Northern Dewatering, Inc, is a company based in Rogers, MN which pumps water away from construction and excavation sites. Usually ground water, rain, and melting snow are factors which flood a worksite and make any construction work more difficult. So NDI, ‘dewaters’ the site by laying out hundreds of feet of pipe and numerous types of pumps to clear a site for work. Many times they have to leave this equipment at a site for weeks, and then as the ground dries, start to remove portions of the piping over a period of days and weeks.
Keeping track of how much pipe is at a site and how much has been returned became an immense headache. Before contacting HighPower Data Solutions, they filled out many sheets of paper with “Ship Out” and “Return” records. The problem was that items were never returned in the same order or quantities as when they were sent out. So they would hand these stacks of 8 /12 x 11” paper sheets to their office assistant, and this poor lady would have to go through each sheet line by line from the ‘shipped’ stack, and look through the many sheets of paper in the ‘returned’ stack, line by line for each item. It was a tracking nightmare. They realized they needed an automated solution to this problem.
They contact HighPower Data Solutions, and we created a digital solution for them. Now it doesn’t matter in what order equipment goes out, or in what order or how many pieces at a time get returned. Using the FileMaker digital solution, they just enter how many are on the truck and the system identifies how many feet of pipe still remain on the site. It also keeps a running tally of their current inventory so that at any time they know how many pieces of pipe, how many pumps, and other equipment are still on hand in the construction yard.
Overall, life is much better now that they have an automated solution for them doing their counting and tracking grunt work, so that they can focus on the real work of meeting the needs of their customers. And that poor lady who was doing all the counting, now has better things to do with her time!