Conveniently located in Dracut, Massachusetts, the team at Equipment East is driven by providing the best customer experience with superior and unmatched service. While they offer a wide range of construction equipment for sale, rent, or lease, the heart of their dealership is in their service department, where they even offer 7 days a week emergency service.

The Challenge:

 As their service department grew, they started to face challenges associating images with work orders and warranties. To get around this, they relied on a separate server and program to store these photos, which required a time-consuming manual process to integrate with their Aspen system.

This inefficiency not only slowed down their workflow but also increased storage costs due to the large volume of photos and work orders.

With their service department at the center of their business, finding a way to streamline these processes and save their technicians valuable time became very important.

The Solution:

Equipment East adopted ASPEN Mobile, an app designed to help service departments attach images directly to work orders, check in and out of jobs, and streamline warranty submissions.

Here’s what Jeff Davidson, Service Manager at Equipment East, had to say about their experience with ASPEN Mobile so far.

What’s your favorite feature?

Jeff: “Before the phone app was released, we used to keep all of our photos in a totally separate server on a totally separate program, and it was kind of a mess. So being able to take photos and attach them to work orders directly has been a big help for us.

By taking photos with ASPEN Mobile, Equipment East is able to avoid the clunky process of creating a PDF of the Work Order, saving them to the Cloud and then saving the images in that folder. Plus, with the amount of work orders they process, the storage was getting pretty expensive.

“Photos are the universal language between us, our vendors and our customers.”

They are also able to communicate more effectively with their vendors. Because photos are an international language, they help overcome any previous communication roadblocks when submitting warranty claims to vendors.

Are you using any other features of the app?

Jeff: “The options for inputting information have been really good for my techs. A lot of them are using voice to text so they can put the phone down while they’re working, make note of comments as they go, and do a lot of the paperwork while they do the job.

“Voice-to-text helps with labor time and some job efficiency, since they can perform 2 jobs at once. They don’t need to spend as much time doing paperwork afterwards.”

“Another feature that has been helpful is the clocking in and clocking out. This has been great for when jobs have multiple segments, and a tech maybe has to get their laptop from outside the shop. They can just punch in and out from step to step with a simple flip of their phone screen.”

How have you seen ASPEN Mobile impact your dealership so far?

Jeff: “The process for inputting photos is just much easier. Instead of having to manually cut, copy, paste, move some photos around and then find and store the images, we’re able to just take the photos, upload to the work order, hit go and be done.

 “Our techs are probably saving 15 – 30 minutes per work order, and sometimes our techs are doing two to three jobs per day.  At that volume, the efficiencies really add up.”

How was the onboarding process?

Jeff: “We all picked up the app pretty quick. We had a couple of calls with the ASPEN Mobile team to get started, and then I had a morning meeting with my crew and they were able to put it all to use the same day. All my techs are able to use it for photos and clocks.

The transition for the users was pretty simple.”

To learn more about ASPEN Mobile and how it can help you save time in your Service Department, click here.