Intelligent Indexing Speeds Up Proceedings
Prior to installing DocuWare, documents were scanned and, in some cases, still physically put into envelops and mailed between the company's locations. "We would collect a bunch of documents and mail them to another site," says Derr. "That added days to the process." Today, documents are loaded directly into DocuWare via an email address where the Intelligent Indexing reads them, pre-filling as many fields as possible. Those fields are reviewed and approved by an Accounts Payable clerk and routed into their appropriate workflows, such as invoicing or purchase order approvals. Encouraged by these efficiencies, the company quickly moved onto automating more complex processes for other teams and departments, including Part Sales and Manufacturing.
DocuWare Improves the Part Sales Team Operations
Derr realized that DocuWare can read and open files in the specific formats that engineers use to design and draw the parts. "That means that without any extra software, anybody can go into our system and open one of those drawings," he explains. His initial goal was to make the drawings easily available to the Parts Sales team. "We build a lot of custom parts, so over the years we've built many custom items, often just one for one customer," Derr says. "That makes it challenging to find the right parts to sell to a customer, and our Parts Sales team would spend a lot of time looking for the right part." It took about a week to scan the company's 50,000 different parts into DocuWare, but once the effort was completed, salespeople were able to access and find the parts quickly and efficiently. "Thanks to DocuWare, our Part Sales team has a much better accuracy in selling parts," Derr says.
DocuWare Modernizes Manufacturing
Before DocuWare, when a new manufacturing work order was issued, all the necessary part drawings were printed and manually grouped together. Today, DocuWare receives the work order from the company's Enterprise Resource Planning system and automatically groups all part drawings required, creating a paper clipped version of 10 to 15 different packets, naming them appropriately for the departments that will use them. With about 30 DocuWare users, the company recently surpassed 1 million documents, still adding about 400,000 a year. Now M.H. EBY is in the early stages of introducing DocuWare to the HR. "It really changed how we work here," Derr says.
