Half the Time to Bill, Nearly Double Service Sales: James CRAFT & Son

See how James CRAFT & Son, a family-owned HVAC and mechanical contractor founded in 1900, replaced paper work orders with FieldConnect’s field service software for Viewpoint Vista, cutting its days to bill in half and nearly doubling service sales.

Overview

For more than a century, James CRAFT & Son built its reputation on “CRAFTsmanship”, but until 2014, its service department still ran on paper. By connecting its technicians to Viewpoint Vista through FieldConnect, the family-owned mechanical, HVAC, and plumbing contractor replaced paper work orders with real-time field data and built a faster, larger service operation.

Since partnering with FieldConnect, James CRAFT & Son has seen results across the field, the office and the bottom line:

• Days to bill cut in half, from 30+ days
• 111,500+ digital forms completed
• Service team grew from 12 to 25 employees, and from 8 to 18 trucks
• Service sales nearly doubled
• Chose to stay with FieldConnect after evaluating other field mobility software

The Challenge

WAITING ON PAPER

When your service team runs on paper, the office is always waiting. It waits on paperwork to come back from the field, waits on approvals, and waits to send the invoice.

For James CRAFT & Son, a mechanical contractor founded in 1900, that wait had become the way business got done. The team wanted two things: to bill faster and to respond to customers faster. Paper made both nearly impossible.

Technicians filled out paper work orders and brought them back to the office for data entry and billing. Documents got lost in trucks, approvals stalled while paperwork changed hands, and the office was always a step behind the field.

For the office, the hardest part was never knowing what had happened in the field until the paper came back. Information arrived late, and billing waited with it. Every day of delay meant customers waiting on answers, the office chasing down work orders, and cash sitting in unbilled work. For a team proud of 100+ years of “CRAFTsmanship”, running service this way was frustrating.

“We experienced everything from losing important documents in technicians’ trucks to passing documents back and forth waiting for approvals to maintaining volumes of files and documents,” explains Bill Craft, Senior VP of Service.

The Solution

CONNECTING THE FIELD TO VIEWPOINT VISTA

James CRAFT & Son didn’t need another system to manage. It needed a way to get information from the field into the system it already relied on. In 2014, it found that partner in FieldConnect, which has spent more than 20 years directly connecting commercial service contractors’ field teams to their ERP.

The plan was simple:

1. Connect to Vista. FieldConnect went live alongside the company’s new Viewpoint Vista ERP in 2015 and moved to the cloud in 2020.
2. Dispatch digitally. Jobs are scheduled and dispatched through FieldGateway, so technicians get the right details for every job.
3. Capture everything in the field. Technicians complete work in FieldAccess. They record notes, time, photos and customer signatures, and fill out digital forms for equipment inspections, refrigerant usage and job safety analyses. That data flows straight into Vista, with no re-keying in the office.

“When we moved to Viewpoint Vista in 2015, FieldConnect was absolutely the bright spot of the entire implementation.”

- Bill Craft, Senior VP of Service

The Results

FROM CATCHING UP TO GETTING AHEAD

The first thing to change was the flow of information. Instead of waiting days for paper work orders to come back from the field, the office could see job details almost as soon as technicians entered them.

“Getting information from techs in nearly real time is a game changer for our responsiveness and customer service."

- Bill Craft, Senior VP of Service

Faster information led to faster billing. With completed work flowing straight into Vista, the team no longer waited on paper to send an invoice, and its average days to bill dropped by half.

“We’ve cut our average days to bill in half,” Craft says. “It used to be 30 days or more.”

The filing cabinets went away, too. Technicians have now completed more than 111,500 digital forms in FieldConnect, including more than 52,000 equipment inspection checklists, 28,900 refrigerant usage forms and 28,800 job safety analyses. Every record is captured on the job and easy to pull up whenever a customer, auditor or technician needs it.

Where They Are Now

BUILT TO GROW

With the office no longer chasing paper, James CRAFT & Son had room to grow. Over the past decade, its service department has nearly doubled its sales, grown from 12 to 25 employees, and gone from 8 to 18 trucks on the road. FieldConnect has grown right alongside them.

Over the years, the team has looked at other options. Through it all, they’ve stayed.

“We have looked at other field mobility software over the years but continue to be impressed with the simplicity and functionality of FieldConnect, as well as the attention to growth, innovation and improvement along the way,” Craft says.

More than 125 years after its founding, James CRAFT & Son shows that a company built on “CRAFTsmanship” can run on real-time data. Asked what he’d tell a contractor still running on paper, Craft’s answer is simple:

“FieldConnect has helped us streamline our processes tremendously.”