SITUATION/NEED

Although each company typically has decades of experience dealing with manual, paper-based processes, research has shown that document management/ automation can drastically reduce operational expenses related to paper processing while simultaneously increasing response times. To be ahead of your competitors, an organization should be able to manage documents more effectively, controlling costs associated with documents & document processes, and using resources more efficiently.

Tubesales and Williams (TW) Metals, a growth-oriented company has leveraged exceptional value to its customers, employees and stakeholders, by maintaining their emphasis on their core competencies: Competitive Pricing, Product Quality and Availability, Responsiveness, Speed to Market; building a global customer base. The slow and exhaustive manual document management processes could not keep pace with the growing global reach of the company. However, even after the company deployed an automated document imaging and document management system, the desired business and system requirements were not met.

IMAGE-X'S SOLUTION

Image-X’s challenge was to restore TW Metal’s faith in electronic documentation and technology. Image-X decided to improve the productivity & speed up the imaging & indexing application by providing them with a system that would offer storage & retrieval of files, ensuring long-term document accessibility & preservation, protection from unauthorized access & alteration, rapid staff acceptance, & smooth integration with existing applications. We selected a customized approach to reach the aggressive turnaround times and requirements set forth by providing time-critical document conversion services to help augment the company’s growing business aspirations. Our state-of-the-art Document Management System helped the organization easily consolidate documents from multiple systems and locations thereby reducing costs in areas such as paper processing, paper storage, printing, and distribution.

The erstwhile software was neither user-friendly, nor customized to the specific needs of TW Metals’. Problems faced ranged from data mismatch, to no data integrity to flaws in distributed architecture, resulting in technical chaos and increased maintenance costs. The need was for a software that would be quick, efficient, secure and easy to use. Image-X’s Imaging solution captured the precise business requirements giving TW Metals’ an innovative and dedicated solution. Their software is both client-server as well as web-based. The client server architecture allows scanning, indexing and storing of records as well as images whereas web based application allows only viewing. The scanning, indexing and retrieval covers 9 different document types like Mill Test Reports, Test Reports Final, Bills of Lading (Manual indexing) etc facilitated from multiple locations. The system is supported by four regional servers viz. Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Cranbury and one backup server viz. Exton. All these servers are connected to scanning stations. All the properly indexed documents are stored in Image-X’s own file management repository called MINDS (Managed Information Networked Document Services). Scanning and indexing is done in a simplex or a batch mode. The system fully permits manual and automatic indexing of the documents. However, since TW Metals has multiple document types, with only some of them supporting automatic indexing, Image-X customized the barcode recognition module to suit the specifications of TW Metals. Our system reads the information encrypted in the barcode(s) (whose 1st two digits contain the district code while the rest represent a unique code identifying the document) and indexes the document under the specific document category. Multiple documents are separated by a barcode separator sheet for batch scanning. Automatic indexing is also permitted using output of an OCR process, external file importation (ASCII Text, XML, data file, etc.) and integration to an external line of business application(s). Image-X’s system thus helped TW Metals’ to organize, distribute and collect documents and knowledge across the entire organization effectively streamlining their processes. Its robust and user-friendly interface let users to manage the scanned images of documents as easily as they would manage real paper documents.

RESULT

Through its agile methodological, operational and technological processes, Image-X allowed TW Metals to meet and exceed aggressive turnaround times, fully exceeding the customers’ expectations. It also proved to be significantly more affordable than most enterprise content management solutions minimizing customization and integration requirements.