Orders Flow More Efficiently and Visibly at DEMCO
Madison, Wisconsin-based DEMCO has served librarians for more than 100 years. It has grown considerably since its founding. Today, the company employs more than 250 people and earns revenues of approximately $70 million per year. The company's catalog now numbers more than 1,000 pages and includes more than 50,000 items.
Paper Clogs the Pipeline
The inefficiency of passing around paper in a high-volume business such as DEMCO is costly. The company processes about 1,000 customer orders and 1,200 invoices daily. Handling a single piece of paper is burdensome enough, but when you multiply that by the number of documents DEMCO processes every day, the result can be a serious drain on profitability. DEMCO realized that implementing electronic document management would streamline workflow and bring real cost and time savings.
"i" Choose WebDocs
DEMCO selected WebDocs over other products it considered due to its low total cost of ownership, and it because it ran on IBM i. This allowed them to integrate with the company's custom-developed, IBM i-based ERP system.
DEMCO uses WebDocs to manage a wide variety of documents like customer orders, invoices, bids, contracts, supplier compliance documents, cross-department issue documentation, legal contracts, and board of director documents. The company plans to expand this list in the near future.
Better Workflow
DEMCO receives orders through the mail, by fax and via its e-commerce Web site. Orders received by mail are scanned into WebDocs and routed electronically to someone who must enter them into DEMCO's ERP system. The images go through a pre-edit phase where they are checked for any special requirements. From this point, they are placed into the order entry queue where one of 35 order-entry operators processes the order.
Improved Productivity and Security
Implementing WebDocs gave DEMCO a 15 percent improvement in productivity. It also eliminated rows of filing cabinets used to store documents that are now kept on low-cost SAN disks. An added benefit was the increased security surrounding customer data like credit card information. Access to secure documents is now restricted to only authorized personnel.
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