Mobile field applications can create unique opportunities for businesses to increase productivity and reduce expenses. When Lilliput, the largest commercial/industrial laundry in Ireland, needed to build a massive system for managing millions of pieces of inventory, it turned to Alpha Anywhere. With Alpha Anywhere's rapid mobile application development platform, Lilliput realized their mobile needs. The end result: an innovative, industrial-strength field mobile system that uses the Web, a mobile app, and RFID tags.
Lilliput handles approximately 500,000 pieces of laundry a week from hotels, hospitals and other businesses. It was losing a significant percentage of its laundry stock, so it decided to use RFID tags to track it all. As part of the system, Lilliput needed an application developed that would enable them to record the RFID data.
Lilliput contracted with company Sedo Unus, owned and run by Aaron Kurth, to oversee the development of an RFID-based solution. Kurth turned to Alpha Anywhere and Web App Express, which provides solutions to companies and organizations spanning more than 40 industries and governmental entities.
The system Web App Express built handles the entire laundry business process, starting with inputting and managing orders, then tracking inventory, shipping, receiving, and laundering articles. The system also handles invoicing and seamlessly connects to Lilliput’s accounting system.
As the linens leave Lilliput and come back, a mobile RFID scanning app, built using Alpha Anywhere, extracts all the information from the embedded RFID chips, and updates the database. Lilliput’s knowledge of its inventory is vastly improved and so is their bottom line.
Mobile App Realizes Big Benefits
Benefits of the system touch every aspect of Lilliput’s operations.“Lilliput keeps track of more than 150,000 unique items with the system now,” Kurth says. “It knows where they are at in the plant, when they leave the plant, where they’ve gone, and when they come back. Lilliput used to spend a half a million pounds a year to replace lost stock,” Kurth says. “With the new system, that number has been reduced dramatically.”
Customer satisfaction has improved as well. Customers sometimes don’t know exactly what linen they have on hand from Lilliput. But with the new system, Lilliput knows down to the piece what each customer has, and can provide that information for them at a moment’s notice.
The new system also reduces the amount of paper that Lilliput uses to track linen, leading to savings of approximately a ton of paper a month.
“The new Alpha Anywhere system created by Web App Express gives us everything we need,” Kurth concludes. “It saves money, gives Lilliput more flexibility in the way it works, reduces lost stock, and improves customer satisfaction.”
Tom Simon, co-owner of Web App Express, adds, “The reasons we use Alpha Anywhere boil down to productivity, which equals value. It also offers power and stability. Our team is able to produce high-quality systems that are highly flexible, intuitive and rock solid in less time. It really comes down to providing more value for less cost.”
For more details, here's the full case study.
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