Magazine Article | March 1, 1998

Unique Solution Makes Retrieval of Restaurant's Daily Reports More Casual

For many of Dade Behring's customers, next-day delivery is not good enough. The $1.3 billion laboratory instrument manufacturer often has to ensure same-day delivery. Integrating technologies with its new SAP system helps Dade Behring deliver the goods on time.

Business Solutions, March 1998
Written by: Nancy Senger
Restaurant Consulting Services, Inc. (RCS3) (Danvers, MA) is an information technology service provider for the food service industry. RCS3 resells many different services to food service companies like Unique Casual Restaurants Inc. (UCRI), John Harvard's Brewery, and Compass. Services include strategic planning, point of sale, back-office design and integration, and off-site computing services.

UCRI came to RCS3 to improve the speed with which its headquarters could disseminate mission-critical information to over 400 restaurant managers. Typically, the company had to print over 200 million pages of greenbar paper per month and was spending $300,000 to $400,000 per year on report distribution. Included in that cost were labor (for splitting and bursting reports and stuffing envelopes), the mail cost (AirBorne Express), and the paper (ordered weekly). By the time the reports were generated, printed, separated and sent out, 36 hours had elapsed.

Turnaround Time Reduced From 36 Hours To Five Minutes
To solve the problem, RCS3 designed a paperless environment for UCRI. RCS3 purchased Filemark's SMARTi Software Solution and used it to process all UCRI's reports from its Oracle Financial Back Office system and input documents, like invoices, in the Danvers computer center. All the UCRI information is processed by two HP9000 servers and archived on 1.3GB cartridges in a HP160 optical jukebox.

Instead of receiving paper reports each day, restaurant managers log into their desktop PCs each morning and can access the reports that were delivered by Filemark's Report Distribution System. This reduced the turnaround time from 36 hours to five minutes. Scanning paper documents was an added benefit because the customer service representatives can now bring up the latest invoices on their computers and compare them to the reports simultaneously to solve any customer issues.