About American Scale

For over two decades, American Scale has been providing scale service and calibration for customers in a wide range of industries across the Southeast. The American Scale team is committed to accuracy in every facet of their products and services, providing customers with the precision they rely on for weighing everything from minute doses of pharmaceutical materials to tremendous trains and airplanes.

Servicing customers including Fortune 500 companies, nearby zoos, motorsport race tracks, aggregate suppliers, and more, American Scale offers both preventative and emergency services along with scale sales and rentals. The company has offices across North Carolina and South Carolina and has held its ISO/IEC 17025:2017 certification for over a decade. Additionally, American Scale holds state certifications across the Southeast, including certifications from the respective Departments of Agriculture in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia.

Chris Hartman, a veteran who attended business school after leaving the U.S. Army, purchased American Scale with his business partner Matt Bauer, in 2018 to realize his goal of owning an industrial services company. Since then, he has been hard at work growing the business and finding new ways to improve American Scale’s processes.

Customization is definitely something I like in terms of not having to reorient our process to the software. We’re able to kind of mold the software, to a certain degree, to our process.

The Challenge

When Hartman acquired American Scale, he inherited an analog record-keeping system built around manually written work orders. It soon became apparent just how much that outdated system was holding the business back, with something as simple as a misplaced piece of paper having the potential to derail a new sale or delay service being carried out. Even when things went smoothly, sharing information between American Scale’s different offices was a tiresome procedure that relied on mailing documents and waiting for them to reach their destination before moving to the next step of a given process.

Looking more closely at how this system impacted American Scale’s everyday processes, Hartman found that bottlenecks were routinely occurring when processes hinged on waiting for technicians to manually turn in their work orders—typically once a week or even every other week. The work orders would then be manually reviewed in the office, mailed between offices when necessary, and finally processed for billing. As a result, it wasn’t uncommon for billing to be behind invoice generation by a full month or more.

After becoming familiar with the day-to-day operations, Hartman quickly identified a disconnect between the capabilities of the analog system in place at American Scale and his own plans for growth. If American Scale was going to grow moving forward as Hartman planned, he knew they would have to find a system that could not only improve their current processes but also scale with the business in the future.

We’re not having to do double work, which is allowing our staff to do other activities that also need to be completed. So ServMan has freed up extra capacity.

The Solution

Eager to find a modern approach to managing processes both in the field and in the office, Hartman began to look into what enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solutions could best benefit American Scale. At the recommendation of 10X, American Scale’s consulting services provider and a WorkWave ServMan partner, American Scale began looking closely at ServMan’s functionality and how it could benefit the company. While they were immediately drawn to ServMan’s customizability and wide range of features, they were even more impressed by what they heard from other industrial companies.

Hartman notes that he “got a good feel” when speaking to other ServMan users. “I had gotten some good recommendations from companies that were in similar industries,” he adds. “That means more to me than any marketing material.”

American Scale quickly decided that ServMan was the right fit for their business and began the onboarding process. Through 10X, American Scale was able to import its existing data into ServMan and configure the information in a way that equipped it to hit the ground running and begin streamlining its processes immediately. Hartman notes that while he seldom needs additional support when using ServMan, the support he receives from 10X as a ServMan partner is always excellent.

ServMan’s suite of modules has allowed American Scale to phase out paperwork orders in favor of accessible digital records, resulting in benefits that are felt throughout the entire organization. Making these records accessible from virtually anywhere, whether in the office, in the field, or even at home, was important for American Scale.

Whereas technicians previously had to return to the office or call in to have a service manager dig through filing cabinets to access any earlier information about a customer’s account when they needed information for a job, ServMan allows them to access the same records from their mobile device while in the field. This has increased efficiency for staff both in the office and in the field, allowing technicians to make better choices based on an individual customer’s service history and eliminating unnecessary trips to the office. By allowing technicians to review prior services that have been carried out on a particular scale, ServMan has helped to increase the effectiveness of American Scale’s technicians.

That same efficiency has drastically improved cash flow for American Scale. ServMan allows the business to take advantage of digital work orders, eliminating the time and expense of waiting on technicians to turn paperwork in, processing it in the office, and sending it between office locations. Instead, work orders in ServMan are processed instantaneously and made available to all of the offices simultaneously. As a result, American Scale is able to bill customers as soon as service is rendered, drastically reducing the wait time on accounts receivable.

By using ServMan, American Scale has been able to maintain the processes they’ve perfected by incorporating them into their ServMan build while simultaneously improving their productivity and efficiency by taking advantage of the software’s considerable functionality.

Since onboarding ServMan, American Scale has established a repeatable process for work orders that allows them to bring new hires up to speed with less training time. ServMan’s customizability was key to this process, with feedback from American Scale’s technicians helping to create a repeatable process that fits seamlessly into the company’s proven processes.

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