Helping FourGen’s Service Team close gaps and spot new opportunities with Salesforce Sales and Field Service

About FourGen

FourGen has been around for 113 years, operating as a family-owned holding company for four specialized businesses focusing on electrical construction, supply, and hardware. While their data center projects sparked massive growth, their electrical services departments have remained stagnant.

The Challenge

The stakes were high. An initial attempt to launch the platform didn’t go live because it was not aligned with the field team's daily needs. That experience taught them that a successful digital transformation requires a partner that actually understands the business.

To make it work this time, FourGen needed to solve these challenges:

• Unscalable data management: Each holding company was doing things separately through multiple different external systems. Because they lacked a centralized place to track work, FourGen leadership had no visibility into day-to-day operations and no digital tracking for labor.
• Communication breakdowns in the field: Project managers deployed electrical technicians to the field with manual emails, which often led to confusion. There was no reliable communication tracking, meaning deployments could easily be lost in an inbox.
• Delayed invoicing and cash flow bottlenecks: Because job statuses and updates were communicated by email, compiling the necessary costs and labor data to bill a client was a highly manual process for the finance team that impacted cash flow.
• Overcoming internal skepticism: Following the initial implementation that did not go live, some of the leadership team was apprehensive about reinvesting in Salesforce.

The internal stakeholders knew the right partner would make all the difference in their implementation, and working with experts who understand the construction industry was vital to tailoring the platform to their team’s service workflows.

The Solution

The project kicked off with a dedicated discovery phase as a risk-mitigation strategy to make sure the solution was worth the additional budget. This phased approach successfully eased internal skepticism, and the FourGen team was excited to restart their Salesforce implementation.

Together, the teams built a service solution that works the way the technicians and back-office staff do:

• Sales-to-Service handoff: Uptima implemented core Sales Cloud objects to capture pre-sales activities, facilitate financial approvals, and transition won business smoothly into operational Work Orders. From there, Uptima installed the Salesforce Field Service managed package to support dispatching and job status tracking for service technicians.
• Mobile-first technicians: The team turned field technicians into a sales channel with a custom mobile interface. The mobile app was configured to give technicians a single place to view job information, create new opportunities, update job status, and ask questions.
• Connected financial systems and invoicing: To establish a single system for all business units, Uptima integrated Salesforce with FourGen's Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP. They can now monitor real-time costs versus estimates, accelerating the time to invoice and keeping every job profitable.

"The app gives the technician one place to go to do his job, to see his information, to update things, and to ask questions. We've even empowered them to create new opportunities and quotes.

These guys know what they're doing. They get out in the field, fix a light fixture, and see that there's a couple of outlets that might need repair. Now they can say, 'I can take care of that for you,' and give them a quote right on the job. It's that idea of real-time revenue generation."

Kevin O’Brian | Director of IT, FourGen

The Difference

Although the implementation is still in its pre-launch phase, initial demonstrations have inspired the FourGen team to see a future where technicians actively drive business growth.

• Real-time opportunity generation: Technicians on-site can now instantly identify and document additional service needs or repair opportunities that arise during a standard visit with their mobile device. This ensures that potential projects are converted into actionable leads.
• Better cash flow visibility: The new system integrated Sales Cloud and Field Service system replaces back-and-forth emails with integrated status updates, allowing users to instantly flag work orders as "ready to invoice" or "ready to close". This cuts the lag time between work completion and billing and drives FourGen's ultimate KPI: getting cash in hand quicker.
• More efficient field work: Before, field techs had to stop their work and call PMs multiple times a day for info on their job and job status information could be left out of date for days until a tech was able to update it after the job was already done. With the app they are able to make updates real time.

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