Success Stories

Even though it's their stock in trade, paper is the last thing Becky Chapman wanted to see more of around the offices of Katzke Paper Company.

All it did was gum up the works, said the information technology manager of the Denver, CO-based paper distributor.

"Because we had to do everything manually" on Katzke's old COBOL-based minicomputer system, she said, "someone on our staff spent the better part of a day and a half every week filing documents. And then there would be x number of hours of any number of people on our staff retrieving documents, or looking for information that might be on those documents."

This grand paper chase often meant that questions went unanswered. "Someone could try to solve a problem, but couldn't because the document was misfiled, or because someone else had pulled the file," she said.

Then there was all the paper that was generated in the process of filling, shipping and billing orders. Katzke's 4000-odd customers place an average of 100 orders a day-and with those orders come "100 pick tickets, which create 100 packing lists, which create 100 invoices," as Chapman put it.

In this fashion Katzke found itself swimming in a lake of paper, yet unable to use it to speed customer service or make sense of its business. Since last October, however, it has been draining that lake and finding new efficiencies by implementing Prophet 21 with the DocMan integrated document imaging solution.

"We had file cabinets and file cabinets full of paperwork, and it was my business to manage it," Chapman said. "My dream was to have a document imaging system, and DocMan - when we evaluated replacements for our enterprise system -- stood out as an advantage with Prophet 21."

Even though the lengthy task of converting all that paper to images is far from complete, Chapman already recognizes how DocMan makes everyone's work easier. "You don't need to worry about a file being on someone else's desk," she said. "Everybody has access to the document. You can have five people looking at the same document all at once."

It also makes organizing those documents faster. "We do a lot of our own deliveries, and now we scan in the signed delivery documents from our customers. Since we already have the documents from the originating customer order in the system, we then have all the documents related to an order together. The next thing we want to scan in are faxed purchase orders from our customers, which we can then attach to the initial order placed in Prophet 21."

And by adding DocMan bar codes to their existing forms, Chapman can scan, attach, and organize invoices as well.

While Chapman said that it was too early to assess DocMan's contribution to Katzke's bottom line, she already can see the effect it has had on the staff: "In terms of quality of work life, it's been a huge improvement," she said. "The office staff is very happy not to have to file things any more."

Not only does DocMan free up valuable time, it also frees up valuable space: "It will replace something like 20 file cabinets," Chapman said. "We will be able to use that space better for other purposes, because we're at a premium for space."

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