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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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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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 »