Landscape Contractor / Design Build Maintain

FEB 2014

LC/DBM provides landscape contractors with Educational, Imaginative and Practical information about their business, their employees, their machines and their projects.

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32 LC DBM Xora and Lawn Ranger Lawn Ranger Outdoor Services, a landscape and snow and ice management company, oversees their fleet with StreetSmart by Xora. According to the manufacturer, their solution is a suite of con- figurable cloud-based apps that benefit mobile businesses and their field employees by turning any mobile device into a productivity and data collection tool that integrates with back-office systems and other applications. As one of the reported 16,000 organizations that have incorporated Xora products for fleet management, Lawn Ranger of Eden Prairie, Minn., made this choice to enable its 60 to 100 crews to operate more efficiently in the field. Todd Dilley, the company's vice president, reports, "It has saved us a lot of time and paperwork, and got us the accuracy that cus- tomers demand. We use it to run all of our crews in both summer and winter." Dilley says that every crewmember has an iPhone with the pro- gram on it. All the jobs for a given day, and the route directions for each job, are sent to these phones. When a crew gets to a job, they "punch in" and then go to work. When a job is done, a few questions regarding the job are answered by the crewmembers. Lawn Ranger's services include grounds maintenance, snow and ice management, landscape design and installation, irrigation service and installation, tree and shrub care, weed, insect and pest control, fertilization, and holiday lighting. The details of each job goes onto a spreadsheet that is used for job costing, billing and job status. And since the jobs are GPS tracked, customer disputes have been drastically reduced. "We have the exact hours they were there," says Dilley. "We can tell the minute they arrived and the minute they left and what they did. There is no longer a question of whether we were there or not." Above: Using Fleetmatics, Case Snow Management in Boston can access a suite of driver and vehicle activity reports. Among the information provided is data that can alert the company to drivers who are speeding or demonstrating other risky behavior. Owner Jason Case says that with this knowledge, the issue can be corrected before it costs them money or causes an extreme safety issue. Fleet Management Tools Improve Landscape Companies' Outlooks By Mike Dahl, LC/DBM Editor l e e t - b a s e d b u s i n e s s e s h a v e l o n g c o u n t e d o n t e c h n o l o g y – t h i n k C B r a d i o s – t o i m p r o v e t h e i r e f f i c i e n c y a n d i n c r e a s e t h e i r p r o f i t s . T h i s c o n t i n u e s t o d a y w i t h t r a c k i n g t e c h n o l o g i e s t h a t c a n , a m o n g o t h e r t h i n g s , s a v e c o m p a n i e s t i m e , r e d u c e f u e l c o s t s , c u t e x c e s s i v e m i l e a g e a n d p r o v i d e c u s t o m e r s w i t h p r o o f - o f - v i s i t s , a s t h e s e t h r e e c a s e s t u d i e s p r o v e . 032-035.indd 32 1/31/14 10:07 AM

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