Aircrete manufacturer wages war on paper

H+H UK Ltd., British manufacturer of aircrete building products, is waging war on paper documents!

Since installing Version One's document storage and form production software, the company has eliminated many thousands of paper documents. It has also freed-up storage space, eliminated the microfiching of documents, cut costs and dramatically improved efficiency. H+H UK Ltd.  is planning to eradicate all unnecessary paper documents across the entire organisation.
 
Brian Collins, IT Manager from H+H UK Ltd. says, "We were drowning in paper! 50,000 paper documents every year were being produced, delivered, stored and handled manually, which was incredibly time-consuming and costly. We were also archiving documents by microfiche which was a slow and archaic process."
 
H+H UK Ltd. implemented Version One's electronic storage technology, DbArchive, and electronic form production technology, DbForm, as a solution to its problems. This software, which has been tightly integrated into the company's COA Solutions accounting system (OpenAccounts) and sales and transport systems, enables automated document storage and the electronic creation of all outbound documents.
 
All paper documents arriving into the organisation are scanned by one of the Kodak i160 scanners located at five different sites and then automatically stored in the electronic archive. Once the imaged documents have been checked and the electronic archive backed-up, the paper documents are shredded.
 
Once in the archive, authorised staff at the company's six sites across the UK can instantly access the documents by drilling down through the accounts, sales and transport business systems or by searching on key words using Version One's DbWebQuery Internet browser. When a document needs to be sent, apart from a few exceptions which still need to be printed and posted, this is done electronically using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), significantly reducing time spent retrieving, printing, photocopying, collating, decollating, enveloping and posting.
 
Collins says, "Paper no-longer dominates everything we do and as a result, we have significantly improved efficiency, freed-up storage space and cut costs. Printing invoices, statements and despatch notes used to take many hours every week. It now takes less than ten minutes! As well as this, being able to instantly access a document together with all supporting documentation directly from the desktop and from anywhere in the UK, has more than halved the time spent resolving customer and supplier queries."
 
To aid the company's war on paper, H+H UK Ltd. is considering other Version One solutions, namely the electronic authorisation system, DbAuthorise, for the paperless approval of documents. To streamline and speed-up the capture of invoice information, H+H UK Ltd. is also considering Version One's automated invoice processing system, DbCapture. This system uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to automatically capture, verify and upload purchase invoice data.
 
Collins concludes, "We're no longer being over-run with paper! We now have much greater control over our operational processes and have a far more streamlined and efficient business. Although we've achieved a lot already, there's still a lot to do! We're attacking paper across the entire organisation and constantly coming up with new uses for the DbArchive system."