Continental D.I.A. Diamond Products

From the founder’s enthusiasm to be a craftsman to a small stone fabrication shop

to a desire to deliver innovative and cost-effective tooling, Continental D.I.A. Diamond Products, Inc. was built. It all began with Founder Vincent Salemi’s vision as an Italian immigrant with a passion for working with his hands.

CDIA attributes their success to their brand TERMINATOR®, which first came to be known as a result of their large circular blades. The brand has grown to globally offer tooling solutions for virtually every aspect of the stone fabrication process. Their products include tools for cutting, polishing, grinding and more.

“The Terminator name carries a high level of quality that can be seen throughout all of the products that we offer to customers,” said Michael Salemi, Marketing Manager.

Salemi continued with what sets them apart from competitors…

“Being that we manufacture our own products, we also handle quality control and service, which gives us more control over the entire scope of our business.”

CDIA experienced rapid growth when they started selling direct to the end users.

“We basically had to redraw our business model. We went from having 10-15 customers to now having thousands,” said Salemi.

Growth brought the need for better inventory control

“At the time we were looking for a solution, QuickBooks didn’t really have an inventory feature. That’s why we were trying to find software to control our inventory,” said Jessica Chang, Office Manager.

She continued…

“We were looking to control and monitor what we received and what was going out, be able to do a year-end inventory, and have accuracy in our inventory. Other functions we did in QuickBooks and it was fine – but there was just no way to do an inventory count.”

The company looked into many software solutions, researching them, as well as testing each one through demos to help determine which inventory solution would fit their needs.

We found Acctivate to be very reasonable and easy to understand compared to other software on the market,” said Chang.

She continued…

We did some research into other software solutions and then we found Acctivate. I did a free trial and really liked it – Acctivate is very easy to understand, logical, and user-friendly. I liked that if you open a customer, you can see their purchased history, invoices, and orders.

With the other software solutions that were also recommended by QuickBooks, it was complicated and looked confusing. For instance, if you opened a customer, it was hard to find order-related history. All the different icons were mixed – it was busy looking. But Acctivate was very straightforward.”

Straightforward system, sophisticated features

Acctivate’s inventory management features have helped them by saving time and providing accurate information.

Acctivate keeps us on top of our inventory – we know what we have on hand and what we sold,” said Chang.

Overall CDIA finds Acctivate to be an effective system for inventory, sales order management, order fulfillment and purchasing. They have ten employees who use Acctivate daily.

All of us can log on at the same time. We have two servers – one is for internal use and the other one is external for all the sales people, who access our remote server. The sales people are in a few states and if they want to access Acctivate to look at what they sold, what products are available, or at customers, they can login to the remote server. We have no problems.”

Assemblies

We use Acctivate’s Assembly feature quite often – it’s definitely very helpful. We use it to put a few components together to make certain products. It’s very convenient and easy to use – just one click and you can assemble an item.”

Barcoding & Mobile

CDIA uses Acctivate’s Mobile Inventory Receiving and Mobile Order Picking to manage inventory and orders. They process about 30-50 orders a day.

The mobile features in Acctivate are very handy and convenient. We have two devices – one for shipping out orders and one for receiving orders.”

Chang on Acctivate’s mobile features…

Acctivate’s Mobile Order Picking helps with accuracy because if we just read the barcode, there’d definitely be some human errors. With mobile order picking, we can verify inventory with the handheld and we get more accuracy with what we’re shipping out.”

Sales Order Management

Acctivate is where we start all of our orders and enter invoicing, but for the accounting function, the information is transported to QuickBooks.

The synchronization between Acctivate and QuickBooks is very helpful. Basically, all of our information in Acctivate is synchronized with QuickBooks for financial purposes.”

Sales Tax Management

In addition to synchronizing with QuickBooks, Acctivate integrates with many third-party solutions. One such solution is Avalara’s AvaTax, a cloud-based sales tax automation solution.

Chang on the benefits of AvaTax…

AvaTax definitely saves us a lot of time because it’s impossible to calculate the taxes ourselves because we are involved in a few states – it’s a big saver.”

Order Fulfillment

And when an order is ready to ship, CDIA uses Acctivate’s Shipping Workstation Interface…

The integration of Acctivate with UPS and USPS software saves us a lot of time by importing shipping information.”

Reporting

CDIA uses Acctivate’s reports for both internal and external use. This gives them the opportunity to have accurate and detailed information compared to using spreadsheets for analysis.

We send reports we have in Acctivate to our customers, to our sales people or keep for our own use. The reports provide us all the information we need about our sales, which is very helpful. We also use all the standard inventory and customer reports in Acctivate.”