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Press Release -- December 9th, 2014
Source: Sprint Nextel
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Making the right moves with mobile forms: Sprint and AB Moving

Texas moving company AB Moving has come a long way in a short time in embracing mobility and eliminating paper from their business processes.

Until early 2014, the company dispatched its mover teams each morning by making them come to the company office and pick up paper documents. That ate up time and forced the drivers – AB Moving has 72 mover teams completing as many as 700 jobs weekly – to put unnecessary mileage on their trucks.

Brent Davis (pictured above), who joined AB Moving in mid-2013 as general manager, saw this process and knew there had to be a better way to handle dispatching, documents, and customer payments. After all, the company was using a sophisticated software application to record customer, job booking, and moves data. What needed changing was how data and documents were being exported from that application and put into the movers’ hands.

Davis found his solution in Sprint, with its mobile forms partner Canvas. Now every mover team leader is equipped with a Samsung Galaxy tablet running the Canvas app, and they no longer need to touch a single piece of paper. The team leaders also have Galaxy 3 phones for swiping credit cards for payment.

AB Moving, based in Allen, Texas, and serving customers in most major Texas cities, has two forms – the bill of lading, essentially the contract between the company and the customer – and a damage report form, in case movers damage an item or need to document that an item was already damaged before they began the move.

Each evening the next day’s bills of lading are finalized and exported from the AB Moving database to the Canvas application, then transmitted to the movers at 5 a.m. As they complete the job at each customer site, movers get customer signatures and take credit card payments. That data is transmitted back to AB Moving, which sends out the signed bill of lading and credit card receipt via email.

Davis himself revamped the paper documents into PDF format for the Canvas app, and the idea, he says, was “to make it as easy as possible for the movers to use. I wanted the absolute easiest way to enable clicking and signing and creating a good customer experience.”

The Canvas system makes form building easy with its drag-and-drop form builder, as well as thousands of customizable apps incorporating additional capabilities such as GPS recognition, barcode scanning, electronic signatures, emails, calculations, access to business data, and the photo capture-and-store features.

AB Moving’s switch to mobile forms, by Davis’ estimates, should yield first-year savings of up to $125,000 just on credit card processing alone, since the processing fees are lower for cards that are swiped on-site. He calculates another $50,000 worth of savings annually in employee time spent matching contracts and credit card receipts, dealing with credit card numbers over the phone, and in the cost of paper.

Being able to photograph damaged items before the move and store those photos has really reduced the number and costs of post-move damage claims, Davis said. Without that easy-to-use application, AB Moving was in a position where it had to compensate customers up to 90 days after the move, since it lacked proof that items were already damaged beforehand.

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