Lancaster Newspapers' Customer Interactions Facilitated by LaserVault
Reports
Lancaster Newspapers, Inc. of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, publishes two
daily newspapers along with a Sunday paper. We talked with JoAnn Droege, Systems
Administrator for Lancaster Newspapers, and Lillian Herbener about the
LaserVault Reports system. JoAnn points out how it has helped them serve their
community better by ensuring that they have prompt access to vital customer
information, and Lillian tells us about the NeXtract data extraction tool that
is a part of the LaserVault system.
Increased access to information
“Our major goal with getting the LaserVault Reports system was increased
access to information,” JoAnn tells us. “We use the LaserVault system every day,
so convenience and ease of access is extremely important. We have six different
daily reports that we store, along with our end of the month reports, which can
number anywhere from 75-80 reports.”
Easy to administer
“The system is easy to administer,” JoAnn says. “The daily reports are PDF
files, and it’s not hard at all to download them to the LaserVault system. We
have around 80 end users. They like the product. What they want is to get the
information they need, and LaserVault does that for them. No complaints there.”
Accounts receivable
“We use the LaserVault Reports system to store our accounts receivable
information. Once we’ve loaded a report onto LaserVault, anyone who needs to see
the report can quickly access it. If a customer calls up with a complaint, or
just needs a copy of their bill, we can address their needs right away.
“We have four users who use NeXtract, the data extraction tool provided with
the LaserVault Reports system. They use NeXtract to generate custom reports,
less so now from the daily reports, but they still use NeXtract pretty
frequently to extract data from the month end reports.”
NeXtract
“I personally use the NeXtract program,” Lillian tells us, “mainly to
generate summary reports for management and our business office. I extract the
data from our month end financial reports. We also do report mining to pull
invoices for a particular carrier or dealer over a range of several months. We
normally extract the data to Microsoft Access.
“Overall, I’ve been very pleased with NeXtract,” Lillian says. “I’ve used
another data extraction tool in the past, and of course this was five years ago,
but I’ve found that NeXtract is easier to use and handles detail better than the
other product I was working with. NeXtract is particularly good about extracting
data from multiple fields within the same report.”
Better than microfiche
“It didn’t make sense storing the information on microfiche. It’s much more
convenient storing the information electronically. Of course, cost-wise, it
makes more sense too. We used to have to send out to get the microfiche done,
and store it offsite, and that cost a lot of money. There’s definitely a
financial return on investment for LaserVault."
“LaserVault has done everything that we needed it to do.”
Download this Case Study as a PDF.