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News Pages 2009 Winter Spring Boyd

N E W S

N E W S . P A G E S ◊ 2009 . Winter-Spring

BOYD CORPORATION:
Low Risk Investment In UnForm Document Management Solution Pays Fast Dividends

"It's an affordable archiving solution that integrates easily with our existing business applications."

That's Boyd Corporation I.T. Manager Steve Prices's take on what the key factors are that make their deployment of the UnForm document management software a success.

Affordability made acquisition of the software easy and painless. Integration capability with the company's custom-developed Progress 4GL-based ERP applications meant both a comfort level with the development environment, and a leveraging of previous I.T. investments.

"To us that meant very low risk, with potentially high returns. Something we could put on the fast- track."

Background

For a number of years the growth of the number of files stored on different network servers at Boyd's various regional locations had been a nagging problem for Steve. There were inefficiencies both in storing and accessing files, as well as in the administration of the underlying file systems.

Considering the Boyd business model and after research into available technologies and solutions, it became obvious there was a strong argument to be made for a more centralized approach to document storage and retrieval.

After considering the acquisition of an electronic archiving solution from one of the traditional leaders in the DM solutions marketplace, Steve realized that the approval process itself could take years, considering the large price tag involved.

So in 2006 he was pleased to discover that SDSI, the developer of Boyd's existing UnForm laser forms software, was offering a much more affordable document management solution. This would break down a key barrier to acquisition, namely, it eliminated the need for higher-level approval since the price tag for the UnForm DM solution was well inside the budget authority of his department.

And the UnForm technology itself was client-server based, which meant direct integration of archiving and document management capabilities with Boyd's ERP applications.

UnForm also included another benefit no other solution could provide: the capability of archiving PDF's from the ERP print streams without scanning. Other solutions would have required significantly more scanning, which is considerably less efficient than capturing documents at their source creation point, when practical.

The savings and efficiency gains so far have been significant.

Steve described to us some of the early archiving projects undertaken and their impact:

Centralized AR Invoicing

One of the first document archiving projects implemented has eliminated 1500 hours per year of clerical labor for an annual savings of $30,000, by centralizing AR invoicing at the company's headquarters. This had not been feasible until a central electronic document repository for invoicing-related documents was in place.

The system works like this:

Order pick ticket and manufacturing routers are now bar-coded and archived at the same time that they are printed by UnForm. Upon factory completion of the order, the printed versions of the order picking list and manufacturing routers are scanned and uploaded using UnForm's image manager tool, so that all related factory notes and markings are captured, as well as any auxiliary documents that need to be retained. The bar-codes on the picking list and router documents allow for an automated capture of the archive index properties that match the documents together in the archive for quick retrieval. The scanned images are stored as multi-page PDF files with the original archive copies of the order and production router. The entire packet of information is then available electronically to the central invoicing clerk, as well as other authorized users.

Immediate access to the scanned packet of documents is what allows invoicing to be centralized, since the invoicing process relies on information contained on the documents that come out of the factory.

Custom centralized invoicing application developed in Boyd's Progress 4GL Web-Speed environment.

Close-up of the Archiving link column which gives the invoicing staff access to the centralized archive documents. The link uses the UnForm client API behind the scenes to retrieve and display documents needed to finalize invoicing.

Quoting/Estimating

Another Boyd project using UnForm archiving made a direct impact on the efficiency of customer service operations:

Boyd is a custom fabricated products manufacturer. Their operations hinge on the ability to estimate and quote jobs accurately based on customer-provided specifications that are submitted to Boyd in electronic PDF and CAD files.

These files are initially collected by Boyd customer service representatives. Boyd estimators then need access to these files to prepare quotes. The easier the access to these files, the more efficient the process and the higher the volume of quotes that can be processed without adding staff.

The Progress 4GL software Boyd uses has a web development environment called WebSpeed, which lets them develop web-based applications that integrate with the main Boyd ERP system. Boyd I.T. staff added web hotlink buttons to the quoting and estimating web application screens to allow browsing for and uploading customer documents to the UnForm archive, and to retrieve customer documents from the UnForm archive. These processes use UnForm's client API for an integration that is entirely transparent to the users.

The central electronic repository that now exists for these documents, and the access to the documents via a customized internet web application, have improved the efficiency and coordination of the various departments involved, resulting in a significantly higher departmental capacity for prospective orders.

Boyd Quoting/Estimating System with "Upload Customer Print" and "View Customer Print" Buttons. These buttons trigger actions which use the UnForm archiving client API to upload files to, and to retrieve files from, the central document repository.

A close-up view of the archive trigger buttons added to Boyd's Progress 4GL custom Web-Speed application.

Momentum and Leverage

The rollout of further system enhancements which incorporate UnForm's DM components has gained momentum over the last eight months, according to Steve, due to the successes achieved with the first projects. Now that a central UnForm document repository has been established, there are a number of web-based workflow applications which are in various stages of planning and development.

It is sometimes difficult to know or quantify how much time is being wasted throughout an organization due to inefficient access to documents. Steve suspects that in strict ROI terms, there have been more savings in some of their follow-on projects linking to the archived invoice documents than in the original invoice processing centralization project itself.

Steve elaborates:

" With the development of our invoicing consolidation and quote systems, we got these documents into the Unform Archive and made them easily accessible in these particular apps -- but now that we have the documents in the archive, we leverage them.

For example, if we are writing a report (we have a Report writing tool that creates html reports) or a new web screen on work order efficiency, we don't just provide the work-order number: we make that number a link directly to the archived router.

Our ship log now has the same links as the Invoicing program. It took only a couple of hours to add, but this allowed everyone to benefit from the Invoicing project. This actually added more ROI than the original Invoicing project. Once a document is in the archive, due to its predictable indexing structure and format, we can easily link to it via any web application."

Perhaps the best part is that the savings and productivity benefits from these projects are a reality NOW, considerably earlier than would otherwise have been the case if a document management solution costing ten times more had needed to be shepherded through Boyd corporate approval channels.

For Boyd, being able to move somewhat organically from laser printing to electronic archiving, without the equivalent of an act of congress, puts them several years ahead of the game compared with the other alternatives; and enjoying a higher ROI due to the comparably low initial investment.

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