"Alpha Anywhere was a big win for everyone on this project. Because of it, I was able to build the apps very quickly, the drivers spend less time on the road, and the car rental company sees improved productivity."
- Kenyon Sprankle, Owner, SWK Systems
An international rental car company with more than 1000 locations throughout the United States and Europe hired SWK Systems to build a fleet management app.
SWK Systems is a Systems Integrator, Vertical Market Software Developer, Consultant, Microsoft Cloud Partner, Office 365 Partner, and an Excel/Quickbooks Integrator. The organization has done work for many clients, including for U.S. Postal Service Vehicle Maintenance Facilities, with 80 locations from Massachusetts to California.
Sophisticatd app built in hours
Runs on all size Android and iOS devices
Rich mobile device capabilities including location and image capture
An international car rental company had locations throughout southern New Jersey that needed to have cars moved from outlet to outlet, depending on the vehicle demand at any particular time. For example, one outlet may have a shortage of SUVs for the following day, while another outlet has a number of SUVs unreserved for the next day.
To match local demand to available vehicles, employees and part-time staff drive cars between locations. Typically, a single driver will drop staff off at outlets, then pick them up after they've moved the cars to their destinations.
Because there are so many of the rental locations distributed in a wide area, it can be difficult for drivers to know the best route for driving from location to location. The rental company was looking for a mobile app to run on multiple platforms that would show drivers the best route to take. Kenyon Sprankle, owner of SWK systems and part time driver for the rental company built the app.
SWK Systems chose Alpha Anywhere because of its ability to build powerful, feature-rich apps on multiple platforms quickly and efficiently.
Kenyon Sprankle, owner, SWK Systems explains, "The beauty of Alpha Anywhere is that you're not device-dependent when you're building a mobile app. You build it once and then deploy it to multiple platforms. That not only makes it easy to create the app for the first time, but for updates and maintenance as well."
Sprankle adds that once you've built the framework for one mobile app, you can re-use it to build others, cutting development time even further. That's what he did with the mobile app for the car rental company. Previously, he had built a mobile app for another enterprise client. He tapped into the SQL database he had built for it and used that as the backend for the car rental app. And he re-used some of the framework and code from it for the app itself.
"Because of that, I only spent between two and three hours building the app, including backend work," he says. "It probably took me longer to type in the names and addresses of the rental locations than it took to build the app itself. If I used another tool, I would have had to spend much more time creating the mobile apps."
He says that it would take an app developer using traditional tools six weeks to build an app of similar complexity.
"With Alpha Anywhere, it only took me between two and three hours to build mobile apps for iOS and Android devices — and that time includes backend work on a SQL database. I don't know of any other development platform that lets you build enterprise-level mobile apps in such a short amount of time."
Sprankle built mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices using Alpha Anywhere. The apps are particularly helpful for new drivers who don't know the locations of the car rental locations in southern New Jersey. With it, when they're at one outlet and need to drive to another, they can quickly find its locations and get directions to it.
"What they get is not just a basic Google map," he explains. "It shows all of the rental locations in southern New Jersey. Drivers can click and find the name and address of any location, as well as the specific car rental ID associated with it. The driver can then find the easiest and most direct route by putting that information into their device's GPS."
The app saves employee's time because they can drive to their locations far more quickly than previously. And it saves the car rental company money because its employees spend less time and mileage driving cars between locations.
"Alpha Anywhere was a big win for everyone on this project," he says. "Because of it, I was able to build the apps very quickly, the drivers spend less time on the road, and the car rental company sees improved productivity."
"It probably took me longer to type in the names and addresses of the rental locations than it took to build the app itself. If I used another tool, I would have had to spend much more time creating the mobile apps."
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/
