"Every now and then we run across a field service management tool that is truly transformational. We've found that with Alpha Anywhere. It's a force multiplier. It lets your development team produce modern business apps much faster than they could otherwise, and deliver much more value to the enterprise."
- Tim Bouchard, VP of IT, Glacier Water
Glacier Water Services Inc. owns and operates over 24,000 water and ice vending machines across North America. It's the world leader in water vending. For over 30 years, they've served as a valuable resource for great tasting, economical water in thousands of neighborhoods. The Company's water machines provide people everywhere with great tasting water that they refill themselves. For doing just a little work, their customers can save a lot of money.
Now they also provide ice, using machines that handle production and bagging right in the store. Their customers can also feel good that, by refilling their own bottle with Glacier Water, they're helping to keep plastic waste out of landfills, and taking delivery trucks off the road. And buying ice from Glacier means they're reducing the number of refrigerated trucks required to stock ice in their store.
Ability to drive business processes
Runs on all size Android and iOS devices
Glacier Water needed an affordable fast field app that could standardize and speed the process of qualifying, signing up, and onboarding new customers; and placing their water and ice machines in new locations.
This field app solution needed to improve the productivity for some 400 sales and field service staff that sell, install, and service its 24,000 water and ice dispensing machines across North America. It had to allow field technicians to perform data collection quickly and work in areas without broadband or WiFi networks. And it had to be compatible across mobile platforms without maintaining multiple applications or incurring costly maintenance expenses.
Lastly, the cost of delivery and deployment had to be less than that of off-the-shelf workflow products and field service management software.
Using Alpha Anywhere, Glacier Water was able to design, develop, debug, and deploy a new custom field service app in a mere six months—about 5 to 10 times faster than was possible had they used Microsoft Access, Visual Studio, or another RMAD platform.Alpha Anywhere's ability to create mobile forms and lookup lists let Glacier Water rapidly create a fast field app with one codebase. The app meets all front-end to back-end requirements, including support for tablets, smartphones, laptops, and desktops; and SQL Server.
Adding sophisticated capabilities was easy using Alpha Anywhere's abundant collection of components, wizards, builders, and smart "coding optional" code generation. Each new feature dynamically adapts to the device it's being run on, without having to develop separate native front ends and back-end interfaces. Most importantly, Alpha Anywhere's built-in support for Adobe PhoneGap and disconnected operation meant Glacier Water's developers didn't waste thousands of hours programming these crucial abilities; and can natively integrate with iOS, Android, the App Store, and the Play Store.
"It lets your development team produce modern business apps much faster than they could otherwise, and deliver much more value to the enterprise."
Glacier Water affected true digital transformation by using Alpha Anywhere to develop a sophisticated sales team field application with a highly responsive design. The application lets the sales team pre-qualify customers using a simple form that works uniformly on any device, whether that's a Windows PC or a mobile iOS, Android, or BlackBerry device.
The application supports integration of attachments and other required items to the main form, which is then digitally submitted for approval. Using the same workflow app, the customer is reviewed, approved, processed, and delivered to the operational side so their new water vending machine can be placed.
The new mobile app has "taken a lot of the non-value-add rework out of the process." And thanks to Alpha Anywhere's built-in disconnected capability, Glacier Water's field workers will be able to work, even when a mobile or other network connection is poor or lost. When the connection returns, the application will automatically synchronize changes in the cloud.
"Alpha Anywhere is a force multiplier."
Alpha Software Corporation
781-229-4500
The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.
Alpha Software Corporation, based in Massachusetts, produces award-winning software that speeds mobile and web app development and deployment for business and IT. The core technology includes two components. Alpha Anywhere®, a full-stack low-code app development platform for building and deploying web and mobile apps. In just hours, Alpha TransForm® turns complex paper forms into powerful mobile forms that speed data collection.
Alpha Software is an InfoWorld Technology of the Year award winner, and scores near-perfect reviews from customers on crowdsourced review sites.
Customers rate Alpha Software highly for its speed of development, flexibility, offline apps, rich feature set and ability to scale predictably. For more information, visit https://www.alphasoftware.com/
