When Banks Hardwoods, Inc. (BHI) was started in 1985, a single office housed its handful of employees in Elkhart, Indiana. In those days, expansion meant adding a manufacturing facility to kiln dry and plane the premium lumber it supplied to area builders.

Today, Banks Hardwoods has two manufacturing facilities in Michigan, another in Wisconsin, and a sales office in Arkansas employing upwards of 175 people. But as the business grew, says Dana Kennedy, Banks Hardwoods’ Controller, sawdust wasn’t the only wood by-product piling up around the organization.

“All this expansion means a huge amount of paperwork,” she says, “and the need for constant communication between the divisions.” When the company added its third division in Newberry, Michigan and saw a 20% increase in customers as a result, she felt the paper jam.

“The paperwork created by one shipment of lumber could amount to over ten pages per packet,” she explains. “These customer order packets were passed through many hands in the corporate office before finally being filed in one of a dozen filing cabinets. That filing system gave way to several frustrations as the volume of files grew.”

Kennedy began looking for a document management system with three goals in mind:

1. Creating a paperless office with a “virtual filing cabinet” to back-up files daily and eliminate the fear of lost or damaged files—and having to store 60 bankers boxes a year of old customer and vendor invoices.
2. Making filing efficient. “Filing paper was considered a chore and was often put at the bottom of the list by our employees,” Kennedy explains. Needless to say, this led to both unorganized piles of paper and misfiled documents.
3. Bridging the communication gap between the divisions and offices.

At the same time, Kennedy knew a document management system would only work if people could use it. “I wanted a system that was easy to understand and would have a small learning curve when it came to training our employees.” Cost, of course, was a concern, but, as she explains, “Our company has always appreciated that there is a value to be placed on quality.”

She researched document management solutions on-line and discovered Laserfiche. “My next thought was that it would be great to have a local company available to buy from and turn to for support,” she explains. She localized her search, and found Laserfiche reseller Bolt Document Management.

Working with Bolt’s Jeff Nelson, Kennedy spent six months analyzing and testing workflow problems and solutions in various departments, including accounting, IT, sales and purchasing. “We tried very hard to sort out what documents we would scan and how to go about indexing those documents,” she offers. “Jeff was very patient through the whole process and never pressured us to hurry up and get this deal done. He knew I was hesitant about spending money on a system that upper management might view as just a glorified filing cabinet.”

To that end, Nelson supplied Kennedy with a list of Bolt’s Laserfiche clients in the area. “I was able to visit one of the companies and actually see the system in action. Even better, I was able to ask people who were actually using it how they liked it and what benefits they had seen. They were also able to tell me what their experience had been with Jeff and his team at Bolt,” she says.

“This was definitely the deciding factor that made us go with Laserfiche and Bolt,” Kennedy adds. “In our business, relationships are very important and we’ve built our reputation on ours. It was imperative to me, as well as my management, that before we invest in a new software system, we also feel comfortable with the company we are buying from and the support team we will be using.”

For Banks Hardwoods’ initial installation in late 2007, Kennedy limited training to a few key people. “This way we knew what the system was capable of and could use that knowledge to customize it to our needs.”

A month later, the whole office started learning how to access the information they needed. “We also have a very strong IT department that had been involved from the beginning so our need to have a lot of support from either Bolt or Laserfiche has been minimal,” she adds.

Kennedy met her initial goals—moving toward a paperless office, efficient filing, improved inter-office communication—almost instantaneously.

“We jumped in by scanning all new documents and stopped filing the paper right away,” she says. “It was hard to convince our data entry people to give up paper at first,” Kennedy admits, but adding a second desktop monitor eased the transition. “We have the scanned document in Laserfiche on one screen and the program they are inputting to on the other. Now they can’t imagine doing it any other way—they love it!”

This meant no more ten page customer order packets, plus scanning was being done much more quickly than the paper filing. “We have been able to increase our communications with our remote divisions as well as our production yard now that they are able to access documents online,” she adds. “The customer service department was very excited to be able to access invoicing packets from their desk rather than searching through files.” Plus, she notes, “There is a greater sense of security knowing that we have an electronic backup of all our documents in case of a loss to our office.”

But perhaps the most profound benefit of Laserfiche is how it naturally aligns with the environmental and financial sustainability at the heart of Banks Hardwoods’ continuing success.

“The Laserfiche system has really complemented our ‘Go Green’ methodology,” says Kennedy. “We’re constantly evaluating new and better ways to make our facilities and production more environmentally friendly and introducing this system has been a big step in reducing our paper usage.” Snapshot is the big paper-saver, she says, enabling staff to print reports and the e-mailed payable invoices directly in to Laserfiche.

The most visible sign of Banks Hardwoods’ improved sustainability is the smiles on all its employees’ faces. “There are two things that they say are their favorites about using Laserfiche,” Kennedy begins. “The first is how clean their desks are now that they are becoming more paperless. The second is how easy the system is to use and how quickly information can be accessed. Regardless of what stage the processing is in, we are always able to find the documents we need.”

As Banks Hardwoods has learned, sustainability comes in many forms.

“We depend on a natural resource, so we are constantly reinvesting in that resource—which is why we have made going paperless a priority in keeping our company as ‘green’ as possible,” says Kennedy. She says the cost savings realized in the year Banks Hardwood has been using Laserfiche is aligned with its company’s economic sustainability. “No matter what our market is doing, we have found that we have to think of our own resources as a company in terms of sustainability, and Laserfiche has been a big part of that.”

Tags: green, Snapshot, sustainability

Posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 4:31 pm under Customer Stories, Manufacturing, Other Industries. You can comment on this post.