“With cemetery records, record-keeping is literally eternal,” says Brian Pellegrin, IS Business Support Manager at Stewart Enterprises, Inc. Full story »
United Road Towing doesn’t bat an eye at hauling 100,000 pounds of equipment or recovering off-road vehicles, yet the company hit numerous roadblocks when moving its internal documents. Full story »
ECOM is a global commodities company headquartered in Dallas, TX, trading cocoa, cotton and coffee between 40 offices in 30 countries. “Columbia, Chile, Honduras, all the i-stans—if they’re growing an agricultural product, we’re there,” says Willa Zandi, IT Director. The Dallas office, for instance, is the company’s hub for cotton trading.
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With construction and mineral operations in more than 20 countries across five continents, the Essar Group employs 60,000 people in 63 companies, with annual revenues of $15 billion. In 2009, the Mumbai-based conglomerate initiated a plan to establish an enterprise-wide Shared Service Center to consolidate and automate finance and accounting processes across India. It looked to Laserfiche to serve as a foundational component of its agile ECM framework through an integration with its SAP–DMS system to support it. Full story »
“Like all non-profit organizations, we continue to be asked to ‘do more with less,’” says Dr. Keith Vire, CEO of the Arkansas Support Network (ASN). Since adopting Laserfiche as its case management system in 2008, Laserfiche has helped do just that by supporting ASN’s 430 staff, program managers and case managers as they provide services and supported employment to over 800 individuals and families with disabilities. Client files that were once three-inch thick folders of medical information, case notes and support plans are now indexed and searchable—visible only to assigned staff, making compliance and frequent audits by multiple state and federal healthcare agencies simple and comprehensive.
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Name a recent natural disaster, and Ceres Environmental Recovery & Restoration Management has been there, helping clean up and rebuild. In fact, the licensed general contractor and government contracting firm has been awarded more than $700 million in disaster recovery contracts during the past eight years—most notably a $500 million contract to help Louisiana recover from Hurricane Katrina.
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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 »