LLOYD'S CONSTRUCTION IN EGAN, MINN., MIGHT not seem as if it needs flashy phone software. The $9-million-a-year demolition and carting company has been run by the same family for the past 24 years. Lloyd's takes down commercial and residential buildings, then hauls them away. What could be more simple? That is, if wrangling 100 employees, 30 trucks, and more than 400 dumpsters can be called simple. Coordinating those moving parts is crucial to growing the business and to saving the sanity of Stephanie Lloyd, 41, who has run the company for the past four years.

Until recently Lloyd's used a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, paper ledgers, and accounting software on company PCs to keep track of its workers and equipment. It seemed a little absurd to the company's de facto CTO Stephanie's 17-year-old daughter, Allie. "Everything had to be written by hand in the logs and then transposed to our spreadsheets," Allie says. The same information was then entered into forms employees carry in the field. "I was like, 'What, Ma, three times for each entry?' "

To make matters worse, the company used radios to coordinate with its workers on the job and the more cellphone towers that came online in Minnesota, the worse Lloyd's radio reception got. It was time, the Lloyds decided, to drag their company into the 21st-century world of smartphones.

Mobile-productivity software, once the exclusive realm of giants such as FedEx and UPS, is now within the range of companies such as Lloyd's. The Apple iPhone and Verizon's LG Voyager, among others, offer fast processors, plenty of storage, and positioning technology to track a user's location by triangulating his proximity to cellphone towers. Load them with software such as Verizon's Field Force Manager, and you've got a phone that handles document portability, business automation, record capturing, and invoicing.