Recycling grease from food-related businesses is a much larger industry than you might imagine – an estimated $2 billion a year. Alpha Anywhere has helped one of the largest players in the industry grow far beyond its original home base, cut costs, and attract new business with an innovative mobile system and app.
The Challenge
All American was looking to expand its grease-cleaning and grease-recycling business beyond its original base in New Orleans. But company operations were run with a combination of manual processes, a Microsoft Access database and lots of paper. All American’s controller, Bobbie Breaux, knew that inefficiencies inherent with these systems would limit that growth. “Challenges that may be acceptable for a local operator, like inefficient scheduling of drivers, insecure record keeping, and time wasted on manual tasks, would become serious issues in a rapidly growing regional operation,” she says.
To manage the growth and make the transition to being a regional operator, All American Grease Services needed a robust Web-based business infrastructure that provided native mobile capabilities.
Solution
Ms. Breaux researched custom mobile development solutions extensively and decided that Alpha Anywhere would be ideal for the task. She was impressed with its flexibility and the power it provided to build Web-based and mobile solutions efficiently. Its ability to quickly prototype systems was also a key factor, since she would need to sell the entire concept to company ownership and some prospective customers as well.
She contacted Alpha Software Corporation, which put her in touch with Web App Express. Web App Express built All American a comprehensive Web-based and mobile system that takes care of every aspect of All American’s operations, including scheduling drivers work and routes, report-writing, and more. It is driven by a SQL database.
Benefits
All American has reaped considerable productivity and financial benefits from the new system. With the old system, Breaux and her staff spent at least two days a week printing out paper tickets. Now it takes less than ten minutes a month to create driver schedules that work across a range of mobile devices. Drivers are more productive, because they easily use the mobile app versus handling paper tickets. They also don’t need to drive to All American’s headquarters twice a day to pick up tickets in the morning, and bring completed ones back in the evening. Some drivers only need to go to headquarters once a month. In addition, staff does not need to manually enter information from paper tickets into the system — the drivers enter updates themselves from the road on their mobile apps. That reduces errors, speeds customer service and saves on time and paper.
The system has increased customer loyalty and made it easier to attract new clients. The system even allows customers to remotely view service and scheduling related data.
All American has expanded dramatically and now provides services across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Its customers include some of the largest companies in the world.
“The system been a big winner for us,” Breaux says. “With Alpha Anywhere, Web App Express has delivered an ideal system that is truly tailored to our business and our unique processes. Without it our dramatic growth would have been impossible.”
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