Case Study: Caterpillar Dealer Uses Digital Pens To Optimize Scheduling And Billing

As the world's largest Caterpillar equipment dealer, Finning sells, rents, and services heavy equipment and engines to help customers maximize productivity. Their customers run mission-critical equipment in rugged and isolated locations ranging from the oil sands in Alberta to forests in Chile. To keep customers moving, Finning's vehicle service teams conduct ongoing equipment inspections and preventative maintenance in the field, generating large amounts of paperwork. The data is used to coordinate repairs, order parts, schedule future service, and bill for labor.

Teams easily collect information on paper in the field, but it takes time for the data to get back to operations, delaying parts ordering, follow-up service scheduling, and billing. Manual data entry into back-end systems takes service technicians away from billable tasks. A key document process for Finning is the timesheet, as it doubles as an invoice and record of repair. Timesheets are filled out in the field and driven back to the office where they are ultimately entered by hand into Finning's back-end system. Delayed time sheets create delayed billing and poor operational visibility to service records.

Finning selected the Capturx Forms Service solution for real-time data capture with digital pens and ordinary paper forms. Now repair teams use the same timesheet that they've been using for years, but as teams fill out their timesheets, the digital pen creates a normal ink record on the paper while also making a digital copy which it stores on the pen's memory. Teams can use smart phones to send data directly from the Bluetooth-enabled digital pens to their back office.

With immediate access to timesheet data, the central office can immediately start the billing process for services rendered, keep payroll records up to date, and streamline account reconciliation. There's no more month-end scramble, invoices slipping into future months, or confusion over missing paperwork.