eBridge Solutions' Case Study: Document Management for Manufacturers
Posted by Stephanie Jones on Thu, Jul 29, 2010 @ 09:14 AM
Founded in 1965, Miller Welding & Iron Works is a custom job shop fabricator and finisher. The company manufactures parts, metal fabrications and machined parts for off-road equipment, mining machinery, oil fields and offshore oil rigs, wind industry components, broadcast antennas and farm equipment.
Miller Welding serves several major equipment manufacturers in the region and nationwide, including Caterpillar, Komatsu and Gardner Denver.
With hundreds of customers and thousands of parts to manage, the accounting staff at Miller Welding was constantly dealing with paperwork.
After the company was acquired by BTD Manufacturing, employees learned of an easier way to deal with their documents: web-based document management from eBridge Solutions.
The Challenge
Miller Welding & Iron Works (Miller Welding) is headquartered in Washington, Illinois — just outside of Peoria — and employs more than 125 full and part-time workers. As business increased, the accounting staff at Miller Welding needed a way to put all of their purchasing documentation in a centralized location where all employees could easily access it.
Luckily, in 2008, Miller Welding was purchased by BTD Manufacturing, so when Kevin Summers, Controller, mentioned that he wanted to centralize records, BTD’s accounting specialist, Angie Lehmann, was quick to offer a suggestion: eBridge Solutions.
BTD Manufacturing has been using eBridge Solutions’ web-based document management system to manage all of their accounting files since 2007. BTD’s accounting department, which includes accounts payable and receivable (AP/AR), payroll and purchasing, is more organized and documents can now be located and retrieved in seconds versus minutes. In fact, in their first year with eBridge, they saved almost $60,000 in labor and storage costs alone.
So referring Miller Welding to eBridge Solutions was a no-brainer.
"Manufacturers can really benefit from a web-based document management system," explained eBridge Solutions’ CEO, Leslie Haywood. "From the accounting department to HR to quality control to sales, every paper and electronic document can be centrally stored so that they are easily accessible from every department and off-site location. Some of our manufacturing clients even offer their suppliers access to documents from halfway across the world.
The Solution
Once Kevin sat through a demo of eBridge Solutions, he was sold. "It offered exactly what we needed," he said. "One central location for all of our paper and electronic documents."
Amber Bensen, Staff Accountant at Miller Welding, spearheaded the project from there. She learned the ins and outs of eBridge and was able to train key employees throughout the company on the basics of scanning and retrieving documents. "Everyone was very receptive to the new processes," Amber explained. "They knew that getting all of our documents scanned into the system would ultimately make their jobs easier."
Once eBridge Solutions’ document management system was implemented and everyone had been trained, two Miller Welding employees spent approximately one month scanning in more than a dozen of file cabinets full of documents from the accounting department.
The biggest obstacle Amber faced was getting people to remember the documents they need aren’t in file cabinets any more. Once the documents were physically shredded, that problem was solved.
On a daily basis, Amber’s team is scanning in their purchase orders, bills of lading and packing slips. Her favorite feature is eBridge’s optical character recognition (OCR) tool that lets users search through the typewritten text of any document stored in the system for fast and easy retrieval.
While a full cost analysis hasn’t been done, Amber knows the company is saving money on office supplies, postage and labor by using a web-based document management system.
Miller Welding’s Production Department has recently started using eBridge to store their documents as well.
If you are a manufacturer and need help organizing the paper or electronic documents at your facility, sign up for one of eBridge Solutions online demos and find out for yourself if document management is right for you!