Kramer LTD uses LaserVault Imaging to retrieve accounts payable invoices from multiple locations.
Kramer Ltd. has been the Caterpillar dealer in Saskatchewan since 1944. Over the years, it has expanded along with the resource-rich Saskatchewan economy to encompass six branch offices as well as overseas ventures. We talked with Kelly Kohlert, assistant I/S manager for Kramer, about the LaserVault line of document management products and what they have done to help reduce operational costs and optimize Kramer’s use of a very important resource: information.
LaserVault Reports – a big hitter in terms of value
“What we consider the big hitters in terms of value for LaserVault Reports,” Kelly tells us, “is that we could get rid of a lot of the filing cabinets and free up floor space, while at the same time reducing the amount of information we had to store in DBS, which meant performance gains.
“Another important feature is the ease in looking up the information.” Kelly explains, “Employees that aren’t very DBS or green screen savvy can open up a browser session, click on the LaserVault Reports application, click on the type of report they are looking for, and have the report at their finger tips in, I would say, 10 or 15 seconds. From there, they can forward it, print it, or export it into PDF documents. There are a lot of things we can now do that we couldn’t do before we started storing information in this format.”
What specifically are they indexing and archiving?
“There’s a whole host of electronic DBS-created documents in the CAT system. In the parts and service archive we have branch transfer activity, demand summary, deposit summary, inventory control statistics, minimum-type performance analysis, parts activity register, parts and service invoices, and return analysis. We also volunteer our warehouse for the United Way, so we keep all of their invoices on our LaserVault system, to help keep them easily accessible to anyone who needs to see them.”
The problem with paper-only documents
“When a paper document comes into the company, that document can only be in one place at one time, and it has to be physically sorted and stored. Also, it can only be stored using only one indexing field. I mean, the document can be chronologically stored, or by the customer number, or in order of the invoice number, but not by all three at the same time. With paper-based document storage, you can only pick one indexing field, and store it in one cabinet in one location, and what if that location is three hundred miles from the person who needs it?”
Imaging – another move forward
“We found that there was a lot more documentation that we could be storing electronically and thereby saving on file space and storage. We also wanted to allow employees at all of our branches virtually instant access to the paper documents stored here. After documents are scanned and stored centrally on a server, we allow web access to the scanned documents to whomever we give authority to. That way, they can bring up that document in no time, if they need to. It just makes good business sense to make the needed information available.
“We’re just starting to get into imaging. Currently, we are just scanning in the accounts payable invoices, but we think there are a lot of other document types that we can begin imaging in the next six to eight months.”
The ease of retrieving data after it is scanned
“One of LaserVault Imaging’s best features is that it is web-based, which makes it very simple to retrieve documents from anywhere, including any of our branches.
“When a person 500 miles away needs to see an invoice for some business decision that they are making, they can log on our intranet, click on LaserVault Imaging icon, put in their login and their password, and search and find any document that they are authorized to see. From there, they can print the document, forward it, or put it into a PDF.
“We have plans to begin, once we are very comfortable with the security of those documents, to begin to destroy our documents after they have been scanned, and that way we’ll free up a lot of storage space, and we’ll save all the time that it takes file those documents.”
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