Cole Industrial, Inc. needed to modernize field documentation in environments where technicians often work without reliable connectivity. Their prior process relied on Word documents and manual routing, creating delays, incomplete reporting, and inconsistent data capture that impacted quoting speed, customer responsiveness, and time to billing.
Cole Industrial, Inc. implemented GoFormz to close the operational edge gap between field work and back-office systems, paired with automated workflows and a direct integration into Acumatica. This enabled technicians to capture required data and photos onsite even when offline, while submissions sync and route automatically into Acumatica without manual re-entry.
Service Reports
Quotes
Near Miss Forms
Job Hazard Analysis (JHA)
Vendor Contact Forms
Customer Contact Forms
Cole Industrial, Inc. is a boiler company serving customers across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. They provide new and used boiler equipment sales, rental boilers, and field service, including installation, maintenance, repairs, testing, and compliance support. Their work helps customers improve boiler room efficiency, reduce downtime, and meet emissions and safety requirements.
For Cole Industrial Inc., field documentation is not just paperwork. It protects service quality, customer trust, and compliance outcomes. But the realities of the jobsite made the existing process increasingly fragile. As Seth Bass, Director of IT, explained, “Boilers are typically in the basement, so we need to be able to collect data offline with zero connectivity to the internet.”
What they needed wasn’t just offline entry. It was the ability to “capture data, capture pictures, package it together,” then sync everything once teams were back online. When that did not happen consistently, reporting lagged, details went missing, and downstream teams absorbed the impact.
As Cole Industrial Inc. modernized operations, they selected Acumatica as their ERP—but Bass noted a key limitation early on. “The one thing we knew going into Acumatica is that they didn’t have an offline data entry capability through their native mobile app.” That created a gap between where work happens and where business systems live. Field teams needed offline capture plus photos and supporting documentation to complete jobs correctly, while the business still needed clean data in the system of record.
Before GoFormz, the process was “digital” in file format, but not in control, speed, or reliability. “It was a Word document template that they all had on their laptops.” Reports still relied on manual handoffs and manual monitoring, which meant the process could stall without clear visibility into what was stuck or why.
Even after moving submissions into Microsoft Teams, the handoff problem remained. Bass described it this way: “Submit it through Teams. Fill it out on your computer and upload it. We review it and move it. It’s basically a paper process, but instead of turning it into a basket, we turned it into a folder, and then I monitored that folder.”
The downstream effect was real latency and lost detail. “Service reports would sometimes take up to a week to make it back to the office.” And when reports were not completed onsite, quality suffered. “They might return to it a couple of days later, and small details and sometimes major ones can get missed.”
Those misses were not trivial. Bass tied it directly to outcomes leaders care about. “When those details are missed, it can impact both revenue and customer experience. It can mean missed sales opportunities or simply slower answers back to the customer when they need them.”
“When those details are missed, it can impact both revenue and customer experience. It can mean missed sales opportunities or simply slower answers back to the customer when they need them.”
– Seth Bass, Director of IT, Cole Industrial, Inc.
Cole Industrial Inc. did not need another tool. They needed reliable field infrastructure that could hold up offline, capture complete documentation, and feed trusted data into Acumatica without manual re-entry or constant oversight.
The result was a new operating model: capture in the field (offline) → validate and route automatically → land cleanly in Acumatica.
One of the earliest proof points was quoting. “In the old process, we were looking at a 36+ hour turnaround.” With GoFormz implemented, Cole Industrial Inc. gained the ability to respond faster when follow-up work was identified in the field. “Now, we’re getting quotes out the same day.”
“In the old process, we were looking at a 36+ hour turnaround. Now, we’re getting quotes out the same day.”
– Seth Bass, Director of IT, Cole Industrial, Inc.
Cole Industrial’s goal was not just to digitize forms. It was removing the manual steps that slowed the business down. “We don’t have to take even a digital form like a Word document and copy and paste it into our ERP.”
“Direct integration means it goes from the field technician straight into our system.” That shift tightened the operational cycle end-to-end. “It means the lifecycle of a service job from dispatch to billing is definitely shorter.”
GoFormz also reduced administrative time in the field by pre-populating forms with Acumatica data. Cole Industrial Inc. estimates that field technicians save 1 to 2 hours per week that would otherwise be spent re-entering information, freeing more time for on-site mechanical work and faster closeout.
“Direct integration means it goes from the field technician straight into our system. It means the lifecycle of a service job from dispatch to billing is shorter.”
– Seth Bass, Director of IT, Cole Industrial, Inc.
Bass evaluated tools through an adoption lens. “I prioritized direct integration and ease of use,” he said. “Our technicians are highly capable, but adoption depends on minimizing disruption. Too much change too quickly can create real resistance.”
Instead, he anchored the rollout in what technicians already knew. “I started with a form that they knew, used, and understood,” Bass said. From there, GoFormz made it possible to control the workflow. “We can control a workflow from that form, automatically upload it, and email it,” he explained. Once the team saw the impact firsthand, adoption shifted from push to pull. “Now they’re hungry for change.”
Beyond speed, safety documentation created urgency. “You’ve got to find that catalyst, and safety is a catalyst. We have to get this documentation done.” When Cole Industrial’s safety director needed a faster way to complete and return Job Hazard Analysis (JHA) documentation, Bass already knew where to start. “My safety director came to me and said we needed a better way to get technicians to complete Job Hazard Analyses and we needed them back faster,” he recalled. “I told him I already had a solution for that.”
The speed of rollout reinforced confidence in the approach. “Within eight working hours, it was up and running in GoFormz.”
“Within eight working hours, it was up and running in GoFormz.”
– Seth Bass, Director of IT, Cole Industrial, Inc.
With better visibility into how forms move through the organization, Cole Industrial Inc. expanded use cases beyond field service. Bass described it as more than digitizing paperwork. “GoFormz really lets you see who’s touching what form and how it gets propagated through the organization, or even outside the organization with the public form feature.”
That external-facing capability enabled customer-driven updates that flow directly into Acumatica. “We send a GoFormz link, referred to as our Customer Contact Form, so they can update key details like names and addresses, and those updates flow automatically into our ERP,” Bass explained. The result is less back office cleanup, cleaner data, and fewer manual follow-ups.
On the back office side, the time savings were just as meaningful. Cole Industrial Inc. estimates the service coordination team saves about 2 hours per week per coordinator by eliminating the need to hunt through emails for submitted forms and manually attaching them to appointments. Across five coordinators, that adds up to about 10 hours per week (520 hours annually) redirected to higher-value work.
What changed at Cole Industrial Inc. was not only speed. It was reliability. With offline data capture, automated routing, and a direct Acumatica integration, the workflow became something the organization could depend on with fewer exceptions, clearer ownership, and fewer surprises as work moved from the field to the office. In other words, the process holds.