Soft drinks distribution company, Buffalo Rock chooses DocuWare for best integration with existing systems, eliminating double entry, thereby saving time and money.

Integrated systems eliminate repetitive manual entry

A family owned business founded in 1901, Buffalo Rock Company produces and bottles a variety of soft drinks, which it sells to approximately 19,000 customers in three different states. With 14 divisions and over 2,150 employees, the company also purchases items from 5,000 suppliers, including Starbucks and others. This massive operation requires a large volume of document processing and record keeping, which prompted Buffalo Rock to start digitizing as early as 1999. But certain key tasks in the Document Imaging and the Accounts Payable Departments, remained manual. “We used to print all our emails and then scan them to input them into our previous system,” says Vincent Holmes, Document Imaging Department Manager. “And then the Accounts Payable department had to re-key everything my department had already keyed in.” As the volume of documents grew, so did the manual processing, affecting productivity and causing delays.

DocuWare, Oracle version 12.1 and Outlook – a seamless trio

The company assessed several solutions and chose DocuWare for its ability to integrate with Oracle’s accounting software and link the two key systems, eliminating the extra manual entry. “We were looking for a software that could integrate with the various Oracle products we were already using,” says Holmes. “And DocuWare was it.” The company also integrated DocuWare with Outlook, customizing it to their specific needs. When importing Outlook emails, DocuWare would attach not only the invoices but also other items such as pictures. While this is a useful feature, Buffalo Rock did not need it and Holmes customized the set up to avoid that. “I have a macro that I wrote for Outlook that strips images and gets rid of other attachments,” Holmes says, “so we send and store only what we need in DocuWare.”