Mechanical Handling Company Improves Customer Response Time with Document Management System

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One of the world’s largest mechanical handling companies sells, services, and rents forklift trucks and manufactures equipment, including a variety of trucks. Its diverse customer base includes large supermarket chains with many vehicles down to small warehouses with just one or two trucks.

From its operation in the United Kingdom, The Mechanical Handling Company’s site-based engineers—combined with 110 mobile engineers—produce about 5,000 calls reports per month. In addition, there are engineers based at this site who carry out further maintenance and repair work. For each job, a service report is completed detailing the work carried out and its associated costs. These reports generate further documentation such as invoices, which need to be filed with the appropriate call report so that accounting and service questions can be dealt with quickly and easily.

why document management

All of this information has to be easily accessible to enable The Mechanical Handling Company’s customer service operators to handle customer queries effectively. Explains The Mechanical Handling Company’s Financial Controller, “This paper-intensive area of the company was ripe for improvement.”

That is why The Mechanical Handling Company looked toward a document management system to improve upon their customer service and employee productivity.

As with most investments in information technology, several solutions were considered. The decision on which system to select was made by The Financial Controller and those who would actually be using it on a daily basis. This group determined that The Mechanical Handling Company needed a supplier who could easily understand their filing problems and provide a system which would be easy to understand. It would also have to offer the flexibility to expand to meet the company’s future growth and development.

After reviewing different solutions, The Mechanical Handling Company selected modules from Optical Image Technology, Inc.’s (OIT) DocFinity® suite of document management solutions, which was purchased from and installed by OITUK, a subsidiary of Graphic Data, OIT’s European Distributor. OIT products selected: DocFinity COLD-ERM, DocFinity Imaging, and DocFinity Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM).

customers and employees benefit

“Before we had the document management system, when a customer called accounts or customer service, the staff had to take down the details and arrange to call the customer back. They then had to go to the paper files, which were stored elsewhere in the building, find the relevant information and telephone the customer with answers to their questions.

The document management system means that our staff can access all the information immediately without leaving their desks. This results in satisfied customers and a more productive staff,” comments The Financial Controller.

He adds, “OIT’s sophisticated search facilities mean that we can find the relevant information even if (customers) call us without, for example, their account number.”

The new system has also improved The Mechanical Handling Company’s cash flow. For example, electronically filed call reports are automatically matched to invoices for service, produced by their scanning system by using DocFinity Imaging. This means that credit control staff has all the information needed on their PC and they can usually resolve problems with late payments and payment queries at once. To ease this process even more, if the customer needs a copy of the invoice, they can fax it directly from their PC using the system’s communications facilities.

Says The Financial Controller, “We were working in chaos. There used to be piles of documents waiting to be filed. The new system means that filing is completed in a more disciplined way so this problem is a thing of the past, which makes for a more motivated workforce. And, because they are better equipped to respond to customer queries, they get greater satisfaction from their jobs.”

no more filing cabinets

The document management system eradicates the problems often associated with paper-based filing. For example, when a number of people are using the same information, it is inevitable that some will be accidentally misfiled or that it is inaccessible to others while it is being used. Also, for companies like The Mechanical Handling Company where a large amount of paper is being generated on daily basis, a backlog of filing quickly develops, making it inconvenient and virtually impossible to find customer information.

Information is now stored correctly within minutes rather than the days it used to take and is available to all operational areas of the company that need it by using the new system.

“The OIT system means that the customer’s confidence in us has been boosted because we can find the relevant information even if they call us without, for example, their account or job number details. This would have been extremely time-consuming with the paper system, but we now have a range of criteria for searching including the invoice date, invoice number, the truck number, the customer’s name and so on,” says The Financial Controller.

In addition, valuable office space has been opened up by keeping the information on computers rather than in the numerous filing cabinets previously needed.

added benefits

The document management system will do more than support The Mechanical Handling Company’s filing requirements. DocFinity COLD-ERM’s report generator can provide valuable management information. For example, it can extract document data relative to an individual truck, customer or salesman.

“The system from OITUK and OIT has brought about many improvements in customer service, productivity and company administration. These are all real business benefits which mean that we operate as a more efficient company to meet the needs of our current and potential customers,” explains The Financial Controller.

 

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