When manufacturing medical devices such as spinal fusion cages, knee replacements, hip replacements, bone screws and the like, precision is essential. Deviating from product specifications by even a miniscule amount can cause serious problems when a physician attempts to implant the device in a patient.

As a contract manufacturing company that specializes in medical device implants and surgical instruments, precision is a chief concern for RMS. For over forty years, the company has ensured the accuracy and quality of its products, spurring expansion and business growth. But as the organization grew, some of its processes failed to evolve along with it.
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Iberdrola Renewables is one of North America’s leading providers of structured energy solutions for wholesale and large commercial and industrial customers. With over 9,300 megawatts of renewable energy in operation globally - and more than 2,800 megawatts of that being wind power located in the U.S. - the Portland, OR-based company is currently the world’s leading provider of wind power. Last year, Iberdrola Renewables created 15,000 jobs worldwide, while investing $2.2 billion in wind power in the US alone – up from $1.54 billion in 2007 – to become the second largest provider of wind power in the US since entering the market in 2006.

But the rapid growth of its renewable energy division in the last few years led to challenges managing its documents and records. “With each new energy project, we were increasing the number of relationships with private land owners, commercial suppliers, and government agencies,” explains Sean Malowney, a Senior Business Systems Analyst at the company. “This translated into a growing volume of invoices and contracts.”
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Derek is 27 and has cerebral palsy. He has a two-year college degree, but hasn’t held a steady job since graduation. He struggles to speak and can’t walk. Yet Laserfiche resellers Bolt Document Management gave him a job helping to build electronic document repositories throughout Indiana.

For Bolt and other Laserfiche resellers across the country, Derek and others like him have the right stuff for one of the most onerous tasks in document management: scanning paper files and turning them into electronic images.
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With its Democratic government firmly in place, South Africa has become one of the African nations with promising oil and natural gas reserves that are safe for legitimate exploration. The country has an estimated tens of trillion cubic feet of natural gas underneath its wildernesses—a resource that, properly tapped, could assist in nation building.

So the Petroleum Agency of South Africa (PASA) went on a global sales trip of sorts last year, trying to interest outside oil companies in the country’s natural gas reserves. PASA representatives visited Johannesburg, London, Houston, TX, and Long Beach, CA, and now the agency has plenty of potential investors applying for exploration acreage. The problem, however, was managing all the associated paperwork.
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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.
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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.
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Newspapers are used to working on tight deadlines, but nothing could have prepared 2008 Run Smarter Award winners the Star Tribune for the time-crunch the Minneapolis newspaper faced when it needed to replace its legacy document imaging system—one with no support or upgrade path—with one that could migrate massive databases from shared servers in less than a year. Full story »

For attorneys, dealing with boxes and boxes of paper discovery documents is the norm. But as courts and prosecuting attorneys are beginning to provide documents digitally, defense attorneys can be caught unprepared.

Faced with trying State v. Valentini, the largest gambling conspiracy case in Arizona history, criminal defense attorney Howard Snader knew his old paper-based system wouldn’t work any longer. Full story »

Donation-supported non-profit organizations need to keep general office expenses to a minimum. The American Cancer Society, in particular, is very committed to putting forth as much of their resources as possible to disease research, detection and treatment, as well as patient support. Full story »

A successful European airline is breaking into new global markets, with help from Laserfiche. When Virgin Airlines of Great Britain launched Virgin Blue in Australia, it chose Laserfiche to support its initiative of instantly scanning and retrieving passenger data. Full story »

As a leading provider of wholesale energy services, Reliant Energy must work within the guidelines set up by the state to ensure the proper operation of its 170 hydroelectric plants. Making sure those guidelines and agreements are readily available in case of an audit is imperative for keeping things running smoothly. Full story »

Brown Metals Company boasts the largest inventory of thin-gauge stainless steel coil on the West Coast. Thanks to an efficient supply chain and a highly-skilled workforce, Brown Metals can quickly process and ship orders of any size, from those weighing less than a pound to those that exceed ten tons. But as the company grew, keeping track of order-related paperwork became increasingly challenging—and had an adverse impact on employee productivity. Full story »

Since its founding in 1958, Arthur McKay has established its credentials as one of the top building services and maintenance contractors in the U.K. The company embraces the very latest technology to provide quality, value and innovative solutions to meet clients’ needs. So it’s only logical that when staff sought to streamline business processes, reduce paper consumption and improve their clients’ access to information, they chose a document management solution with an equally impressive track record of innovation. By implementing Laserfiche digital document management, Arthur McKay has optimised their business processes and realised a vast improvement in their quality of client service. Full story »

In 30 countries on five of the Earth’s continents, three to four million people have leprosy, or suffer its disabling aftereffects such as blindness, loss of hands and feet and facial disfigurement. Eleven thousand new cases are found every week, 15 to 20 percent of them children.
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Ceval Alimentos of Brazil implemented Laserfiche Document Imaging a few months ago and the company is already seeing huge results, one of which includes the elimination of an entire room of printers.

“Before (Laserfiche) we used to print 1 million pages monthly, now we only print 200,000,” said Alessander Comandolli, Technology Analyst of Ceval. That 80% reduction has made quite an impact on Ceval (a branch of the Bunge Group in Argentina) the third largest soybean exporter in South America.
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