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National Hose Testing Specialties (NHTS) is a fire equipment testing service that sends crews to firehouses to test ladders and fire hoses for quality and safety. Checking quality and safety compliance requires filling out forms and inputting data, but NHTS was still having field reps use paper forms. These forms had to be returned to an office assistant at the main office, which meant field reps had to make extra trips to turn in all their documents. It took about two weeks before test results were entered into the company database and checked for accuracy, invoiced, and processed.

Invoices couldn’t be processed until all tests were recorded in the central database, which delayed payment for jobs by at least 1-2 weeks. If tests were incomplete or inaccurate, reps would have to make another trip to the firehouse to retest and re-certify the hoses and ladders in question. If a firehouse was audited for test results, NHTS had to manually pull test results for each hose and ladder tested and send them by mail to the firehouse.

All of these manual processes were taking too long, especially with safety on the line. NHTS knew they needed a more efficient solution, which is why they partnered with AltSource, a custom software development company in Portland.

Addressing NHTS' immediate needs, AltSource built a native Android app that streamlined the testing process, synced test results in real-time, and leveraged a custom web app to generate reports for customers immediately - increasing profit margins and reducing time to invoice by weeks.