From Paper Tickets to Automated Field Service

The Challenge

Ninety-nine percent manual. That's where their field service operations stood when we started.

A national commercial equipment distributor with hundreds of technicians in the field — and a tech stack that had been assembled over a decade without a strategy. Great Plains for ERP. Fieldpoint for dispatch. Salesforce for CRM. None of them talked to each other.

Technicians worked off paper. No on-site invoicing. No real-time warranty lookups. Parts inventory was tracked manually — tech-kit warehouse locations in Great Plains never auto-decremented when a technician pulled a part. Customer-facing reps couldn't tell a client whether their equipment was still under warranty without calling someone.

Invoicing was worse. Every invoice required a manual handoff from the field to accounting. Techs finished a job, filled out paperwork, and waited for someone in the back office to process it. Cash collection lagged behind the work by days, sometimes weeks.

And Fieldpoint — the dispatch platform they'd built their operations around — was a dead end. No roadmap. No future. They needed a replacement, not a patch.

Our Approach

We didn't start by ripping out Fieldpoint. We started by mapping every workflow it handled, then designing a Salesforce Field Service Lightning architecture that could replace every Fieldpoint function.

The scoping sprint covered three areas:

• Service operations: Case → Work Order → Service Appointment object model to replace Fieldpoint's dispatch and scheduling
• ERP integration: Great Plains asset data flowing into Salesforce in real time — warranty dates, install dates, product make/model, serial numbers
• Invoicing: On-site invoice generation so technicians could close out jobs in the field, not in a spreadsheet

We also mapped technician inventory management. Each tech has a kit stored at a specific warehouse location in Great Plains. We needed Salesforce to know which tech is assigned to which GP Site ID so inventory deductions hit the right location automatically.

Mid-engagement, we made a strategic pivot. We'd initially scoped standard Service Cloud, but as we dug deeper into Fieldpoint's functionality, we realized FSL's native objects — Service Appointments, Service Territories, scheduling optimization — were a much better fit. We pivoted without scope disruption. That's the retainer model working as designed.

The Solution

Work order automation. Flow-based automation generates Service Appointments from Work Orders automatically — no more manual scheduling. Work Order Line Items for labor, travel, and parts populate at creation. Dispatchers see everything in one view.

On-site invoicing. Custom "Generate Invoice" button on the Work Order object. Technicians create invoices the moment a job is done. Card payments on-site. Email payment links for larger jobs. Accounting gets clean data without a manual handoff.

ERP integration. Five key asset fields now auto-sync from Great Plains into Salesforce: Sold Date, Install Date, Warranty End Date, Product Make/Model, and Serial Number. Reps can pull up warranty status in real time without calling anyone.

Inventory management. Each technician's Great Plains Site ID is stored on their Salesforce User record. When a tech uses a part on a job, the inventory deduction hits the correct tech-kit warehouse automatically. No more manual stock reconciliation.

Data migration. Historical asset records backfilled from Great Plains for validation. Every active asset in the system has a complete, auditable history from day one.

Service territories. Configured to match their real dispatch process — territory boundaries, skill-based routing, and scheduling rules that reflect how their operations actually run, not how a default template suggests they should.

The Results

Field service went from 99% manual to fully automated. Technicians work from their phones. Dispatchers schedule from a dashboard. Invoices generate on-site.

The Great Plains integration eliminated the warranty lookup problem entirely. Five critical asset fields sync in real time — reps answer warranty questions in seconds, not hours.

Cash collection accelerated measurably. On-site invoicing means techs close out jobs and collect payment before they leave the property. The days-long handoff to accounting is gone.

The mid-project pivot from standard Service Cloud to FSL was handled without a single scope disruption — no change orders, no timeline slip. The retainer model gave us room to make the right architectural decision when we found it, not lock into the first one.

Ten-plus discrete deliverables shipped: Flow automation, ERP integration, user management, invoicing, inventory tracking, data migration, territory configuration, scheduling optimization, and training. All on a fixed-scope retainer. All production-ready.