The company is a small, privately owned business that is one of only two companies worldwide which offers all phases of pressure tapping. Pro Tapping specializes in tapping pipeline. In addition to offering all phases of pressure tapping, the company also has a recent addition to its services, pipe freezing, which offers a quick, efficient and affordable alternative to pipe maintenance or line modification without shutting down a system. The company serves customers from refineries to chemical plants to pharmaceutical facilities and a variety of commercial and municipal facilities.

Ironically, for a company that specializes in ‘No Shutdown’ service, it found itself in need of expertise to prevent bottlenecks, slowdowns and even shutdowns of a different nature. When it came to its own business automation, however, Pro Tapping found itself combating a different kind of pressure – processes were largely manual and paper-driven, administrative tasks were executed largely based on the memory of the employees and truly effective database organization was missing.

“During 2003, we were using an area computer service to try to improve our business processes, but they were just not meeting our needs. We knew we wanted better control over our database and more automated and tailored processes for the minimum of 50 bids a day we review,” Charlene Miller recalls. “We wanted a database design that could be a real marketing tool for us, giving us statistical information showing us great detail on each and every client – we had none of that and it was frustrating.”

Charlene and her husband, Ross Miller, own Pro Tapping.

Ross Miller is so highly respected in his field that even his competitors occasionally seek his advice on seemingly impossible-to-solve challenges in pressure tapping. His quest to create a premier pressure tapping business started back in 1983 when, as a union certified fitter and welder who had worked around the world for 15 years, he had become frustrated with the substandard service offered by pressure tapping companies. Starting with no funds but plenty of knowledge, Ross built Pro Tapping into a first-class operation in an industry that allows little room for error.

Today, Pro Tapping is the largest privately held pressure tapping company in North America. Charlene Miller is tasked with ensuring that the business her husband founded operates smoothly. Tired of poor results with the computer services company Pro Tapping first utilized, Miller made a call to Miles Technologies.

Miles Technologies is a Moorestown, NJ-based firm that prides itself on being a complete solutions provider that provides its clients with a single, tightly integrated system developed by the same team of skilled engineers from end-to-end. This “single source” approach saves Miles Technologies' clients, like Pro Tapping, time and money they would otherwise spend searching for multiple vendors to provide individual services.

Miles Technologies custom applications include: Contact Management & Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Inventory, Shipping, Invoicing and A/R, Purchasing and A/P, General Ledger, Check Printing, Human Resources, Contact Management, Sales and Accounting Reports, Scheduling, Graphical Website, Quoting & Estimating, Order Entry, Credit and Payment Processing as well as Order Fulfillment.

Pro Tapping utilized Miles Technologies for a robust, customized database design, allowing for intense statistical information to be readily accessed by employees. Keyword searches assist the Pro Tapping team in easily finding the right clients and jobs matches, better expediting the extensive and diverse dozens of bids the company handles each day.

Miller reports time savings at Pro Tapping have been considerable with Miles Technologies customized solutions in place. Five of the company’s seven office employees utilize the Miles system every day, and work at Pro Tapping has been more streamlined and efficient since the Miles system went live.

The various custom forms and extensive fields designed by Miles Technologies for Pro Tapping equip the company with an intelligent database that can also be used as a powerful marketing tool. Fields were created to allow Pro Tapping to keep track and search for type of tap, extensive technical information on hot taps, wet taps, line stops, valve insertions, pipe freezing, quotes for the various taps and parameters of the taps, as well as administrative information such as callbacks, notes, referrals and other administrative areas of interest associated with each bid.

“The statistical information on our clients was never organized and automated like this, it was largely on paper and in our memories,” says Charlene Miller. “Most of our database and organizational processes were manual and paper-driven, but now our information is organized and automated and searchable – it’s a whole new way of doing business and it is most certainly the right way.”

Today, Pro Tapping is a highly automated business. The company can, at a moment’s notice, access bids, records and complex job forms automatically. They can evaluate how much business they have done in any given specified time period with click of a mouse. Everything is automated, stored digitally and easily accessible.

“We are no longer a company that operates with paper-driven processes. We are not struggling to keep track of papers, not to lose things, to keep reminders and notes in memory We are automated – and we can focus even more time on our primary goals of serving our customers,” Charlene Miller reports. “When it comes to organizing our administrative processes, the pressure is off.”