 Document Management & Workflow Specialists
(865) 450-9696 |
Restaurant
Client Description:
Our client is a popular casual-dining restaurant company with over 800 locations, primarily in the East and Midwest. Our client has enjoyed remarkable success since its inception, and plans to expand by about 50-75 restaurants per year.
Business Challenge:
With over 800 restaurants being handled through their corporate accounting office in Tennessee, our client was facing a document storage and retrieval nightmare. All of their filing systems required storing, filing, and manual retrieval, thereby causing long delays in document processing, access, and response to inquiries.
Additionally, each restaurant was shipping packets of invoices, payroll information, and human resources forms to the corporate office for processing. They were spending thousands of dollars on shipping fees, and always risked packets being lost, misplaced, and taking many days to finally be processed by the corporate office. Our client was looking for a way to scan these packets remotely, and automate the processing at the corporate office.
Infotek’s Solution:
Following intensive meetings to discern our client’s needs, Infotek recommended a workflow solution featuring remote scanning to automate the capture and processing of their invoices. Our client added a small Fujitsu desktop scanner to each restaurant, along with Cardiff’s TeleForm and Web Capture software. Using Cardiff’s TeleForm and Web Capture software for the front-end workflow, our client is able to have each of their restaurants scan invoice packets daily, and upload the invoices via a secure intranet to the corporate office. Upon receipt of the digital invoices at the corporate office, TeleForm begins to process the invoices by automatically extracting information from the invoices and automatically entering them into the accounting system. Minimal interaction is required by human operators, who now only have to verify information and manage the batch processes.
This system also utilizes our client’s existing EMC Xtender Solutions products ApplicationXtender, WebXtender, and DiskXtender that had been installed by Infotek several years ago for back-end storage and retrieval. ApplicationXtender allows for a large number of users who can retrieve, process, and manage their stored documents after the workflow process, while WebXtender is a secure web-based interface that provides the same functionality for remote users via the World Wide Web. DiskXtender manages the large amount of documents in storage on their jukebox
Results:
Our client’s accounting department has since realized a superior level of efficiency and productivity. Employees are now able to handle questions while still on the phone, instead of hanging up, physically retrieving and searching the files, making a photocopy, and then returning the call.
With the addition of the remote restaurant scanning solution, our client has realized various cost savings, including significantly reduced shipping costs. In addition, they are able to save on the total number of accountants needed to process the incoming invoices. With the automation, they have also discovered that instead of closing out the books each month in 4-5 days, they are able to close their books in 1-2 days. Each accounting auditor now has about 2,500 fewer pieces of paper crossing their desk each week, and no longer need to sort paper with their new “see once, work once” philosophy.
When reviewing the costs of saved employee labor, storage area overhead, copy paper, maintenance on equipment, and shipping costs, our client has a system that has paid for itself in less than ten months. Now that the system is in place, they are looking at expanding the business automation technology into other departments to further improve their business processes.
