Helping FourGen’s Service Team close gaps and spot new opportunities with Salesforce Sales and Field Service
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. Their leadership looked to Salesforce Sales and Field Service solutions to drive efficiency and tap into new revenue opportunities.
“Our sister company, ArchKey, recommended Uptima to us. Because of their deep expertise in the construction industry, it was obvious they knew what they were doing and could deliver a product we could actually use. When I went to my boss and told him it would require additional investment to do it right, I told him I was confident we could get it implemented this time because Uptima was finally the right partner.”
- Kevin O’Brian, Director of IT, FourGen
Executive Sponsor
Industry
Products
Services
Challenges
Managing High Volume Service Operations
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.
Results
Transforming Service Calls into Revenue Opportunities
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. They also designed the solution so that each subsidiary’s information remains separate from the others.
- 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.