About the Customer

Forklift dealers compete on uptime. When a customer’s equipment goes down, every hour costs the customer money and costs the dealer trust. The dealer’s value depends on getting a technician on-site quickly, fixing the machine, and keeping the customer’s fleet running.

This dealer operates 15+ branches across the U.S., providing forklift sales, service, and rentals to manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics customers. Their service business is the relationship engine. It’s how the dealer earns repeat sales, expands accounts, and competes against national players.

Before partnering with ForeFront, none of that ran on connected systems. Sales lived in Zendesk. Dispatch ran on paper planners and 275+ shared Outlook calendars across the branch network. Service work orders, parts, and invoices moved through QuipWare ERP via manual handoffs. Customers had no way to see their own equipment, schedule a service visit, or track a technician.

They came to ForeFront looking for a Salesforce solution to replace the phone-and-email scheduling process. What followed was a multi-year, multi-cloud transformation across sales, service, dispatch, and customer experience, including an M&A integration partway through that proved the platform could absorb growth.

5 Branches. 275 Calendars. No Way to Schedule Service Without a Phone Call.

Material handling dealers run service operations that are deceptively complex. Every customer fleet looks different. Every machine has its own service history, warranty status, and parts requirements. Every technician has a specific skill set, geographic territory, and availability window. Coordinating that in real time across multiple branches is hard. Doing it on paper is impossible at scale.

This dealer had grown through that exact constraint. Sales reps tracked deals in Zendesk while service teams ran on paper planners and shared Outlook calendars. Dispatchers across the network managed coverage with 275+ separate calendars, none of which talked to each other. New dispatchers took 9 to 12 months to ramp because the knowledge that mattered most lived with the people, not the system. When someone left, the system left with them.

Customers felt every gap. Booking a service visit meant calling a branch, leaving a message, waiting for a callback, confirming a time, then calling again if anything changed. There was no way for a customer to see their own equipment, look up service history, check warranty status, or track a technician on the way. For a dealer whose value proposition is uptime, the customer experience was working against the brand.

The financial side was just as siloed. Quotes, contracts, work orders, parts, and invoices moved through QuipWare ERP through manual handoffs. Sales reps couldn’t see service history when quoting renewals. Service couldn’t see open opportunities. Leadership couldn’t see either in one place.

Then an acquisition entered the picture. The dealer was about to absorb a regional competitor with seven additional branches running on a different ERP. Without a scalable platform, the acquisition would have meant another set of disconnected systems and another round of manual reconciliation.

A Multi-Year, Multi-Cloud Transformation That Built the Industry’s First Self-Service Portal

ForeFront was brought in to replace the phone-and-email scheduling process. The work expanded from there into a multi-year platform transformation, delivered in phases that compounded value at each step. Here’s how it works:

ForeFront replaced the legacy field service tool with Salesforce Field Service. Work orders, technician management, planned maintenance, parts and pricing, warranty and core returns, and a tech mobile app went live across the branch network. Account, location, contact, and territory management were configured to reflect how the dealer actually operates rather than forcing the dealer into out-of-the-box assumptions.

ForeFront pushed back on the obvious path. Instead of integrating Zendesk to Salesforce, we coached the dealer to move sales onto Sales Cloud in the same org as service. That advisory call is the reason the dealer has a 360-degree customer view today. Sales reps see service history when quoting renewals. Service sees the deal pipeline. Leadership sees both.

ForeFront built a customer-facing portal on Experience Cloud and Salesforce Appointment Assistant. It is believed to be the only self-service scheduling application in the material handling equipment industry. Customers log in to view every piece of equipment they own, complete service and work order history, warranty details, maintenance plans, and key contacts. They self-schedule service appointments, get automated confirmations, and track technician ETAs in real time.

ForeFront integrated QuipWare ERP bi-directionally with Salesforce so quotes, work orders, parts, and invoices stay in sync. Sales can see what’s in inventory. Service sees what’s been billed. Finance sees a single source of truth.

When the dealer acquired the regional competitor, ForeFront integrated the second ERP via Boomi into the same Salesforce org. All seven new branches were onboarded without standing up a parallel system. The acquired company’s territories, products, service resources, service contracts, dispatch console, and checklists were merged into the existing org.

The platform proved itself under M&A pressure almost immediately. What would have been a re-platforming project at most dealers became a controlled onboarding. Twelve branches now run on one Salesforce org with two ERPs connected behind them.