Xora StreetSmart is a management application designed to improve field operations. It turns any mobile device into a productivity and data collection tool. The data is processed and reported on to help companies make better decisions, automate business processes and eliminate manual paperwork.

Managing employees in the field and accurately tracking their hours for billing purposes is a challenge that landscape companies face daily.

The Lawn Ranger, Inc., a full-service landscape design, installation and maintenance company based in Eden Prairie, Minn., relies on a new digital tool to enable its 60 to 100 crews to operate more efficiently, which pays big dividends for the company.

The tool, StreetSmart, is an ap created by Xora that turns any mobile device into a productivity and data collection tool. According to Todd Dilley, the vice president of Lawn Ranger, "it has saved us a lot of time and paperwork, and got us the accuracy that customers 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 program 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 they are done, they answer a few questions regarding the job, then they close it out and move on to their next assignment.

The details of each job goes onto a spreadsheet that is used for job costing, billing and job status.

"We can look at spreadsheet and see if it is done, not done or active," says Dilley.

It also provides other benefits to the company. For example, during a snow event, a crew might have to be sent back to a site two or three times. Management is able to make real-time decisions based on how long the storm lasts and instantly inform the crews if and where they have to return.

And since it is 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. We can show them the GPS coordinates of exactly when we were there."

Best of all, billing time has been drastically reduced.

The old method that Lawn Ranger used was to have everyone fill out a paper sheet on every single site they went to. During a snowstorm that could be up to 45 sites in a 20-hour shift. This led to crews logging wrong numbers or forgetting to fill out paperwork in real-time and then having to guess arrival and departure times later.

"We'd have stakes and stacks of paper," remembers Dilley. "We'd have literally five or six people working for two weeks before we'd be able to bill." And if the customer had a complaint, all we could really say was that we had this piece of paper but there was no real proof other than our word."

The Lawn Ranger is starting its third year working with StreetSmart. Dilley estimates it took the company two weeks to implement the system and two months to perfect it.