When you think of a landscape company, you probably think of shovels, trucks, tools, and heavy equipment. But, have you ever thought about the technology behind a successful landscape company? You might be surprised.
At Native Edge Landscape, we love pushing boundaries, being different, trying things no one else would think of. This creative drive has always been a core part of our design philosophy, and it carries over to other areas of the business as well. Since the beginning, we have been a leader in pushing the boundaries of technology in the landscape industry. With two full time programers in the office, there is always some new innovation coming out of our shop.
Heads up… It gets really geeky past this point! Read at your own risk!
Hardware:
- Powered By Apple – We are a 100% Apple Shop. The Macs on our desks, the iPads in our trucks, and the iPhones in our hands, provide an integrated fluid system for managing customers and collaborating on projects from start to finish.
- Raspberry Pie – Ok, so we are a 99.99% Apple powered shop. We do have one trusty raspberry pie used to serve up our Telemetry dashboard.
- Nest Thermostat – This handy little device keeps us cool and allows us to fight over the temperature of the office without ever leaving our desks!
- Phillips Hue – Our office turns into a disco when we get a new lead! 🙂
Software:
- WordPress.org – Our heavily modified WordPress install has been humming along serving up our website for 3 years now. The extensive library of plugins available has been incredibly helpful in managing our ever growing mass of content.
- SketchUp – Although all our designs are hand rendered, SketchUp has been an incredibly powerful tool to have at our disposal for simple modeling.
- Google Earth – A perfect tool for assisting our designers in gather information like: elevation, tree canopy placement, lot size, etc. The extendable nature of the program helps us visualize the “context” of a design with our own data sources.
- Apple Aperture – Organizes our over 120 Gb library of landscape photos and videos.
- OSX Mavericks Server – The VPN features are incredibly important for the remote nature of our business. File Server keeps our files organized and locked down. And profile manager has made managing our large collection of devices incredibly easy.
- Pixelmator – A quick and easy graphic design program allowing our designers as well as our marketing team quickly generate graphics for designs and marketing materials.
Cloud Services & APIs:
We have stitched together an elaborate suite of cloud services to streamline our communications and workflow:
- Twilio API – We leverage the incredible power of the Twilio phone platform to power our incoming and outgoing customer communication.
- Pusher API – We use the real time power of Pusher websockets to keep our remote customer facing systems in sync with our in house office systems and field devices. Customer triggered events start syncing of information and alert the appropriate people to take action.
- TelemetryApp – Telemetry powers our office dashboards giving us a steady stream of information on important KPIs.
- Mandrill API – Mandrill powers the automated emails sent from our customer management system.
- BitBucket – Hosts 5 repositories with thousands upon thousands of lines of code our developers created for our custom software solutions.
- CloudFlare – CloudFlare has done an amazing job at optimizing the speed that our website is served to customers.
- Google Apps – Who can possibly do business with out this suite of apps? Google analytics being our favorite tool.
- LocalPlantSource.com – An ATX local startup and awesome group of folks, localplantsource.com’s platform gives us quick access to plant availabilities at local nurseries
Innovations:
Sometimes, you just can’t find exactly what you are looking for. So, we have created custom in house software to bridge the gap between our different systems and tackle some problems in a very unique way.
- Scapegoat Server – A custom, integrated online solution for managing landscape companies. This system hold all of our customer notes and records, tracks employee hours, manages the collection and assignment of leads, and integrates directly with our Twilio phone system. With a CalDav and CardDav built directly into the backend, its able to keep all our contact and schedule information synced across all of our devices.
- Scapegoat App – A custom universal iOS client for the Scapegoat Server.
- The NEL Client Center (Launching Spring 2014) – A client facing extension of our Scapegoat Server, The NEL Client Center allows clients to easily access documents, invoices, and schedules for their projects.