How RDI Modernized A 50-Year-Old Business And Doubled In Size With FieldPulse

Customer Spotlight: RDI

• Industry: Commercial Furniture Installation
• Company Size: 50+ employees
• Location: St. Louis, MO
• Previous Platform: Pen, paper, and Excel
• FieldPulse Features: Scheduling, Job Management, Employee Timesheets, ClearPath, Custom Forms, Cost Tracking, Customer Communication, Fleet Tracking, Invoices, Custom Workflows

By the numbers (3 years on FieldPulse):

• 100% business growth in 12 months
• 10 → 30–40 jobs per week
• 3 weeks → 5 days time-to-invoice
• 15 → 50 employees in 3 years
• Time tracking rollout: 2 weeks (expected: 6 months)
• Job-level profitability: invisible for 50 years → visible on every job
• 10,000+ jobs recorded in FieldPulse

Last year, RDI doubled the size of a 50-year-old family business — from 15 employees to 50, from 10 jobs a week to 30–40, from invoicing that took three weeks to a five-day batch every Monday.

They didn’t flip a switch to do it. They spent three years building workflows inside FieldPulse — scheduling first, then invoicing, then time tracking, then ClearPath, which finally tied labor hours to specific jobs and unlocked job-level profitability for the first time in 50 years.

Most paper-and-Excel operations feel the strain long before they double. Jobs start slipping through the cracks. The office turns into a bottleneck. Every new hire adds more coordination overhead.

RDI grew anyway — without adding layers of back-office chaos to support it.

RDI (Receive Deliver Install) is part of the Manley Family of Companies — a commercial interiors business in St. Louis specializing in office furniture installation and modular wall systems. They install the cubicles, glass-walled offices, and demountable walls that design firms and architects spec for their clients. When the design is done, RDI is the team that puts it all together.

Scott Bertram and his wife came into the business with corporate backgrounds — Scott in finance, his wife in project management, where she’d rolled out technology across her former company. They knew what was possible. They also knew what they were walking into: a 50-year-old family business with about 15 employees still running on pen and paper.

That’s where they started. This is what they built.

The Manual Process That Was Capping The Business

The commercial furniture trade doesn’t have plumbing’s standardization. Every job is custom. RDI’s customer structure is layered on top of that — design firms and architects are the customers paying the bills, but the actual install happens at the design firm’s client’s office. The customer paying the invoice is rarely the customer on site. That structure doesn’t map cleanly to how most field service platforms are designed. Plumbing platforms assume the homeowner pays. HVAC platforms assume the person on site is the person on the invoice. RDI needed a parent-child customer relationship — paying customer and job-site customer, separate but linked.

That complexity sat on top of an operation running on pen, paper, and Excel. Three workflow breakdowns mattered most.

The folder problem. Every job depended on a folder making it through five hand-offs. The day before each job, the office printed everything — customer info, blueprints, paperwork for each crew member — and put it all in a folder. The folder went on a service truck to the job site. The crew did the work, got a customer signature, and the folder had to make its way back to the office. Someone scanned every page and emailed it to the customer. Some folders came back in a day. Some took longer. Some never came back clean.

“We would end up eating the cost for things,” Scott said. “Three or four days later, it’s tough to go back to a customer and say we forgot we did this.”

The phone-tree problem. Mid-job changes kicked off a phone tree. If a customer emailed with a change, the office had to call the crew, send someone back out, or pull a crew member back to the office for new paperwork. There was no way to push an update to the field in real time.

The three-week invoice. Done manually in Excel, job by job. For a business doing projects with $10,000 to $15,000 average tickets, that lag had real cash flow consequences. The longer the invoice took to send, the longer the cash took to come in. The longer the cash took to come in, the harder it was to fund the next job.

Underneath all of it: no job-level visibility. Paper time cards meant the office had a rough sense of what was happening, but no real numbers. No way to see which jobs were profitable, which were losing Fmoney, or where the margins really were.

Every one of those breakdowns slowed the business down in a different way.

Every job paid the tax — in time, in cash, in customer goodwill that erodes when a folder doesn't come back clean. By 2023, the business had outgrown the system underneath it.

Building The Workflows One Step At A Time

RDI didn’t try to digitize the entire operation overnight. They knew their team — long-tenured, comfortable with how things had always been done — and they knew the change had to come in stages.

“We ripped band-aids off one at a time, instead of all at once,” Scott said.

Scheduling came first, then invoicing, then time tracking. Each workflow they built became the foundation for the next.

Scheduling was the most immediate need. A digital board in the office, every job and every assigned crew member visible. Crews could log in the night before and see exactly what they were walking into — the project, the address, the special notes, the on-site contact. Instead of spending the first hour of every job getting acclimated, they hit the ground running.

Invoicing came next. RDI runs weekly batch invoicing — every Monday, the office runs through every job from the previous week, generates invoices, and includes progress billing where the project calls for it. Three weeks became five days.

Custom Forms, GPS fleet tracking, and asset tracking came as the team grew. Each addition was a response to what the business was becoming — not a feature added because it was available.

By year three, the office wasn’t running the system anymore. The system was running the work.

The Rollout That Beat Every Expectation

When the team was ready for time tracking, the question wasn’t whether they could do it. It was whether the field crew would actually use it.

RDI had been on paper time cards for decades. Employees filled out a card during the week, turned it in on Monday or Tuesday, and the office processed payroll from there. Everyone knew there was waste in those hours. More importantly, there was no job-level visibility. You couldn’t tell how much labor went into any single project.

The challenge wasn’t the tech. It was the people. A field crew of long-tenured, technology-resistant employees who had been doing it the same way for thirty years.

Then, they started using ClearPath. Clock in, view the job, clock out. No extra buttons, no confusion. Scott and the team customized the interface down to the minimum.

They rolled it out on December 15. They expected adoption to take six months. Within two weeks, they were running payroll off it.

The adoption surprised them. The ownership surprised them more.

“The guys call into the office and say, ‘hey, I noticed in FieldPulse this wasn’t quite right, like, update it,’” Scott said. “They hold a certain level of accountability and they love it to be right from that perspective — which is like a weird cool full circle moment for us.”

A field crew that ran on paper for thirty years was self-policing their digital workflows within weeks. FieldPulse gave them something paper never could — the ability to fix their own data, and the ownership that came with it.

The Data Layer Most Field Service Businesses Never Build

When Scott signed up for FieldPulse, scheduling was the goal. Time tracking would come later. Job profitability was — in his words — a “hope-dream,” not an expectation.

Three years and 10,000+ jobs later, that hope is what’s reshaping the business.

For the first time in 50 years, RDI can see which jobs make money, which lose it, and where the margins really are. ClearPath unlocked it — finally tying labor hours to specific jobs in a way the team would actually use. The reporting layer Scott didn’t know was achievable became day-to-day — the kinds of projects that perform well, the things that need pricing attention., and which clients consistently push margins down.

That data drives how the business grows now. After doubling the company last year, RDI needed to keep the pipeline full. They didn’t guess. They looked at the margin data and pushed marketing and sales toward the job types where the business performed best.

“I wasn’t really thinking about it until we went into the data,” Scott said. “Wow, we have really great margins on these sorts of jobs. Let’s push it more into that.”

The decision didn’t come from intuition. It came from three years of jobs in FieldPulse — and the data layer ClearPath added when it finally tied labor to the work.

Workarounds solved the immediate problem. But the workflows they built in FieldPulse kept compounding over time — into better reporting, better pricing decisions, and clearer visibility into where the business actually made money.

The back office benefits the same way. The day-to-day weight that used to consume the team — scheduling, time tracking, invoicing, job tracking — runs in FieldPulse now. The capacity that came back went into employee training programs, not into adding office staff to keep up with the doubling.

What’s Next

The workflows RDI built aren’t done getting built. Every job adds to the data layer. Every report sharpens the next pricing call. Every crew member who flags an error in the system makes the next workflow that much tighter.

Three years ago, growth on pen and paper would have meant breaking the team, the books, or both. RDI built a way of operating that could actually support the size they were becoming.

The growth changed the size of the business. The workflows changed what the business could handle.