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Unisys World: $50,000 document system saves $100,000-plus, incalculable soft dollars
CASE STUDY
Canon Business Solutions Northeast
Implementation of a document storage and retrieval system that cost less.than $50,000 has saved Canon Business Solutions Northeast, in Lyndhurst, N.J., more than $100,000 per year while also improving customer service.
In the past when the company stored most sales order documentation on paper, customers were kept waiting while files were retrieved from external storage locations. The company switched to a document management system that stores both images of order documentation and reports generated on an AS/400 for instant retrieval.
Substantial cost savings have been achieved including nearly eliminating the need to retrieve documents from external storage, copy sales documents and print reports. Time savings have been achieved throughout the organization because critical documents can be retrieved in seconds rather than a day or two and by reducing paper handling.
Just as important, 40 or 50 customer calls per day that require reference to order documentation can be answered immediately rather than having to call back in a day or two after documents have been retrieved from storage.
"It's impossible to determine exactly how much we are saving but I'm sure it's many times the cost of our investment," Louis Gucciardo, director of information technology for Canon Business Solutions, said. "We are saving about $100,000 a year in paper, Federal Express bills, faxing and storage costs. Of even greater value are the savings in soft dollars.
"We found the cost of an uncollected bill, a timely proof of delivery, more efficient processes and quicker customer response to be incalculable. But it's clear that we are saving substantial monies and as we move to take advantage of additional capabilities of the system, our savings will continue to increase."
Canon Business Solutions-Northeast handles sales of Canon business products for the Northeastern United States. Canon business products include full-color as well as black-and-white copiers, printers, micrographics and image filing systems, facsimile machines, flatbed scanners, and other specialized industrial products. Customer orders are typically eight- to 10-page documents that include the order itself, leasing documentation, service contract, sales tax exemption licenses, marketing coupons and sometimes other items. They often cover many different machines and are created at regional offices located throughout the organization's sales area.
Previous manual process
In the past these document packages were created at the regional sales offices. A sales administrator was responsible for gathering the documents, making four copies for use at the branch and headquarters, keyboarding information into the company's order entry system, and shipping the package to headquarters. When the package arrived at headquarters, it was supposed to be converted to microfiche, but the large number of documents involved and time required to microfiche each document meant that this job fell far behind.
"When we began the project there was a two-year backlog of documents; now they are archived and available online within a few hours," Gucciardo said. The most recent documents were stored in a room at the processing center, and the others were stored at a remote document storage company. The customer service representatives needed to retrieve these documents on a regular basis.
For example, a customer might call to say that they were missing an item from their order or that an extra item had been shipped and the representative would need to refer back to the order. In other cases, a customer might call for service on a machine purchased years ago and the service representative would need to check to make sure that the service contact was still in force. A salesman might be preparing a quote to replace machines purchased a number of years ago and would want to see exactly what the customer ordered the last time. In several cases, auditors wanted to see copies of tax exemption forms provided by customers.
With the previous approach it took a lot of time and was costly to archive and retrieve these documents. There was no chance of obtaining the documents immediately, so the service representative would have to tell the customer that he or she would call them back. If the order were recent, the service representative would try to locate it in the storage room. This could take hours because of the large numbers of documents stored in this room.
More commonly, the documents would have already been shipped to the records storage company. The documents would be delivered a day or two later, but Canon would be charged for the delivery. At the time the document system was installed, storage costs were running about $2,200 per month. Another problem was that documents were frequently misfiled or lost. Often documents associated with the order would come in late, and it was very difficult to find the right order package to associate them with.
Another paper-related challenge was the need to print and distribute tens of thousands of pages of reports every month. In many cases, these reports were distributed to people who looked at them only occasionally or only needed a couple of pages of a much larger document.
Gucciardo assigned Systems Analyst Tom Ainsworth to the task of selecting and implementing a document management solution.
"I picked the Metafile solution because it had some significant goodies that the others systems I looked at didn't," Ainsworth said. "It makes it possible to assign people and classes of documents to groups and limit the groups that are able to access each document. Metafile's COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk) storage system was the best we saw.
"They have a full text search feature that makes it possible to find documents even with very incomplete information. Their service people are excellent - they know their product and how to make it go. Finally, the cost of the product is considerably less than most of the alternatives that we considered."
Canon selected Strategic Business Systems of Ramsey N.J. to configure the Metafile software to their needs.
New automated solution
Here's how the new document management system works. The regional offices now assemble the documents and scan them using a Canon ImageRunner multifunction product that includes a laser printer, scanner and fax capabilities. Once the documents are scanned, the sales administrators use Ecopy Inc's Ecopy software to send them to a network folder at headquarters in which they are queued for indexing. No data entry needs to be done at the regional offices; a bar coded header page or the bar-coded order itself,
Steve Shustak, Canon's micrographics administrator; monitors the input and follows the remote scans through the system. The documents are stored in Metafile and can be called up in a few seconds simply by typing in the customer order number. Gucciardo said the big advantage is that customers get the information they need right away.
Ainsworth used Metafile's Windows-based, menu-driven download software to manage the downloading of host spool files. Several standard output queues were established on the AS/400 and reports that are intended to be archived are placed in these queues. Standard file naming conventions were established to identify the reports. To add a new report, a staff member simply requests a new Metafile report. This is accomplished by the Metafile administrator who establishes a definition for it.
The entire process takes about five minutes. The program works by reading the spool file and converting it to the compact, searchable file format that resides on the Windows 2000 server. No host code changes were necessary. Ainsworth specified which reports should be archived, when and how often downloads should occur, and what should be done with the spool file once it is downloaded.
The COLD system works by reading the spool file and converting it to a compact, searchable file that resides on a Windows 2000 server. The client software was installed on users' desktops at headquarters and regional sales offices. With a single search, users can call up both images and COLD reports.
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