Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Alex Bratton, CEO of Lextech (Part 1)

Alex Bratton is the chief executive officer of Lextech, a company that creates custom mobile apps for organizations to optimize their workflows. Alex has a BS in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He founded and lead several successful companies in the past, including EmailRx, The Net Squad, and WebRPG. In this interview he provides several use cases of how Lextech adds value to businesses and their processes by designing customized mobile apps, and he gives us his views on the mobile app space and what entrepreneurs should be focusing on to be successful.

Sramana Mitra: Alex, let’s start with introducing Lextech to our audience as well as giving them some of your background.

Alex Bratton: Our focus as an organization is to help other organizations apply technology to address challenges with business processes and to unleash what we see as billions of dollars locked away in enterprise and business workflows. We do this by applying suites of custom mobile apps, identifying how to better enable workflows for a mobile workforce, and putting them in the hands of everybody in the team so that they can be more effective at what they do – which we hope is something that is a pleasure to use, brings a smile to people’s faces, and allows them to get their job done faster and more effectively, producing great results for their companies.

SM: Take a few of your customers and double click down into interesting case studies of what they are doing, what you are doing for them, and what trends those case studies speak to.

AB: One of the corporations we are working with is Blue Star Energy. Their primary business is doing energy retrofits of buildings. They had a very paper-based operation. They would use clipboards, send people in, they had to do an audit of a building, look at every light fixture, document every light fixture and then turn that into a proposal to retrofit that building. That was something that would take approximately 12 people [several] hours over a week to create.

Part of the process was looking at double entries. Once you entered information on a piece of paper, it would be transcribed by someone else, which led to challenges in the process. We helped them put together an iPad application that was a smart worksheet. So it is not just, “How do I type into an iPad,” but, “How do I let this tool help prompt me for the right information at the right time, more quickly capture the data and immediately generate information to be able to create proposals.” That took a 12-person, hours-long process down to a four-hour process – from a week down to a day in terms of being able to deliver results.

SM: What are you doing specifically to save time?

AB: One of the great things about mobility is that it forces simplicity in processes. We looked at what their process is. One of the keys to success when you are building something on the mobile side is to live in someone’s shoes. We were going through these processes in order to really understand them.

We were able to simplify the process that was paper based, but the key was when somebody was putting the information to paper, that person had to actually enter in all of the information. When you were able to switch over to a smart sheet on an iPad, people didn’t have to enter everything. They could potentially enter part of the information, and the system was smart enough to know if they were picking a particular lightning fixture and [it would]ask if the fixture has this or that kind of wiring, container and lens on top of it. The person was able to enter the information much more quickly because of the intelligence of the app.

It is not just an intelligent data collection application, it is intelligently prompting. One of the things that disappoints me is when I see people having to go in and type lots of information. That is not a great user experience. That is replacing a piece of paper with a word processor. It is when the application can make it simple that it gets really fast.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Alex Bratton, CEO of Lextech
1 2 3 4 5