Grand Teton Lodge uses LaserVault Reports to have easy access to their financial data.
Keith Kooyman, IS Director for the Grand Teton Lodge Company, recommends LaserVault and Image EveryWhere - two document management solutions that help Grand Teton Lodge further their environmental mission while reducing overhead and ensuring that guests receive better services than ever before.
The Grand Teton Lodge Company provides lodging for visitors to the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Their mission is to provide hospitality services while preserving the awe-inspiring natural beauty of the Tetons. We talked with Keith Kooyman, IS Director for Grand Teton Lodge Company, and learned just how the ESC document management solution was in alignment with their core values.
Easy Access to Financial Data
“Fewer printouts and more reports going straight to LaserVault from the AS/400 means savings not just from a business standpoint, but from an environmental one as well.”
-Keith Kooymans,
IS Director, Grand Teton Lodge Co.
“Prior to LaserVault, everything was printed on paper, and we just had volumes and volumes and volumes of binders,” Keith says. “If you needed to research a particular account, let’s say you might start with the AR Folder, but then you might have to switch over to accounts payable, say, or even the credit card records. It was not only a nightmare in terms of keeping track of all of those printed pages, it was also a nightmare from the standpoint of the sheer volume of paper that we went through in a given month. We have probably reduced our company printouts almost in half. Everything is either scanned into Image EveryWhere, or in the case of special reports, instead of being printed they are directly imported into the LaserVault system.”
“Whereas before it was difficult for us to have easy access to a wide variety of financial data, now anything you need is literally right at your fingertips – you can retrieve any kind of financial information you need from your desktop computer.”
Document Imaging
“We scan the customer registration forms – an eight and half by eleven sheet of paper that is generated when guests check out. We scan that, so that we have an electronic copy that we can go back to it if we need to research what the guest was charged while they were here, what they purchased, and so forth. We are also scanning credit action slips.”
“We hope to scan more types of documents in the future,” Keith told us. “Right now we have a Fujitsu scanner. It's done a pretty good job for us but the amount of pages that we are planning on scanning will be going up, so we are currently planning on upgrading to a faster and more rugged scanner.”
Integration with the AS/400
“I can say that one of the key features of LaserVault is its integration with the AS/400. We have an AS/400 back office server running the property management; you know, the interface options of the AS/400 are not as robust as with a PC server, but with LaserVault it was a very easy interface.”
“A majority of the reports that we used to print are now sent directly to the LaserVault system where we can view them from the screen. We simply write to LaserVault, and then the people that have the need to view data have access to the LaserVault system and can view the reports at their leisure.”
Keith pointed out that, “Fewer printouts and more reports going straight to LaserVault from the AS/400 means savings not just from a business standpoint, but from an environmental one as well.”
Disaster Recovery
“Presently, we have two internal DVD disks in the LaserVault server, one is the primary, and the other is the backup. They are mirrored; so, we have the primary LaserVault disk, we have the backup LaserVault disk, in addition we have the hard drive space on the server, and then we take that one step further with a tape library with a disk-to-tape system hooked up to it. We have multiple layers of backup protection.”
“Sarbaines-Oxley is huge as well,” Keith adds. “We’re just experiencing the tip of the iceberg. LaserVault helps us a great deal with that, because it allows us to easily store a lot of the records that in the past have been printed out, and as we all know, printed records don’t store well and they’re hard to search through in the event of an audit.”
Fast Installation and a Short Learning Curve
“I think the original install process was efficient, and I think it went well. And the support since then has been good also. We probably have a total of 30 LaserVault users. It wasn’t hard to train them at all. LaserVault is a pretty easy application. If a person knows how to use Windows, it’s a short learning curve to learning LaserVault.”