Before Ksertronics
Champions Hyrdo-Lawn Inc. is a great local company in our area that, for over 40 years, has been the preferred choice of contractors and engineers for erosion control and turf establishment. With this success, though, comes lots of accounts to manage and report on.
Champions attends monthly MUD meetings for all of its accounts and reports out on the updates. This includes photos, comments, and any other items that are necessary to be shared at the monthly MUD meetings.
Champions needed a faster and more efficient way to generate these reports each month, as the current method was to manually upload all photos to a laptop and paste them into a Word document. This took way too much time and caused too much disunity in the final reports from rep to rep across the company.
Building Champions' App
The two goals this project were 1) Simple and 2) Efficient. Luckily this is right up Ksertronics’ alley. We decided on an iOS app that would do all the heavy lifting and leave the Champions reps’ to just input the data they wanted.
We worked closely with a few reps from Champions to quickly build out a V1 of the app for immediate use and testing. This version quickly saved hours of work a week by simply moving the work to the iPhone app.
The app was simple and easy to use, which was very important to Champions. The user simply needed to take photos of their projects, right from the app, and then input their comments. Like a simple form, all that is needed is to fill it out.
The magic was in the logic of generating the report. We built the app to take the simple input by the user and turn it into a perfectly formatted PDF. All of this happened in mere seconds after the user submitted the data. This PDF file could then be emailed right from the app.
Our Results
As soon as we launched the app for the Champions reps to use, it immediately increased productivity across the company. What used to take hours in the week for each rep to do, now only takes minutes. And all of this work could be done in the field as they gathered the data, so this new app fit perfectly into the flow of their work.
This app also created the added benefit of unifying the structure of the reports across the company. Now, all reports created by Champions have the same look and feel. This makes it easier for customers to find the info they need when reading each report, and also makes sharing the reports easier for the Champions reps. It also just looks better to be unified as a company 🙂
The first version of the app was such a big success, that a second version was contracted to be worked on. It was a pleasure working with Champions, and we look forward to continue to improve their business process through technology.
