Acowin rollout & field digital transformation

Drove the 2014 rollout of Acowin, a third-party HVAC service management platform, replacing ACOMARC, the predecessor UNIX-based service management product from Team Management Systems Inc., running on SCO OpenServer Unix at a regional HVAC business.

The predecessor: ACOMARC on SCO OpenServer

Before Acowin, R&W ran on ACOMARC, a fully-integrated Unix-based HVAC service software from Team Management Systems. ACOMARC covered Service, Service Agreements, Customer/Site, Dynamic Scheduler dispatch, Equipment, Job Cost, GL, AP, AR, Payroll, Inventory (warehouse / truck / site / tool / serialized / barcode), Fleet Maintenance, Marketing / Lead, Point of Sale, plus an Office System with Rolodex, Diary, Office POs, Inter-Link email, and a built-in fax system. The OS underneath was SCO OpenServer.

No factory training had been provided. I picked up SCO OpenServer administration, ACOMARC operation, user provisioning, backups, terminal session setup, printing, and break/fix support on the job from vendor documentation and Unix man pages. Kept the legacy environment running reliably for years while building toward the move off it.

Vendor selection

Evaluated Acowin against the alternatives available at the time and selected it as the best fit for R&W's service business. Notable in the selection: Acowin came from the same vendor (Team Management Systems) as ACOMARC, which meant the vendor could perform the data conversion themselves rather than R&W having to extract and rekey ACOMARC's Unix datastores.

Vendor-driven migration (2014)

Team Management Systems handled the ACOMARC to Acowin data conversion: customers, sites, equipment records with warranty and PM history, service agreements, dispatching, AR/AP, and job cost history all moved over by the vendor.

My role on the R&W side covered:

• Vendor selection.
• R&W-side project management.
• Cutover coordination, including timing around the seasonal dispatch load.
• Validation of the converted data.
• Training for dispatchers, technicians, office staff, and management on Acowin's day-to-day workflows.
• Decommission of the SCO OpenServer / ACOMARC environment after cutover.
• Ongoing Acowin administration, including FoxPro DBF backup and recovery, schema updates with releases, user provisioning, and mobile device provisioning for techs.

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 the rollout:

• 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.

What this accomplished

• Eliminated paper work orders and the weekly office-return-to-re-key cycle; dispatchers gained a live view of field work.
• Brought customer card payments into the field, removing the call-the-office-to-charge interruption.
• Moved the business onto a modern HVAC-native platform with vendor support, replacing legacy SCO OpenServer / ACOMARC tooling that was increasingly hard to maintain.
• Standardized operational data and reporting across the service business.
• Removed a single-point-of-failure dependency on the prior SCO OpenServer environment, including the self-taught operational knowledge required to keep it alive.