic inquiries and access to the AI assistant. Acumatica Payments is live and the company is starting to work through the customer portal and AI-driven customer engagement features. Different team members are picking up different areas: Zach on purchasing, Cody on CRM, others on budgeting and finance.
Advice for Small Businesses Considering the Same Move
Joe’s advice to any small business evaluating a similar ERP change comes down to three things: find the right VAR, get every employee on board before go-live and require the initial scoping meeting to happen on-site rather than over video calls. HMS’s one regret was doing that scoping remotely, which cost a couple of extra weeks and left a handful of decisions harder to make than they needed to be.
“I put a lot of pressure on SWK when we started because I said, I don’t want any hiccups. They absolutely delivered and we couldn’t be more thrilled.” — Joe Marko, President Emeritus, HMS Motorsport
