Finning speeds heavy equipment service with digital pens

As the world’s largest Caterpillar equipment dealer, Finning sells, rents, and services heavy equipment and engines to help customers maximize productivity. Their customers run mission-critical equipment on job sites, and rugged and isolated locations. To keep customers moving, Finning’s vehicle service teams conduct ongoing equipment inspections and preventative maintenance in the field, generating large amounts of paperwork. The data is used to coordinate repairs, order parts, schedule future service and bill for labour.

Challenge
Teams easily collect information on paper in the field, but it takes time for the data to get back to operations, delaying parts ordering, follow-up service scheduling and billing. Manual data entry into back-end systems takes service technicians away from billable tasks.

A key document process for Finning is the timesheet as it doubles as an invoice and record of repair. Timesheets are filled out in the field and driven back to the office where they are ultimately entered by hand into Finning’s back-end system. Delayed time sheets create delayed billing and poor operational visibility to service records.

Solution
Finning selected the Capturx Forms Service solution for real-time data capture with digital pens and ordinary paper forms. Now repair teams use the same timesheet that they’ve been using for years but as teams fill out their timesheets, the digital pen creates a normal ink record on the paper while also making a digital copy which it stores on the pen’s memory. Teams can use smart phones to send data directly from the Bluetooth-enabled digital pens to their back office.

Data sent wirelessly from the field is instantly available in the back office in the original handwriting and as converted text in data tables. The data can be integrated directly into other back-end systems like timecard management software to automate workflows such as payroll and billing. PDF files with the original handwriting also contain converted text as keywords, making them easy to search, archive, and retrieve.

“As part of the world’s largest Caterpillar equipment dealer, Finning provides a range of equipment sales and customer support services to the construction, agriculture and mining, among other industries throughout Western Canada,” said Sam Chapdelaine, Customer Services Manager, Finning. “Capturx helps us efficiently track the service paperwork for our planned approach to scheduled services, proactive maintenance and repairs, so customers can minimize unplanned downtime and get productivity when they need it.”

Benefits
Service teams no longer take billable workers out of the field in order to drive forms back to the central office. With the extra time freed up from data entry, service crews can spend more time on billable tasks. With reduced time lag between service repair and delivery of service record to the central office, Finning has real-time visibility into their customer accounts and repair teams.

With immediate access to timesheet data, the central office can immediately start the billing process for services rendered, keep payroll records up to date, and streamline account reconciliation. There’s no more month-end scramble, invoices slipping into future months, or confusion over missing paperwork.