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The digital transformation of the aviation industry continues to create new ways for airline carriers, leasing companies and aircraft service organizations to compete.
While aviation has traditionally lagged behind other industries in digital innovation, Coopesa RL — a provider of service and skilled personnel to the aviation industry since 1963 — has prioritized investing in new technology to transform its business. Most recently, Coopesa used Laserfiche to digitize and automate its documentation processes, which has resulted in a reduction in employee hours spent on updating and tracking down paperwork, better oversight of documents and processes, and a boost in productivity. Additionally, the improvements have shortened the average time planes are grounded for service, enabling Coopesa to offer more value to clients.
“Every day, more and more airlines, competitors and suppliers are transitioning to a digital environment,” says Herbert Cabrera, IT director at Coopesa. “Additionally, many of our mechanics are millennials; they are very willing to work in a sophisticated digital ecosystem. We recognize the need to provide the tools that will empower them to be as effective and productive as possible.”
Based in Costa Rica, Coopesa offers major maintenance, inspections, modifications, upgrades, refurbishments and painting for the world’s aviation fleets and leasing companies. The company has three hangars, and plans to open a new facility that will accommodate additional offices, back shops and the service of even more narrow- and wide-body planes. As the company evolves its offerings, Coopesa has also embarked on a journey to digitally transform its business as well.
Coopesa’s IT team identified an opportunity to digitize the process of documentation, which is required for every task involved with aircraft repair and maintenance. Documentation enables the company to comply with numerous regulatory requirements from more than 13 aviation regulatory agencies in the region — plus requirements from clients’ countries. Traditionally very manual and paper-heavy, documentation for a single service could take up to three days.
Some of the challenges Coopesa faced as a result of manual, paper-heavy documentation processes included:
The company sought a user-friendly, customizable solution that could help employees digitally and securely document service activities and purchases, as well as reduce the manual tasks involved with managing and updating documentation.
“In order to keep up with our growing clientele while continuing to honor our commitment to quality, safety and compliance with regulatory requirements, we turned to Laserfiche digital document management and business process automation,” Cabrera says. “Laserfiche helps us to meet one of our biggest challenges: complying with civil aviation control entities in each of our clients’ countries as well as our own.”
Using Laserfiche, Coopesa digitized critical documents related to services and automated many of the tasks related to reviewing, approving and updating documentation. The company also automated the process of material purchase documentation, which must be kept for two to five years for auditing, depending on material type and client requirements.
“Digitizing these processes allows us to avoid manual review of thousands of documents, and mitigated the risk of lost documents that previously had to be physically transferred between offices. We also have a full audit trail for all documents; everything is completely traceable. This digital experience puts us on par with the largest repair shops in the world.”
—Herbert Cabrera, IT director at Coopesa
The company has plans to integrate Laserfiche with other internal systems, to centralize information and enable employees to more easily locate certificates and other critical documents, no matter where they are stored. Another project on the horizon is the digitization of personnel files, which also require strict controls and security.
“For many years, the aviation maintenance industry was reluctant to adopt technological solutions, but now there is a new digital ecosystem,” says Cabrera. “Laserfiche has enabled us to not only participate but act as a leader in the digital transformation of the aviation industry.”
Coopesa’s Laserfiche initiatives have significantly reduced costs related to the printing, storage and transportation of paper documents. More importantly, the documentation process — which previously took up to three days — now only takes one to two hours. Clients automatically receive notifications immediately when they have corresponding tasks to complete.
“Streamlining this process is incredibly valuable,” says Cabrera. “We can shorten our turnaround time, while our clients can quickly schedule the return of their aircraft to operation. This has a positive effect on our revenue as well as the customer experience.”
The increase in transparency across the organization also allows for better planning. Staff are empowered with information regarding hangar space, technician and other resource availability to fulfill clients’ service and maintenance needs in the most efficient manner possible. Managers are also better able to measure performance and productivity by examining process data.
Another important benefit: Employees have reclaimed time from tedious, manual processes to be dedicated to more specialized tasks related to quality control and customer service.
“Our biggest satisfaction is seeing aircraft take off from our facilities, and operating safely and reliably,” adds Cabrera. “We will continue to invest in the technology solutions that enable us to be our clients’ partners in maintenance, and to meet their needs with high-value and competitive solutions for service.”
Merichem is a global company that serves the oil and gas industries with focused technology, and chemical and service solutions. Its proprietary impurity removal processes increase the quality of refinery products and oil and gas streams, and the company beneficially reuses spent caustics and other byproducts from oil and petrochemical plants around the world.
Merichem used Laserfiche to automate a number of approval processes, centralize information and improve information governance. The result has been a decrease in the burden on employees for meeting all of the requirements of ISO 9001, ASME and other documentation requirements, an increase in information accuracy and productivity, and faster turnaround times for customers—all critical improvements for an organization focused on operating safely and efficiently in a fast-changing, highly regulated industry.
“There has been a lot of change in the oil and gas industries,” said Amy Magee, project controls manager at Merichem. “It used to be that hiring a bunch of people wasn’t a big deal because the industry was making a lot of money. It’s never going to be the way it used to be—cost savings have become more important. Everyone in the industry is working to better understand how they are using money and how they are operating, so we can do things differently and more efficiently.”
With three U.S. offices and over 1000 treating units in refineries in 53 countries, Merichem must comply with a multitude of safety standards including those of the ISO, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and other organizations related to pressure vessels and refinery equipment.
“Quality and safety are extremely important to us,” said Amy Magee, project controls manager at Merichem. “We need to ensure our systems are built to the right standards. Data sheets are needed for equipment; drawings for construction; plus a lot of testing has to be done. And anyone who operates any of our equipment or the equipment we purchase needs to know what they are doing.”
The company initially needed a new centralized repository for documents, but Magee also realized that the company’s needs went beyond digital storage. “We need the ability to manage licenses with customers and give them access rights to individual folders,” she said, adding that employees previously had to manually track access to specific folders via spreadsheets or on Word documents. “We also have to track versions of documents, and when we disseminate information or updates, we need to know if and when documents are received and reviewed.”
Another essential component of Merichem’s operations, data books, were time intensive to compile, and were often still printed on paper and sent to customers. When a project was completed, employees had to compile anywhere from 10 to 20 books—with about 750,000 pages in each book—in a short time frame. PDFs were manually uploaded, and any time a change is made, it must be carefully tracked and sent to the customer as well. This resulted in increased overtime hours at the end of every project. “Data books were being printed, and employees had to manually mark up the individual copies,” Magee said. “They then had to scan the page back in, and there was no way to know if a customer had opened or looked at it. It was just a monotonous process. You had to check that you didn’t duplicate efforts. A lot had to be done to ensure the information was correct.
“Our cycles are very fast, and a lot of projects are fast-tracked,” Magee added. “Manual work was delaying our processes, and employees had to work overtime to get things done within our time frames.”
The company ultimately turned to Accelerated Information Systems, a Laserfiche Solution Provider, to implement a Laserfiche system that would enable access control, provide tracking capabilities and automate manual processes, including data book compilation.
“Safety is serious business at Merichem,” said Zaheer Master, president of Accelerated Information Systems. “With Laserfiche we’ve automated a critical but monotonous task, freeing employees to work on more important projects.”
Today, Merichem uses Laserfiche for document management; Laserfiche provides granular security control so that individual employees are no longer tasked with tracking access to information. Project assistants previously spent on average 750 hours—about half of the hours charged to a typical project—uploading and transmitting documents to multiple outside parties. Today, they have reduced that by about one-third, or 250 hours.
The centralized system also allows employees enhanced search capabilities, saving additional time finding information. “One of the biggest complaints we had about the previous software we were using was that you had to know the exact name of what you were searching for,” Magee said. “Being able to use Laserfiche and do partial or fuzzy searches, and search through OCR and metadata has been huge for us.”
Beyond improving the management of information, Merichem used Laserfiche to automate the process of data book compilation. Today, employees simply need to follow a naming convention for files and an automated workflow compiles the data book in 30 minutes to two hours—a process that used to take a full week.
“I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that Laserfiche makes our employees’ lives easier. It’s had a positive impact inside and outside of my department, across the rest of the organization. It helps all of our employees and alleviates stress related to deadlines, and we are able to expedite the turnaround time for preparing and submitting data books to customers. The end of a project is always a stressful time period, but it’s much easier now since very little manual work has to be done. We don’t have that rush at the end, where everyone’s putting in overtime hours.”
—Amy Magee, Project Controls Manager at Merichem
Merichem continues to explore new uses for Laserfiche and increase efficiency across the organization. Next, the company has plans to implement Laserfiche for specifications review, another time-intensive and paper-driven process. Magee explained that employees will also use Laserfiche in shipping and receiving, allowing employees to use tablets to take pictures of materials before they are shipped, so that they can upload them to the Laserfiche mobile app. This will assist employees in ensuring the company has records of the exact condition of items before they leave the premises, helping to fulfill requirements of ISO 9001.
Magee encourages her team members to obtain Laserfiche Certification and get involved with process improvement. “Laserfiche has helped in a lot of aspects,” Magee added. “It’s helped to keep everyone on track, and now as we are overseeing and facilitating work, we are able to make sure that people have the tools they need to get important information to customers in a timely manner.”
Tecnoglass is a leading glass and window manufacturer, and the first Colombian company to be listed on the NASDAQ. Since its beginnings in 1984, the company has gained recognition for delivering high-quality products, competitive prices and timely delivery. In more recent years, Tecnoglass experienced tremendous growth, doubling revenue since 2014 thanks to the company’s vertically integrated business and strong, innovative product offerings.
To remain on the forefront of the industry and continue to meet customer expectations, Tecnoglass introduced automation to its operations. This transfomation has affected not only the fabrication of products, but also core business processes across the enterprise.
At the heart of Tecnoglass’s digitization and business process automation initiatives is Laserfiche, which the company uses to store critical documents, manage records and enable collaboration between employees and with external suppliers. This Laserfiche-enabled digital transformation has benefited the entire organization, increasing accountability, improving compliance and accelerating business across all units. Today, Tecnoglass continues on its growth trajectory using Laserfiche to eliminate repetitive, time-intensive manual tasks, and enable employees to maintain focus on fulfilling customers’ quality and service expectations and remaining competitive in the marketplace.
In December 2013, Tecnoglass debuted on NASDAQ. Shortly after, the organization sought a better way to manage documents, since the company’s legacy system was no longer robust enough to meet the demands of a rapidly growing business and could not be integrated with other core technologies.
“Records were disorganized, and stored in warehouses making them difficult to find,” said Plinio Florez, document management coordinator at Tecnoglass. “This led to high storage costs and labor costs associated with searching for documents. It was almost impossible to consult files for decision-making, which delayed critical processes.”
Tecnoglass also faced challenges collaborating with suppliers. The legacy supplier registration process was manually driven and paper-based, which led to lost documents, and difficulties with authorizing suppliers and making payments.
The Tecnoglass team found that Laserfiche could meet the company’s document management needs as well as enable the automation of key business processes such as supplier registration and accounts payable. The Laserfiche platform was also easily integrated with Tecnoglass’s ERP system, helping to centralize data and operations.
Tecnoglass also enlisted the help of Colombia-based Laserfiche Solution Provider, Gestech, for the implementation. “Having local support was another important part of our decision making process,” said Florez.
“Laserfiche was the perfect choice to take Tecnoglass into the next phase of growth and expansion,” said Jaime Barrios Perez, CEO of Gestech. “By using Laserfiche to centralize information, and digitize and automate processes, Tecnoglass created a more seamless experience for employees and suppliers that is closely aligned with the company’s modern, global vision.”
The most immediate change Tecnoglass made was to digitize documents and store the electronic files in a Laserfiche repository, making information easier to process and share with outside parties when needed.
“We had to change the mentality of employees, which was that documents are only safe if they’re ‘physically available,’” said Florez. “To the contrary, by digitizing paperwork, we have enhanced controls and mitigated risk of information loss.”
Digitization made an impact across the company, especially in the foreign trade department, which manages significant amounts of Tecnoglass’s transactions and activities. The company was able to save nearly $73,000,000 Colombian pesos in costs related to shipping and processing paperwork alone. Today, the company’s Laserfiche repository houses more than 10 million files, all easily searchable by authorized employees.
Moving toward a digital-first environment also made collaboration with outside parties easier. The paper-driven legacy supplier registration process was replaced with a Laserfiche electronic form and automated workflow. By digitizing and automating the process, the company eliminated lost paperwork and accelerated registration, improving the experience for both Tecnoglass employees and the company’s suppliers.
Using Laserfiche, Tecnoglass employees can now easily search and retrieve documents without having to step foot in a warehouse. This has resulted in faster decision making, as well as a faster response times to internal and external audits — such as those related to Sarbanes-Oxley Act, ISO standards and the company’s Authorized Economic Operator certification, for which Tecnoglass has committed to both physical and IT security and safety standards throughout its supply chain by meeting requirements set forth by the Colombian Tax and Customs National Authority (DIAN).
“Laserfiche has helped tremendously with the company’s compliance with legal and industry requirements. Having the search functions at our fingertips has eliminated headaches for many of our employees, and automating processes has eliminated repetitive, error-prone manual tasks like data entry, allowing employees to focus on more productive work.”
—Tecnoglass General Counsel Andrea Zambrano
The company’s success with Laserfiche continues to spread throughout the organization since initial implementation. Additional departments have automated key processes including accounts payable, supplier updates, correspondence management, user profile confirmation and document loan control.
“Departments that have benefited from the implementation of Laserfiche include: purchases, treasury, accounting, document management, foreign trade, warehouse and internal control, all of which mainly needed a solution that allowed them to optimize time, space and the fulfillment of obligations to third-parties,” said Zambrano. “We have created and opened up new channels of communication with third parties, such as our suppliers. We’re now able to notify suppliers when we have an issue with a document or bill — prevent billing errors and delays — and we give our suppliers more convenient methods for updating data online.”
Tecnoglass’s Laserfiche implementation has created a more integrated work environment, where processes are standardized and transparent, enabling the company’s management team to more easily optimize resources and personnel. Employees and departments are accountable, which has led to better collaboration and better communication, even with third parties.
“Adopting Laserfiche technology opened up new possibilities for our organization that were previously dismissed,” said Zambrano. “It turns out we just did not have the foundation and practices in place that would enable more innovation. Once we started implementing automated workflows, we eliminated silos and our operations became more connected. We continue to work on integrating workflows and centralizing data and processes. Laserfiche is an extremely powerful tool for our organization.”
G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned and operated Pepsi franchise bottler, built its business on an unwavering commitment to customer service. In order to maintain that focus, the company has aimed to operate as efficiently as possible, digitally transforming much of its business in order to free up employee time for providing the products, solutions and services that exceed customer needs.
As part of this transformation, G&J Pepsi recently centralized its accounts payable operation. By using Laserfiche to streamline and automate invoice processing, G&J Pepsi has reduced managers’ repetitive manual work, enabling them to dedicate more time to strategic decision-making, oversight and interacting with customers. The new system gives the company tighter control over disbursements, supports regulatory compliance, reduces costs per invoice processed, and has increased efficiency across the organization.
An Accounts Payable Refresh
G&J Pepsi is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, with 13 locations across Ohio and Kentucky, and more than 1,600 employees. With thousands of invoices being processed weekly, the company recognized the need to centralize and automate accounts payable.
“Accounts payable used to be in four different buildings,” says Jeremy Harper, director of accounting operations at G&J Pepsi. “As we continue to grow, we knew it was going to be more difficult to process invoices if they were done in different locations, and they were done manually. We needed a way to make the process digital, collect what we needed, push invoices to managers for review and approval, and pull information later if we needed it.”
The legacy manual process involved invoices coming in through the mail, and being physically sorted and placed in managers’ mailboxes. Managers would sign off on the invoices, then the invoices were manually collected and matched up with relevant documents, such as packing slips. An AP clerk would then enter the information into the company’s AP system, Microsoft Dynamics GP; the documents would also have to be scanned into a repository.
“The volume of invoices was growing, and the company was looking at hiring another AP clerk in order to manage them,” Harper says. “The cost of manual processing would continue to grow.”
G&J Pepsi had been using another document management solution to electronically manage records for nearly a decade, so the company turned to Laserfiche Solution Provider Gordon Flesch for support on implementing a new workflow for invoices.
“In order to maintain its commitment to service and support compliance, G&J Pepsi needed a solution that would integrate with other core technology systems and improve efficiency,” says Bill Dermody, managed content manager at Gordon Flesch. “Laserfiche supports the company’s goals and has innovative process automation and reporting capabilities that G&J Pepsi can leverage as the business evolves.”
Today, invoice processing requires very little human intervention once invoices are pushed into Laserfiche. “Once invoices are pulled into Laserfiche we have a lot of workflow automation that kicks in and helps streamline the process,” Harper explains. “Metadata is added automatically, and then invoices are routed to different managers across the company.”
In the new Laserfiche solution, invoices are automatically sent to the appropriate managers. Once approved, invoices are routed back to the AP department for final review. As a result of G&J Pepsi’s integration between Laserfiche and Microsoft Dynamics GP, the solution automatically creates the invoice vouchers and, once invoices are paid, check numbers, dates and payment information are pushed back down to each Laserfiche document so all the critical information along with the image is stored in one place.
“It’s fully automated from beginning to end,” Harper says. “And we can pull any of these documents at any time to check them if we have questions.”
Invoice processing is now scalable, and the company has created a clearer separation of duties: Employees who post AP vouchers cannot process disbursements, and vice versa.
Transforming Operations: A Winning Recipe
As a result of the AP automation, G&J Pepsi has been able to centralize its entire accounting function by streamlining processes and giving the company more visibility into operations and control over invoice and payment information. The centralization has enabled the company to consolidate vendor payments, introducing new efficiencies and cost savings. G&J can also identify errors prior to posting payments through the automated workflow which performs a reasonableness check on dates, and verifies that the sum of distributions are equal to invoice amounts.
“Having to manually pass paper documents around introduces a lot of risk,” Harper said. “You’re not completely certain of who signed for it or when; you have to check whether a manager is authorized to sign for certain amounts; documents get delayed and sometimes lost. Once those documents leave your desk, you lose control over what happens to them.”
Now, automated workflows enable the AP department to standardize processing to eliminate issues like lost, duplicate or late payments. Audits—which G&J Pepsi undergoes each year to support compliance with industry regulations—are now much easier since all information related to invoices and payments can be found with a few clicks.
“We’ve gotten great feedback,” Harper says. “Managers that are tasked with approving invoices are very happy with it.”
The company is able to process over 1,000 invoices weekly with just two AP clerks. “As we continue to use the solution and process invoices, the process cost per invoices is dropping, and increasing the bottom line,” Harper explains.
One of the greatest benefits of the solution, however, has been reclaiming managers’ time for more value-added work that requires human interaction, such as oversight, monitoring and, most importantly, customer service. With a history that dates back to 1925, G&J Pepsi has grown from a small operation to the largest family-owned Pepsi bottler on its dedication to customers and ability to respond to their needs.
G&J Pepsi is now looking to automate more key processes, such as contract management, in order to support companywide digital transformation initiatives.
“Laserfiche has a ton of flexibility, and the integration with Dynamics was a big selling point,” Harper adds. “Laserfiche best fit our needs from the beginning to the end of the process.”
Want to learn how AP automation can give you a strategic advantage? Download this infographic and start tackling the challenge of invoice processing.
Leveraging process automation and an organized repository, Ghana National Petroleum Corporation reduced the time it takes to access content from one month to less than a minute.
A Johannesburg-based engineering company digitally transformed occupational health and safety incident reports, helping with compliance, communication and changing how the mining industry does business.
A leading manufacturer and supplier of formwork and scaffolding systems, PERI streamlined operations and enhanced the customer experience through an online portal.
PERI Formwork Scaffolding Engineering Ltd, based in South Africa, is a global manufacturer of formwork and scaffolding and provides consultant, project and engineering services for the construction industry. With wide-reaching operations across 60 global subsidiaries, the firm manages complex payment streams that require efficient processes and quick response times.
“As technology changes, there’s a need to communicate and distribute to customers more efficiently,” says Jacques Lotriet, Business Analyst for PERI’s Financial Efficiency Projects.
The organization previously relied on paper mail to sort, distribute and pay invoices. Collecting payments from customers often took up to two weeks with no guarantees that documents and payments would be returned on time.
With Laserfiche, the company built a web portal that provides customers and staff with web-based access to monthly statements and invoices. The accounting portal significantly decreased the time it takes staff to process invoices, improved the customer experience and helped the company provide more transparent operations for regulatory compliance.
“Feedback from our customers and our staff internally has been extremely positive, especially with the way to quickly and easily access and distribute documents,” says Lotriet.
The ability to quickly model and execute digital business processes helps PERI Scaffolding continually improve its customer experience and remain competitive in its industry.
“It is very versatile,” says Lotriet. “I like to describe it also as a blank canvas. If you can think it up, you can build it. The electronic flow and distribution is also very efficient, and saves a lot of time and money.”
Click here to learn more about using Laserfiche to streamline the accounts payable process.
Halquist Stone is one of the largest stone quarries in the Midwest, manufacturing and selling natural stone products nationwide. The company’s expertise spans materials used across all types of residential, commercial and landscaping projects—from the walls of castle-inspired homes to rocks that populate zoo habitats.
Generating sales orders for the organization’s diverse range of products requires the cooperation of several departments, which are often spread across seven geographically separated manufacturing facilities.
“Our old sales order process really came out of the ’50s,” says Wade Balson, CFO at Halquist Stone Co. Employees used carbon paper to make copies that then had to be sent to manufacturing, distribution, sales and accounting to be processed. “The supervisors at all the different locations were spending two to three hours a day manually inputting data—that left them 15 hours a week off of the manufacturing floor, where they need to oversee the product actually being made, making sure it’s getting done correctly, making sure people are doing their jobs.”
In order to continue serving a growing customer base across the country, the company needed to reclaim supervisor time.
Halquist Stone used Laserfiche to automate the sales order process, eliminating manual data entry and the many spreadsheets that previously burdened supervisors. Supervisors now enter orders on iPads, and information is automatically routed to the relevant departments to be processed. Additionally, customers can easily change or cancel orders via an online Laserfiche form, and supervisors can see the change or cancellation immediately after it is submitted.
Balson estimates that the company saw a return on its Laserfiche investment in under a year of using the software. “ROI numbers just skyrocketed from there,” Balson adds. “Now we’re automating more processes with Laserfiche, and finding more ways to use it. That just increases my return exponentially.” Benefits include:
“The more that we’re embracing it, the faster and better everybody’s going to be,” Balson says. “It’s completely changed the entire culture of our company.”
