For years, Cat® dealers have relied on legacy systems to manage their daily operations. While foundational, these platforms often come with steep learning curves and workflows that can slow down parts counter and shop personnel. Dealers frequently struggle with lengthy training times for new team members and tedious system workarounds, such as:
canceling and restarting a process to change a transaction from a counter sale to a counter quote
managing multiple need-by dates
switching between store inventories
Portal Suite from FDC Solutions directly addresses these pain points by modernizing legacy workflows in an intuitive browser experience.
The enhanced value in Portal Suite is primarily delivered through the Customer Portal component (which seamlessly handles parts counter sales and quotes), the Create Shop Order component for creating shop requisitions, the Order Inquiry component for document tracking, and the Machines component for details about customer and rental fleet equipment.
The Portal Suite components successfully recreate basic Cat® dealer workflows and layer them with a modern graphical user interface. Because the Portal Suite's navigation is much more intuitive than legacy ERP systems, dealers benefit from reduced training times and improved user adoption.
Here is a closer look at how Portal Suite delivers these benefits across its components.
Customer Portal
The Customer Portal component seamlessly handles parts counter sales and quotes by integrating advanced features into a single workflow.
Intuitive Navigation and Advanced Search. Intuitive navigation shortens training time through intuitive user interface controls and advanced customer lookups by name, account number, or phone number. Partial text strings can be used to search for either the customer name or customer number. The advanced customer search function also allows users to find customers using known details such as a contact name or zip code.
Flexible Order Document Selection. Users can dynamically switch between creating a sales document and a quote document without restarting the order. In legacy systems, changing an order from a counter sale to a counter quote can require canceling and restarting the entire process, but Portal Suite allows users to choose the order type at the end of the process.
Need-by Dates and Store Selection. The Customer Portal component supports assigning a need-by date at both the header and line-item levels instead of a single need-by date. Additionally, the store identifier feature allows users to easily change store numbers by providing an in-line lookup that contains store number and name, which can be especially useful as dealers increase the number of store locations through continued growth.
Flexible Order Entry. The Bulk Order Pad feature enables copying and pasting part numbers to add parts to an order quickly. The Customer Portal also supports importing spreadsheet files that contain quantities and part numbers.
Automatic Line Merging. When duplicate parts are added to an order, Portal Suite automatically consolidates them into a single line item, saving warehouse personnel from visiting the same bin location more than once.
Create Shop Order
The Create Shop Order component provides an intuitive way to process shop requisitions.
Familiar Workflow with Modern Features. The Create Shop Order component uses the work order number to recreate the familiar workflow of legacy systems, allowing users to create shop requisitions for parts.
SIS Integration. Users have quick access to invoke SIS (Service Information System) directly from the order entry screen. When a valid serial number is entered, this information is passed to SIS so compatible parts can be displayed and returned to the order entry screen.
Order Inquiry
The Order Inquiry component is utilized for comprehensive document tracking.
Seamless Document Lookups. The Order Inquiry component allows users to view shop and counter documents created in both the Portal Suite and legacy systems, providing detailed order status and comprehensive history tracking.
Advanced Search Capabilities. A general order inquiry allows searching across customers using a document number or customer number directly without navigating to a specific customer profile first.
Enhanced Information. When users view document information in the Order Inquiry component, they see significantly more information than is typically available on a single screen in legacy systems.
Machine Information
The Machines component allows for quick lookup of details about customer machines.Users can sort customer machines by serial number or customer-assigned equipment number. By typing a partial string of the serial number, make, or model into the search field, the Machines component automatically displays results matching the search criteria entered by the user.
Expand Your Unified Ecosystem
Beyond modernizing core ERP operations, Portal Suite serves as a central hub that seamlessly connects with additional software from FDC Solutions. When purchased separately, powerful applications such as K*Track for package tracking and notification, WMSv2 for advanced warehouse management, the file upload utility for Promo Code 2.0, and Allied Parts Price Upload 2.0 are linked directly from your Portal Suite interface. This eliminates app-switching, unifies your parts counter and warehouse logistics on a single platform, and delivers an improved end-to-end operational experience.
Ready to optimize your team’s effectiveness?
Don't let legacy system limitations hold back your operational performance. Empower your team with a modern, high-velocity platform engineered specifically for the demands of today's Cat® dealer product support operations.
Complete the form below to start the conversation and allow a member of our team to show you how Portal Suite from FDC Solutions can transform your parts and service departments.