Case Study: Jamestown Container Companies

Packaging solutions and services being managed digitally

With over 60 years of experience in the industry and five facilities in New York and Ohio, Jamestown Container designs packaging solutions for a variety of needs. The company supplies consumers with custom-design packaging, ranging from simple brown shipping boxes to creative and colorful options.

Growing number of documents makes file access and retrieval difficult and time consuming

With the company's customer base reaching about 1,900, Jamestown's accounting department had to maintain thousands of documents. Before implementing DocuWare the company estimates about 250 man hours was spent on manual file retrievals over the last few years When a shipment went out, the customer would keep one paper copy as proof of delivery while Jamestown would keep the other and use it to invoice the customer. In one location, the accounting department maintained 20 to 30 file cabinets of packing slips and invoices. The cabinets were completely full and more papers were piling up on top.  Storing so many physical copies was making the retrieval process slow, error-prone and sometimes unreliable. When customers called to ask questions about their invoices or shipments, the billing staff had to manually search for the invoices, this often took a long time.  

DocuWare was integrated with existing email and accounting systems

To improve the process, Jamestown equipped their truck drivers with iPads that electronically captured customers' signatures. The software sent an email to the customer with digital proof of delivery, which helped reduce paper use, but Jamestown still needed a copy of that for its own records.

A document management system was needed and DocuWare was selected as the best fit. To store a digital proof of the delivery copy, Jamestown added itself as another email recipient which was made easy and seamless with DocuWare's Connect to Mail solution. This allowed Jamestown to automatically index and store the digital proof of delivery right in DocuWare. The company also integrated DocuWare with its accounting software.