Done properly, document management not only saves filing space, it fulfils the fundamental requirement of automation - it saves time! Mail order giant Grattan reduced the time taken to resolve a customer query by ten minutes, as IT Project Manager Carl Bridgewater explains to David Tyler.

Grattan plc is currently the third largest home shopping company in the UK, selling a wide range of products including womenswear, menswear, childrenswear, furniture, electrical appliances, toys and gifts. Most products are delivered direct to customers' homes via the company's dedicated logistics division Parcelnet and the company offers a number of ways to pay including personal accounts, debits and credit cards.

For all deliveries Parcelnet generates a courier manifest used as a Proof of Delivery notice and for handling customer queries. Carl Bridgewater, Project Manager in IT, explains the consequences, "Anything up to 14,000 documents are returned to us each day from deliveries across the UK and each of these manifests can contain up to 14 transactions. Until recently, all these documents were stored in filing cabinets."

Over a hundred such cabinets were needed to store just three months worth of manifests. "Because of Grattan's various customer-friendly pay schemes, such as 'buy now - pay later', many customer queries are not actually received until several months after the original transaction. If a query came in and the manifest could not be found we were not able to prove that delivery had been made promptly and with sound goods and, consequently, we had to settle claims when perhaps we wouldn't have had to if we had the right information to hand."

Bridgewater continues, "On average, each customer query involved six visits to the filing cabinets before the query could be resolved. The manifest might not have been returned and filed yet or it may already have been removed by another clerk. Each of these visits took an average of two minutes: an average of twelve minutes per query. With an average of 1,000 queries per day, an awful lot of time was spent to-ing and fro-ing compared to actually resolving issues."

With so many documents coming from so many locations there was little chance of Grattan's clerks knowing if the manifest was even in the filing cabinet at any given time. Similarly there was no way of managing the progress and performance of couriers. "We had had enough," insists Bridgewater, "There had to be a better way of handling the situation but the sheer size of the task meant that we might create more problems than we solved."

The solution was IMSCAN 32, which allows twelve months worth of manifests to be stored on-line for instant access while older records are stored on CD. It can handle electronic documents in virtually any format as well as scanned documents.

Over the first seven months of operation 21.7 million documents were scanned into IMSCAN, putting 100Gb of information onto 174 CDs. Carl Bridgewater has been impressed with the system's capabilities: "We now have up to twenty people on the network each day using IMSCAN and they are making up to 50,000 searches every month. Indeed, thanks to IMSCAN, we can now comfortably handle over 1,000 queries a day with each one taking no more than a minute. A vast improvement on the twelve minute average we had become used to!"

The annual input for Grattan is expected to be around 38 million documents. "The massive space saving in terms of filing cabinets and the subsequent tidier office area has been a huge benefit. The sheer volume of paperwork that had to be kept at hand was threatening to take over my department. The effect of a tidy environment on the overall morale and efficiency of our clerks cannot be under-estimated," says Ray Wadkin, Grattan's Admin/Systems Manager.

Carl Bridgewater was also impressed with the on-going developments being made on the IMSCAN product. The latest version, imscan.net, allows access and retrieval using a web-based browser so that it can be used via Internet and intranet, as well as through direct dial-in access. "These developments are important to us in that we want to feel comfortable that the system will be able to grow to accommodate our own growth and development. More specifically we can see the potential for adding key new applications to the system. We are looking to add Proof of Delivery documentation from third party carriers that will give us even greater visibility into our logistics operations. Also, we would look to add the ability to actively query third party transactions."

Bridgewater concludes, "The implementation of IMSCAN32 has revolutionised Grattan's courier claims department. We are now able to respond accurately and almost immediately to virtually any query and this has helped to increase profitability as well as efficiency. More than anything else, the IMSCAN document management system has saved us that most precious of commodities in the business world today - time!"

More info: http://www.imscan.co.uk