Removing snow, ice and avoidable costs with wireless solutions from Sprint

That’s how the owner of a leading Chicago area snow and ice removal company described how Sprint has helped improve his crews’ productivity.

Snow Plus president Steven Greenwald oversees 400 employees and 150 pieces of heavy plow equipment when the Windy City and nearby towns are buried in the white stuff. In 2012, the company was mired in manual processes for many of its tasks, such as scheduling snow removals, reporting and billing, and researching legal disputes,. This caused delays and down times and impeded snow-clearing operations, which gouged Snow Plus’s bottom line.

Using customized wireless forms, navigation and mapping from JobNotes™ (a proprietary solution that Greenwald developed and will market this year in the United States), operators today can rapidly provide field updates, more quickly locate properties, review customized color satellite images  and go over site documents and plans.

Drivers can also save time and give their managers more up-to-date information. According to Greenwald, the fleet management solution provided by Actsoft’s Comet Tracker for GPS also lets supervisors know precisely where each piece of equipment is or has been, meaning more efficient dispatching. The uneditable GPS tracking history also provides vital protection in legal disputes. The history playback feature of Comet Tracker lets Snow Plus see what field crews are doing and streamlines routes to save time and fuel costs.

“Before Sprint’s help, field crews were hampered by large, cumbersome ‘snow books’ in our trucks,” Greenwald recalls. “They were time consuming to compile staff labor and manually update the 300-page binders throughout the season. It was also very costly.”

Wireless technology rewarded Greenwald with better efficiency and immediate costs savings. In early 2014, Sprint solution specialists Mike Litscher and Brian Handler suggested a combination of wireless solutions. The advice offered the company fleet and asset management from Actsoft; mobile device management from  Airwatch; secure VPN with Sprint Data Link; and mobile access information via Samsung Galaxy Tab 4tablets secured in the trucks to work in conjunction with the JobNotes™ solution.

The new JobNotes™ “SnowNotes™ application provides the data that was once stored in the snow books (client requests, where to pile snow, colored maps, etc.). This data now resides on a cloud platform and is immediately accessible to drivers and staff via the Galaxy 4 tablets through Sprint’s wireless network.

Choosing the Sprint solutions recommended by Litscher and Handler has cut operating costs at Snow Plus up to $150,000 annually. Greenwald expects the cost savings to continue.
The multimillion-dollar company continues to thrive and add customers.

“Mike and Brian are a like part of my team,” Greenwald said. “Their recommendations have been wise, the installation of the Sprint solutions has been mostly trouble-free and the Sprint network has been extremely reliable.”