Skidmore Sales Feeds Quality Document Management
West Chester, Ohio-based Skidmore Sales & Distribution brokers and distributes ingredients for the food industry. They recently were able to drastically reduce their price notification process with the help of WebDocs and iForms from RJS Software.
Mounds of paperwork
Food quality and safety is a paramount concern for everyone from farmers to consumers. Ensuring that food quality requires the managment of a considerable volume of documents. Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), allergen specifications, kosher compliance documents, certificates of analysis and certificates of origin are just some of those documents.
Some of the documentation arrives electronically, but paper-based documents are still very much part of the process. Managing all that paperwork can be cumbersome and prone to errors, and errors cost money. Skidmore Sales was growing, and so was the amount of paperwork.
Out with old, in with the new
Skidmore had software that allowed it to scan in paper documents, but it was cumbersome to use and required quite a bit of manual entry of key fields used to search for documents. An incorrect key made the file nearly impossible to find. Furthermore, it did not integrate with the ERP application Skidmore uses to run its business.
WebDocs provides Skidmore with an integrated document management system that runs natively on IBM i (as does their ERP system) and makes finding documents an extremely efficient process.
Killing time
When Skidmore announces a price change for a given product, they use their ERP system to find all the customers that have ordered that product in the past 6 months. Then, Skidmore uses RJS' iForms software to generate a price notification letter and archive it to WebDocs. The company then uses WebDocs' email automation capabilities to distribute the letter automatically.
This has greatly reduced the amount of time it takes to generate and distribute price notification letters. In the past, this process would have taken a day and a half. Now, it takes 15 to 20 minutes to send electronically.
Utilizing expertise
Much of the benefit for Skidmore came in the form of expertise relating to the IBM i platform. "When tying into the ERP system we were able to take advantage of some of the expertise that RJS has in-house," says Skidmore Sales IT Director Dennis Meyers. "They understand the AS/400 (now IBM i) and the program logic used on it. That was very valuable."
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