Cashman Equipment Company is not only one of the highest-rated Caterpillar equipment dealers in North America, but it is also one of the largest privately-owned companies in Nevada. Headquartered in Henderson, they employ over 600 dedicated team members of various professional and technical backgrounds. Nationally recognized by Caterpillar for outstanding sales performance, Cashman Equipment is a full-service dealership, providing new and used equipment for sale or rent, as well as high-quality parts and service to construction, paving, mining, logging, truck engine, and power system industries throughout Nevada and California.
Ready to Install and Migrate—with a Little Help
Don Erlanger, Manager of Information Technology for Cashman Equipment, explains their software and hardware environment, which includes a mixture of Windows servers and Power Systems running IBM i. “Like most Caterpillar dealers, we use a software application called Dealers Business System (DBSi) with our IBM i. We also have a Windows environment that supports our file and print services, email, and other business applications.”
For several years Cashman Equipment had been using Fortra workload automation and job scheduling and enterprise data access solutions across their IBM i environment. Then they purchased message and event monitoring software from Fortra. At that time, the team felt that it would be beneficial to receive product training and consulting services from Fortra to help them get up and running with the new software, as well as migrate one of their existing products to the latest version so that they could use its new graphical user interface.
Two Days, Multiple Training Goals
The consultant from Fortra arrived on-site the night before Cashman Equipment’s scheduled upgrade in order to see the entire process through with the team. She spent two days with Don’s team in their conference room walking them through the product installation and upgrade, as well as training them on how to do exactly what they wanted to do with the products.
Don and his team found the customized, collaborative nature of the training to be easy to understand and extremely valuable. “On a scale of 1 to 10, our Fortra trainer was a 20. She really knew the products…. She knew we were IBM i novices trying to learn the basics we needed to know on a day-to-day basis.” Along with understanding everyday basics, he said one of his team’s training goals was to learn to be more proactive about fixing issues. “If we ran into problems, we can always contact Technical Support. But one of our goals was to learn how to fix things ourselves. And that’s exactly what happened,” says Don.
“If I can pick up one or two solid points during training, that’s a strong session,” Don added. “The trainer made a number of very good points that really stuck, and she helped us learn. What we came away with was extremely valuable—we even had meetings immediately following the sessions to make sure the suggestions were implemented.”
We had a huge need and high hopes, and the trainer really helped us. It was great training—a very valuable experience.
Don Erlanger, Manager of Information Technology, Cashman Equipment
Flexible, Customized Training Results in Improved Software Usage
Don really liked the flexibility and thoroughness of the training. “Our trainer was very agreeable to whatever we asked. We didn’t have a set curriculum, so she touched on key points within each solution and showed us helpful tips and techniques.”
After their product training, Don and his team felt much more comfortable configuring alerts and notifications and answering messages within their Fortra products, and they hope to do more training in the future.
Don summed up the training experience succinctly. “We had a huge need and high hopes, and the trainer really helped us. It was great training—a very valuable experience.”
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