First Tool Corporation

About First Tool Corporation

First Tool Corporation was looking for a way to improve communication between their shops, some of which are out of state, and with their traveling employees. Their shops handle a wide range of jobs from designing and building special machines to injection molding, and much more. They have six different divisions and communicating between them was becoming a problem. In addition, they have service people on the road who need to check in with the shop. Beyond all of these concerns, one of their servers was going down and would cost them about $20,000 to replace. Brett Houseman, the IT Director for First Tool Corporation in Dayton, OH, realized that they had to go to the cloud.

When asked about the process, Houseman said, “E2 SHOP has been great. The transition has been very smooth. I would recommend this to anybody that needs a shop software system.” When they have questions, First Tool has gone to the Shoptech Community online to see if anyone else has had a similar problem and how they solved it. If that doesn’t answer their question, they can either call tech support or open a ticket from the community webpage. Either way, Houseman said, Shoptech’s service has always been phenomenal.

They plan to add more functionality in the near future with E2 Data Collection. Previously, their employees would have to waste a lot of time clocking in and out of jobs walking across the plant, and those on the road can’t clock in at all. Now that they can clock in on their phones, tablets, or iPads and it will speed up work in the shop and give more accurate time reporting out of the shop. All in all, the decision to upgrade from E2 Pro to E2 SHOP on the cloud has helped their business tremendously. As Houseman said about being on the cloud, “…they have… great security built-in with their cloud servers. And it has helped us become a more productive company.” Making shops more productive and profitable is exactly what Shoptech wants to do.