Flight Masters is an air-freight forwarding company that tries to treat all its customers like family.

Trouble is, the family is growing–fast.

Founded a dozen years ago, the company now has major offices in five U.S. cities–San Francisco; Ontario, Calif. (near Los Angeles); Minneapolis; Dallas, and Chicago-and just a few months ago it became international, by opening an office in London.

“Though we’ve gotten a lot bigger, we’re not so big that we don’t care about the customer,” Information Systems Manager Scott Johnson said in an interview recently. “And we never will be. We cater to the customer in a way that really huge freight forwarders can’t. We’ll give you whatever you want, from same-day delivery, to delivery a month from today, if that’s what you need.”

Such individual service requires tight control of records. When Flight Masters was smaller, its dispatching crew had to keep an eye on 5,000 documents a month. That number now is up to 15,000 and growing. “But we’ve still got that small-customer attitude,” says Mr. Johnson. “When our customers call for status checks-where is my package right now ? — we’ve got to tell them.”

And that was where Laserfiche came in.

“For every shipment we send, we need someone at the other end to sign it off; that’s our proof that they received it.” Mr. Johnson says. “The receipt is what we go by. The airport agent sends it back, with his bill, and, until recently, another piece of paper went into our file cabinets. Then, if the customer wanted to see the receipt, we had to send it to him. It could take one person a couple of hours to find one piece of paper.”

Once a year, they’d transfer the files from the file cabinets (”huge file cabinets,” says Mr. Johnson) to corrugated-paper storage boxes on a truck loading dock at the corporate office headquarters in Eagan, Minn. They were destroyed after about three years.

“There was paper everywhere,” says Mr. Johnson. “That’s why, about a year ago, we started to investigate document imaging.”

After consulting Enterprise Network Systems in nearby Eagan, MN., they quickly settled on the Laserfiche system. In the Flight Masters corporate office, one clerk now controls records preservation and retrieval, tagging each invoice or receipt with index numbers and dates, source and destination data, and then slides it through a scanner, at a rate of 30 documents per minute. The images on the document are instantly converted into electronic impulses, and these are then preserved on CD-ROM disks-about 10,000 documents to a disk, Mr. Johnson says.

“Now we don’t destroy anything,” Mr. Johnson says. “We can get anything back, any time. That’s one big advantage to this system.”

Is there another?

“Oh yes, the biggest: Searching for a document and just within seconds, finding it. That right there pays for the system.”

Tags: commercial

Posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2002 at 11:44 am under Customer Stories, Other Industries. You can comment on this post.