If At First They Don't Succeed ...

Some people say the best way to teach your kids a lesson is to let them make their own mistakes and be there to support them when things don't work out. Jeff Haller's experience suggests the same might be said of imaging customers. In 1996, Haller, managing partner of ASP (application service provider) DataServ (St. Louis) (www.dataservasp.net), read an interesting article in a local business journal about a company called Anchor Packaging. Based in St. Louis, Anchor invented and manufactures the heat-safe plastic containers that many delis and grocery stores use to package whole cooked chickens and a wide variety of other foods for takeout. That product and many others are marketed through a number of channels. Given the company's size and volume of business, Haller determined that Anchor would be a prime candidate for a document management solution and called the controller. The controller liked the idea, but had already determined to tackle the project in-house with a scanner and homegrown image viewer to handle incoming purchase orders. "We parted on a positive note," recalls Haller. "And I asked him to let me know how it turned out."

Six months later, Haller was following up on the account and gave the controller a call to see how the system was faring. His timing couldn't have been better. The server had recently crashed and Anchor had lost all images from a three-month period. However, that was just the most recent battle. It had taken three weeks to teach the staff to scan. Meanwhile, the information systems (IS) staff continued to tweak the system and make changes that kept changing the way the scanner operators performed their jobs. Documents were neither indexed nor placed in a database, simply stored as files on the server. This meant a user had to know very specific information in order to find a document. Within two days, Haller had signed them up to convert to a DataServ ASP solution.

ASP Combines Quick Implementation With Flexible Options
Less than a month later, Anchor was enjoying the benefits of a hosted imaging solution. According to Haller, a month is the maximum amount of time necessary for DataServ to perform analysis, training, and full implementation, regardless of customer size. DataServ provides access to the documents through Fortis from Westbrook Technologies, Inc. (Branford, CT). This software suite enables the capture, storage, and organization of documents and includes modules for ERM (enterprise report management) and workflow. Using this solution, workers can sign on to the secure, password-protected Web site with a standard browser.

One of the criticisms of the ASP model has historically been lack of flexibility, but that is not the case at DataServ. Customers can choose to scan documents themselves or have them scanned at DataServ's facility, where 10 high-speed scanners of various brands process about 1.7 million documents each month. The ASP also allows customers to choose the level of indexing they wish to do in-house. Anchor chose not to do any automated data entry. After the order is manually entered into the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, DataServ picks up the documents every two days for scanning, indexing, cleanup, and quality assurance. Maintaining its own data center, DataServ hosts the images online for use by credit and customer service reps.

Additional documents are shipped from another Anchor facility in Arkansas. Thus, the manufacturer is able to maintain a centralized repository without the additional network infrastructure costs. In addition, the Arkansas plant is a manufacturing site without the IS staff to support a scanning operation. Because of the environment, the location is not appropriate for housing scanning hardware, which could be affected by dust and other contaminants.

Haller says most of the time customers have no reservations about shipping the documents to DataServ for scanning. In the case of the Arkansas facility, the approximately $4 a day spent to ship documents is much more cost-effective than creating and supporting an entirely new department to scan documents. "For most companies with fewer than 1,000 documents a day, it just doesn't make sense to process documents themselves," comments Haller. He can also point to the fact that, in almost five years, Anchor has never lost any documents as a result of the shipper.

Outsourcing Solution Includes Future Integration Opportunities
Anchor Packaging currently sends about 10,000 to 11,000 documents a month to DataServ. Initially, those documents were limited to purchase orders. Anchor has since expanded the solution to include customer service and accounts payable, and Haller believes there is additional room to grow this solution. Ongoing integration opportunities may arise when Anchor upgrades its ERP system. Currently considering systems such as SAP and JD Edwards, Anchor could opt to enable image retrieval from within those applications.

Haller estimates that Anchor employees undergo about half a day of training in order to learn how to use the system. One of the things that makes the system easy to use is the fact that it is accessed through an IE (Internet Explorer) browser. Most users are already familiar with using a browser, and the Fortis solution supports Active X controls rather than plug-ins, which are not supported in some later versions of IE.

Make Customer Headaches Disappear
Though Anchor has not placed a dollar figure on its cost savings, Haller says that outsourcing to an ASP has clearly saved the company money. Since the implementation, the need for dedicated filing and retrieval clerks has been drastically reduced, and those employees have been reassigned to customer-facing activities that generate revenue. Of course, they are also saving the time and headaches associated with running an in-house scanning operation.

Maybe it's the widespread acceptance of document scanning that leads customers to believe they can undertake a document imaging project on their own. The availability of production scanning hardware from Internet e-tailers is likely another factor promoting the belief that anyone can create an imaging solution. According to Haller, many of his customers have tried to create and manage an imaging solution and failed, which means they have already learned the value proposition of outsourcing to an ASP. The hard part for the VAR may be refraining from saying, "I told you so."