John Hoelz, principal of the New Berlin, Wis.-based rep firm, J.F. Nolan & Associates, is all over all things technical. An admitted “techie,” he's the guy in the office who actually enjoys the IT stuff — setting up the email accounts, teaching people how to sync their smart phones, etc., because he loved messing with technology.

Except for a short stint with a technology consulting company that helped schools and churches incorporate technology into their operations, for most of the past 20-plus years, Hoelz, with the able assistance of Christina Lueck, now the company's vice president of operations, has harnessed technology to make life easier for the salespeople of J.F. Nolan & Associates as they call on customers throughout the Milwaukee area, and the far reaches of Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Now he wants to make life easier for other reps and distributors with RepFiles, an end-to-end file distribution system that makes manufacturers' up-to-date product information available 24/7 so they can access it on sales calls via tablets without being connected to the Web.

As the developer of the cloud-based RepFiles content management system for tablet computers, John Hoelz has come a long way since his first days as a rep with the firm in the early 1990s, when he said he would never own a computer.

The story of RepFiles actually begins in J.F. Nolan & Associates' pre-computer era in the early 1990s, when John Hoelz first joined the rep agency. He laughs now when he thinks that back then the most advanced electronic device the firm had in its office was a fax machine, and that in those days he was pretty vocal about how he would never own a computer. The company got its first personal computer around the time Lueck joined the agency in 1992 so they could work with a lighting control program offered by GE Lighting Controls, which they still represent. “Christina set it up and got it working,” he says. “Programming was written to a floppy disc that you would insert into to a lighting control system to load the program as to when relays would turn on and off.”

They eventually started using that computer for basic word processing and e-mail, when that became available. As new technology came to the electrical market, it seemed like J.F. Nolan & Associates was always one of the first companies to adopt it, whether it was personal computers, laptops, cellphones or smartphones. Like many reps, Hoelz lived through the evolution of the cellphone from a brick-sized device that you had to haul around in a bag to the smartphones many of us rely on today. His agency's salespeople also started packing laptops for their sales calls.

“We were right there,” he says, “As soon as you could mount cells in cars, we had them. As soon as they introduced PalmPilots we had them. They just had basic contact info and some primitive notetaking, if you could learn how to enter the text using “Graffiti.” There was always the inherent problem of how do you synchronize what's on there with what you have on your desktop. Back in that day all data was local. Everything sat in one spot and you had to return home to get that kind of info.

“We were pretty early adopters of that type of technology. Standard Electric Supply once asked me to speak to their local NAED group about technology and what it was doing for our industry. I will never forget that presentation because I talked about fax machines, cell phones and pagers, which was high tech at that time.”

But to Hoelz, at least two things were missing that he would eventually build into RepFiles. First was a dependable link that would allow salespeople to access the most pertinent product information for sales calls when they needed it most — at the point of contact on a sales call with that customer. Also on his wish list was a centralized depot of up-to-date product information accessible from the field that wouldn't require Christina to constantly e-mail the latest files to salespeople.

During this era, reps were having all sorts of challenges with IT management. J.F. Nolan & Associates had a techie on call in Hoelz, but most reps didn't have that luxury. “One of the challenges for an agent is who manages their IT,” he says. “We all expend a tremendous amount of energy trying to find a solution that's right for our agency and none of us are on the same page. We are all going down the same road, but we are not talking with each other.”

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