Sometimes, a little innovation can go a long way. That’s the case with a recent Laserfiche installation with one of the world’s oldest makers of fragrances and flavors, Robertet.

The 150-year old firm needed some way to readily access some very important papers it kept in notebooks at its US headquarters. Many of its operations were completely computerized, but not information in the notebooks, which held safety specifications about the materials they buy to make perfumes smell sweeter and soft drinks taste better.

According to federal guidelines, those documents, called material safety data sheets, had to be stored for some 30 years and Robertet wanted a safer way to store them. The company also wanted an easy way to store new material safety data sheets that came into the offices from time to time, and it wanted them stored in a document management system that would automatically index them in a way that would make them easy to find and retrieve.

This wasn’t a job for ring-bound notebooks. It would take a flexible document management software package and an installer that knew how to take advantage of that flexibility.

Champion Workflow Systems in Pine Brook, NJ, has 18 years’ experience in document solutions and network and Web services. Laserfiche is an industry pioneer whose document management software is helping thousands of government and business offices worldwide run more efficiently.

Robertet’s business applications—accounting, inventory, manufacturing and the like—ran on a MAPICS ERP with an IBM DB2 database. Champion wanted to install the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ Real-Time Lookup module to handle Robertet’s scanning and storage needs for the material safety data sheets.

That’s where the innovation came in. Quick Fields could automatically populate several document index fields simply by having users scan and type in a short product code number. The only problem is: Quick Fields doesn’t support DB2. There was no way to get the material safety data sheets into Robertet’s MAPICS DB2 without typing them in by hand.

“No problem,” said Gary Loew, Champion’s president. Working with Robertet Systems Manager Ed Lykins, Champion designed an interface between DB2 and Quick Fields that has Robertet staffers singing its praises.

They developed a table view in DB2 that contains all of the indexing information required to populate the Laserfiche template. The information required for indexing resides natively in the MAPICS DB2 database.

Any time a MAPICS transaction results in a relevant data change to the indexing information used by Real-Time Lookup, the view is updated, Loew says. Moreover, that updated view is automatically exported to a comma-separated variable file.

It is that CSV file that Real-Time Lookup utilizes for automating the material safety data sheet indexing process, Loew says. Employees need only enter a product code number. Real-Time Lookup accesses that number and looks up the remaining index information.

“Users love the fact that they are only required to make 3 mouse clicks and type a short code number. Quick Fields and Laserfiche take care of the rest,” Loew says. “This ensures minimal opportunity for data entry errors and standardized information in template fields.”

The emphasis on simplicity is not lost on Robertet staff trained on the new system, Lykins says. Simplicity was a prerequisite for the installation and Champion and Laserfiche came through with flying colors.

“One of the big things we needed from this system was it had to be easy to use, and Gary made sure it was,” Lykins says. “We didn’t want to have to train people for days to use this system. We needed to get the information on these documents fast and this system does that well.”

Champion is equally impressed with Laserfiche.

“It speaks very well of Laserfiche when you can make that much happen with so little effort,” says Loew. “It’s really a very efficient system that we installed there.”

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Tags: Quick Fields

Posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 4:09 pm under Customer Stories, Manufacturing, Other Industries. You can comment on this post.