Acowin rollout & field digital transformation

Selected and rolled out Acowin, a third-party HVAC service management platform, as the replacement for a legacy Unix-based service management system at Ross & Witmer. Alongside the system swap, took the field operation from paper to iPads.

What I owned

• Vendor selection and the business case for choosing Acowin.
• Schema mapping from the Unix predecessor into Acowin's Visual FoxPro DBF datastore.
• End-user training for dispatchers, technicians, and office staff.
• Ongoing administration through the remainder of my tenure: user provisioning, schema and code-file maintenance, backup and recovery of the FoxPro DBF data, mobile device provisioning for techs.
• Integration with Office 365 (calendar and email) and the company's reporting workflows.

The field workflow change

Before the rollout, the field workflow looked like this:

• Techs wrote paper work orders.
• Whenever they needed to charge a customer's credit card, they phoned the office.
• At the end of each week, they returned to the office with a stack of completed paper work orders.
• Office staff re-keyed every work order into the computer.

After:

• Techs use iPads in the field with in-field card processing.
• Work-order data is captured into Acowin in real time.
• Dispatchers have a live view of field work.
• The weekly paper-to-database re-entry cycle was eliminated entirely.

Honest framing

Acowin is a third-party COTS product, not something I built. My work was product rollout, schema migration, training, and ongoing administration. There's a separate, recent personal repo where I've experimented with reading Acowin's DBF tables in Python via dbfread, but that's exploratory tooling, not a shipped reporting platform.