Darr Equipment Co: Modernizing Operations to Scale with Confidence
| Headquartered | Dallas, Texas, US |
| Founded | 1954 |
| Locations | 10 |
| Industries | Heavy equipment sales, service, and rentals; material handling |
| OEMs | Caterpillar, Mitsubishi, Jungheinrich, UniCarriers, Clark, Kalmar |
| VitalEdge Solution | e-Emphasys ERP |
About Darr Equipment Co
Darr Equipment Co has been a fixture in the Texas and Oklahoma heavy equipment industry for over 70 years. Founded in 1954, the company started as a Caterpillar earthmoving business in Dallas, built on the original founder’s conviction that North Texas was going to grow, and that the right equipment would help build it. That founding instinct proved right. Roads, airports, and major infrastructure across the Dallas area were built using Darr equipment, and the company has grown alongside the region ever since.
Today, Darr is a fourth-generation, family-owned private company with locations across Texas and Oklahoma, a material handling division, and a warehouse products business. The company’s mission reflects the standard it holds itself to: customers recommend Darr, equipment operators prefer Darr’s equipment, and employees are proud to work at Darr.
“When we were drafting our mission statement, we purposefully didn’t draft them with specific hurdles. We drafted them with hurdles like recommend and prefer in order to really show what we wanted to be, which was we wanted to be the best in class. We wanted to be so good that you would tell your friend to come to us.”
– Jack Camiolo, CFO, Darr Equipment
That ambition to be best in class extended to every part of the business, and eventually made it impossible to ignore that the infrastructure supporting the business wasn’t keeping pace with it.
The Problem with Growing on Two Systems
When Jack joined Darr roughly ten years ago, the company was running on two separate systems with no unified view of the business. His job as CFO was to interpret information and communicate it clearly to ownership and the board, but the data he needed was always weeks or months out of date.
“A big part of my role as CFO is interpreting information and getting it to a way that I could communicate to the family or the board. And it was very difficult to do that when you had two different systems and it was taking a month to close our books. For the first probably five years of my time here at Darr, I wrestled with that. It was almost impossible to make good decisions and to give good information when you were always 30 or 60 days behind what was happening.”
– Jack Camiolo, CFO, Darr Equipment
The problem wasn’t confined to finance. Across the organization, departments operated independently. Branch-to-branch communication was inconsistent. Technicians worked from handwritten paper write-ups. Invoices were printed and stuffed into envelopes to mail to customers. Every question from a manager, from every level of the company, eventually made its way to Jack.
“When you’re on two different systems that are 60 days behind and I am the only person that can put it together to give information, I am the keeper of all the information.”
– Jack Camiolo, CFO, Darr Equipment
Tyler Magee, Darr’s Regional Operations Manager, saw the same fragmentation from the field. Without a unified system, visibility ended at the edge of each department.
“Before e-Emphasys, we lost a lot of things. We weren’t able to track exactly where jobs are, where machines are. Parts, inventories, everything kind of got messy. There was not a ton of communication even between, in the branch, between departments, much less branch to branch. We’ve got several branches across Oklahoma and Texas, and before everything was manual.”
– Tyler Magee, Regional Operations Manager, Darr Equipment
Meanwhile, Darr’s growth continued. Each new branch and product line added complexity to an infrastructure that was already struggling to keep up. The gap between Darr’s ambition and its operational systems became increasingly clear.
The Decision to Build an Enterprise Foundation
Rather than continuing to work around the limitations of two disconnected platforms, Darr’s leadership made a deliberate choice to invest in a unified enterprise system. The goal was straightforward: one platform, accessible to every department and every branch, giving every person in the organization access to the same information in real time.
Darr had been a VitalEdge customer since 2019, operating on e-Emphasys ERP5. When the time came to evaluate a migration to ERP6, the decision wasn’t framed as a routine upgrade. It was framed around what the business needed to keep growing.
“We wanted to lay the foundation for an environment that we can grow on top of, whether that were additional branches, lines of business, or other product offerings within the VitalEdge environment.”
– Rachel Hagedorn, IT Project Manager, Darr Equipment
Rachel Hagedorn, Darr’s IT Project Manager, led the ERP6 migration. Her focus from the start was on building something that could scale, not just something that would work for the business as it existed today. The move to ERP6 would also open up a range of additional VitalEdge capabilities the company hadn’t yet had access to, creating a foundation for future growth that went beyond the migration itself.
What e-Emphasys Made Possible
The impact of moving to a unified platform was immediate and cut across every level of the organization. For the first time, information that had previously taken 60 to 90 days to surface was available in real time to managers across every department and every branch. The role of the CFO as the sole keeper of organizational data effectively disappeared.
“When you have a system like we have now where the information is live, so now we’re real time and we’re able to give every manager access to the information real time, there is no more keeper of information and the time it takes for information to get from me to other people, or really the information to get from reality to people, just went from 60 or 90 days down to instant. And that’s a real difference maker.”
– Jack Camiolo, CFO, Darr Equipment
The accessibility of the platform changed how leadership engaged with the business at every level. Within the first weeks of going live on e-Emphasys, Darr’s CEO, who had never logged into the company’s previous systems, was navigating the platform independently and flagging issues on his own.
“About a week or two after being on the system, my CEO, who on the previous systems probably had never even logged into those systems, but on e-Emphasys it was so intuitive. He had logged in and he had come to me with a mistake that he had found in our rental fleet, which when I looked at it was right. He had gone in, identified a vehicle, identified that we had mis-done the depreciation and some expenses on it, and we fixed it.”
– Jack Camiolo, CFO, Darr Equipment
Across operations, the move to a single system eliminated the fragmentation that had defined daily work. Tyler Magee described the shift in terms of what the organization could finally see.
“Once we got into the new system, everything is visible. It’s all in one place. The system is designed for what we do. It’s not some generic system that we have to bend to use. It works well across the board. From branch to branch, department to department, we can collaborate easier.”
– Tyler Magee, Regional Operations Manager, Darr Equipment
Moving from Paper to Digital Workflows
The paper elimination process began immediately after go-live. Jack started methodically moving every workflow off paper, one process at a time: invoicing, collections, warranty submissions, audit trails. Technicians who had been doing paper write-ups in the field moved to mobile devices via e-Service Tech. Customers began receiving invoices electronically through a Billtrust integration. The physical paper trail that had accumulated for years, boxes of documents stored in warehouses to meet seven-year tax and audit requirements, began shrinking for the first time.
“As soon as we were on e-Emphasys, I started, lockstep, every single process we do: how do we move this from paper to digital? That would be invoicing, that would be all our collection, that would be all our audit trails, that would be our warranty submission. Every single thing that we’d been doing with paper before, we just started the process to figure out how to move it off of paper.”
– Jack Camiolo, CFO, Darr Equipment
The system’s flexibility also proved critical as Darr continued to grow. When the company acquired a business in San Antonio and launched its warehouse products division, e-Emphasys accommodated the changes without disruption. New branches, new general ledger accounts, and new billing structures for different product lines were all set up and operational within the existing system.
“This system allowed us to create branches, create GLs, create ways for us to measure how we were doing, easily and within our own team. When you do that, it becomes very easy to pull that information out and dissect it and see how you’re doing and make decisions on what you’re doing with a new business.”
– Jack Camiolo, CFO, Darr Equipment
For Tyler, the difference between the old systems and e-Emphasys came down to a simple distinction: one required constant workarounds, the other was built for the work Darr was already doing.
“The system was built for our equipment. It’s not a generic system that we have to bend to make work for us. It’s built for what we do, the parts, the service, the rental, the equipment side. It works well.”
– Tyler Magee, Regional Operations Manager, Darr Equipment
Positioned for Growth
Darr’s partnership with VitalEdge has grown well beyond a software implementation. The company is now building toward capabilities that extend the value of the platform to their customers directly, including dashboards that will help equipment operators answer questions they currently can’t: what does it cost to maintain this fleet, where is spending concentrated, and when does it make more sense to change an application than replace a tire.
That kind of visibility, from the CFO’s office all the way out to the customer relationship, is exactly what Darr’s leadership was working toward when the company made the decision to standardize on e-Emphasys. The infrastructure is in place. The data is live. And the organization that once ran 60 days behind now runs in real time.
“We really value that VitalEdge is trying to establish a dealer community where we can collaborate together, and that they’re designing the environment holistically so it suits all of our needs.”
– Rachel Hagedorn, IT Project Manager, Darr Equipment
“This has been transformational for Darr. Our partnership with e-Emphasys ERP has made Darr a better company. It’s made us be able to provide a better service to our customers. I don’t think we could have gotten to the level we are now without partnering with VitalEdge e-Emphasys.”
– Jack Camiolo, CFO, Darr Equipment
