Hi-Temp discovers a faster, less expensive way to manage documents
Hi-Temp Insulation, a supplier of thermal and acoustic insulation products for the aircraft, missile and space industries, saves more than $4,000 a year by using WebDocs to electronically manage customer records and other business documents.
Paradigm shift
Hi-Temp wanted to move to a paperless workplace, improve productivity and save money by electronically managing documents generated from their ERP system from a web-based program.
Costly paper-based workflows
Managing paper documents was expensive and time consuming. Hi-Temp was spending considerable sums of money on paper, printing and document storage. Productivity suffered, too, as employees found themselves wasting time routing, filing and retrieving documents.
A more efficient way to manage documents
After searching for solutions, Hi-Temp chose WebDocs, which allows them to scan, store and share documents electronically.
Approximately 3,500 new invoices, purchase orders, packing slips and other documents are scanned or imported into WebDocs each week. Most of those documents are generated directly from System i applications, without the need to print paper.
Seamless Integration
A key selling point of the system was its ability to integrate easily with the company’s ERP application. WebDocs’s flexibility allowed employees to use either the ERP program’s graphical or 5250 interface, both of which were in use in the company. Restricting all users to one interface would have been unproductive and disruptive.
While working in the ERP application, users simply position their cursor in a key field, press a button and WebDocs displays all related documents in a separate window.
Lower costs, high ROI
Eliminating paper-handling has reduced the cost of accounts payable processing by $4,000 annually. Hi-Temp expects to realize similar savings in other operational areas. A further savings has come through the elimination of paper itself. In the past, some documents were output to expensive, multi-part forms. Today, many of them are not printed at all.
Streamlined work processes
Workflows such as processing purchase orders used to take two to three days or longer. Now they take just 45 minutes. Plus, because documents are electronic, they rarely get misfiled or lost. Document images are automatically indexed directly from information on a user’s screen or from the document itself. And an audit trail tracks the lifecycle of each document.
The paperless office has been an unfilled promise for many years now, but it’s a promise that Hi-Temp is getting closer to keeping. “We can see where we’re going to be putting so many of our documents in WebDocs,” said IT Manager Kathleen Creamer. “Our ultimate goal is to file all documents electronically.”
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