First Tool Corporation

In 2021, Shoptech Systems and its ERP products were acquired by ECi Software Solutions. E2 Shop System was restructured and renamed JobBOSS². Please refer to the JobBOSS² listing page for up to date information.

The Company: 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.

The Situation: Server to Cloud

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.

The Solution: E2 Shop System ERP

First Tool already had E2 Pro, so the choice was easy to upgrade to E2 SHOP on the cloud. Shoptech’s cloud servers are run through Rackspace, which Houseman already knew to be a secure and reputable company. Management agreed and they began changing over. As Houseman said, ​“The transition…was very seamless.” They talked to Shoptech’s tech support, uploaded their database in a few hours, and First Tool was running on the cloud the next morning. To ease the transition, they were also given access to a sandbox with a dummy company in it. This allowed First Tool’s employees to experiment with the new system, without worrying that they were going to make any mistakes with their own information. SHOP’s layout, which looks like a webpage, was familiar and made it easy to navigate.

The Results: E2 Shop System Implementation Benefits

Now that First Tool has the cloud, communication has become much better between their divisions, and they’ve all become more efficient. Their traveling employees just need an internet connection to check what’s happening in the shop. Changing to the cloud has made their costs shrink, freed up their IT department, and given them the security that their data is backed up. The updates are also automatic, which Houseman said was a blessing and gave IT more time to work on more important things.

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 iPods 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.