About the Customer

This industrial equipment distributor and service provider operates seven branches across Ohio, Kentucky, and the surrounding region, specializing in dock equipment, overhead doors, storage systems, and material handling solutions.

Seven Branches, No Shared Source of Truth

Critical service processes still depended on paper forms, spreadsheets, and manual data entry.

One of the organization’s biggest obstacles was a lack of visibility into the equipment inventory it serviced. Planned maintenance inspections were completed on paper, signed by customers, scanned at local branches, reviewed by management teams, and manually re-entered into operational systems, slowing the service-to-cash cycle. Service history, maintenance records, and asset information often lived in different places, making accurate reporting difficult and creating administrative overhead throughout the organization. Without a complete equipment hierarchy, maintenance planning, warranty tracking, service history, and reporting all became significantly more difficult.

The company weighed a point solution for field service before deciding the real requirement was bigger than dispatch. It needed one platform to run sales, quoting, service, and installation the same way at every branch, on a foundation that could scale as the business grew.

One Platform, One Owner for Every Record

ForeFront deployed Salesforce Field Service with custom Work Order, Project, and Quote objects, integrated bidirectionally with the ERP through MuleSoft. The implementation also became a company-wide data modernization initiative, that enabled a digital inventory of all customer equipment.

The work included:

• Building the integration layer. A MuleSoft integration connects Salesforce to the ERP in both directions: customer, product, price, cost, and inventory data flow one way out of the ERP, so finance stays authoritative over anything that touches an invoice, while work orders, service quotes, and installation projects flow the other way in real time. Seven manual entry points became one.
• Structuring the asset hierarchy. Assets are organized in a hierarchy that mirrors how equipment exists in the field: Customer → Site → Position → Asset. A dispatcher or technician can navigate from a customer account down to one specific piece of equipment and immediately see its history, maintenance activity, inspections, and service records, replacing what used to live in handwritten notes and disconnected records with one digital asset inventory — now foundational to how the company plans service work, manages maintenance agreements, and tracks warranties.
• Enabling technicians in the field. More than 90 technicians now work from mobile-optimized workflows that put asset history, work plans, and preventive maintenance checklists, including compliance inspection forms for overhead doors and cranes, directly in their hands on site, along with customer signature capture.
• Automating quote to project to work order. A quote that closes becomes the project directly, with real-time cost rollup across installation labor, subcontractor invoices, and equipment, so profitability is visible by service territory while the work is still underway.
• Adding service automation. ForeFront layered in automated service report generation, customer communication workflows, and branch-level dispatching with skill-based scheduling across the technician workforce.
• Migrating clean. Rather than carrying forward years of legacy transaction history, the team started clean on transactions and migrated what field service actually runs on: the installed asset base, loaded through a repeatable template, with customer records sourced from the ERP and technician IDs reconciled to their ERP equivalents so labor cost ties out from day one.
• Automating planned maintenance. Planned maintenance was one of the largest opportunities for improvement: teams used to track inspections, visits, schedules, and paperwork by hand. Now, maintenance plans automatically generate preventive work and track visits from planned through completion. Technicians use digital inspection workflows tied to equipment records instead of paper packets, capturing documentation, results, labor, and approvals in the field. That visibility lets teams forecast labor needs against scheduled demand.

With every branch running the same process against one owner-of-record for each piece of data, the payoff showed up almost immediately.

From Separate Systems to Single Source of Truth

Today, the company operates on a connected service platform supporting the full lifecycle of customer engagement, from quoting and project execution to preventive maintenance and field service delivery. All seven branches now run Salesforce Field Service, built by a team that specializes in field service and knows how industrial distributors actually operate, not a generic dispatch tool bolted onto Sales Cloud. That expertise shows up in results a standard implementation wouldn’t have delivered:

• Replaced paper-based inspections, maintenance documentation, and service records with digital processes.
• Real-time installation profitability. Branch leaders can see margin on an active job by service territory as the work happens, instead of reconciling it weeks after the crew leaves.
• Zero dual entry to the ERP. The bidirectional MuleSoft integration eliminated the manual re-keying that used to sit between the field and finance.
• 90+ technicians equipped in the field. Every technician arrives with complete asset and work-order history instead of calling the office to piece it together.
• A platform built to scale. As more field service technicians are onboarded, the platform will grow with the team.

Since go live, ForeFront has stayed on as a managed services partner, a testament to the trust the team built during implementation and the results that followed it. That’s the clearest sign of a partnership that worked: the company didn’t just accept the build, it extended it.

The ForeFront Difference

Industrial distributors running field service on a patchwork of systems tend to reach for a point solution first: a better dispatch tool, a mobile app bolted onto the existing stack. It solves today’s problem and leaves the real gap, between field operations and the ERP, untouched.

ForeFront’s field service practice is built to close that gap, not work around it. Our deep ERP integration expertise, paired with hands-on experience running multi-branch, asset-heavy field service operations, turns that closed gap into operational efficiency: a platform that reflects how the business actually works, not a simplified version of it.