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For small and mid-sized businesses For large enterprisesCase Study: Manufacturing
Find more case studiesOne of the oldest box companies west of the Mississippi, Lawrence Paper Company is a family-owned business established in 1882.
The need to modernize drives digital innovation
With about 215 employees at its Kansas location, Lawrence Paper Company produces a variety of boxes and packaging materials, ranging from simple brown boxes to items large enough to hold auto parts. The company serves about 2,000 customers ranging from pet food producers to beer brewers, from industrial to retail, and from manufacturing to the automotive industry. Last year, it made enough corrugated sheets to circumnavigate the globe. That volume of work requires precise record-keeping, which used to generate a lot of paper. “We’ve been around for so long that we have been doing things the same way for 30 to 40 years,” says Mike Cordaro, I.T. Specialist & Special Projects Manager. “There was a lot of paper pushing between different departments. We wanted to be more efficient.”
DocuWare frees up space and decreases paper use
Lawrence Paper Company had a sister business that already used DocuWare. After analyzing the potential performance improvement, Lawrence Paper Company made the decision to also go digital. “We thought it would be a good idea from the performance perspective—instead of looking for sheets of paper stuffed inside cabinets,” says Cordaro. The company installed DocuWare about three years ago, starting with the Accounting Department. Digitizing immediately brought benefits. “We had a wall of filing cabinets and offsite storage where this paper went to live after being processed,” Cordaro says. “When we installed DocuWare, we had a big shredding party, got rid of the file cabinets and freed up office space.”
We had an annual process in which we had to move all of the paper documents offsite. It was an exercise that took two to three days. We don’t have to do this anymore. We got rid of the file cabinets and freed up space.
Mike Cordaro
Design, I.T., & Special Projects Manager
Streamlining workflow through favorite features
DocuWare also improved workflow and made operations more efficient. Prior to DocuWare, when an employee made a purchase, they would initiate a paper trail. A paper-based purchase order would circulate between seven different people and then was stored in a file cabinet. DocuWare made it much more time effective and easier to reconcile in the company’s Enterprise Resource Planning system and streamline the work of the Accounts Payable team. “We went from processing 15 invoices a day to processing 100 invoices a day,” Cordaro says. With 35 DocuWare users, of which 10 to 12 upload files, and the rest act as approvers, the company accumulated over 150,000 documents since installation. The employees particularly enjoy the Intelligent Indexing feature that allows them to automatically file documents from the company’s internal report iSeries, which speeds up their work.
DocuWare efficiency inspires future plans
DocuWare also saved time on managing physical storage. “We had an annual process in which we had to move all of the paper documents offsite. It was an exercise that took two to three days. We don’t have to do this anymore,” Cordaro says. Inspired by these efficiencies, work is underway to introduce DocuWare to other departments. The next one on the line is Payroll, with plans to expand to the Front Office, which processes customer order intakes. “We are expanding it to Payroll shortly, with other departments on the roadmap,” Cordaro says.