TRC breaks through the paper barrier
Based in East Liberty, Ohio, Transportation Research Center (TRC) provides comprehensive automotive research, development, and testing services and facilities to manufacturers, industry organizations and government agencies worldwide. Recently, the company solved its paper storage and business process management problems by implementing WebDocs and Enterprise Workflow.
The “paper barn” problem
One of TRC’s 12 buildings, a climate-controlled structure about the size of an average barn, was filling up with paper. After more than 30 years of testing, TRC had accumulated a lot of proposals, test reports, land maps, leases, correspondence and other documents that couldn’t be thrown out. Storing these documents was expensive, and finding and using them was difficult and time consuming.
Slow-moving workflow
The nature of TRC’s work requires complex business and approval processes that often required documents to be manually routed across the company’s 4,500 acre campus - from person to person, building to building - until the chain of approval was complete. To reduce the amount of time-consuming paper-shuffling, projects were often reviewed and approved in meetings that unnecessarily tied up a lot of people. Both cases resulted in delays that slowed down the company’s work processes.
WebDocs and Enterprise Workflow to the rescue
Now, all documents are stored as electronic images in WebDocs and routed automatically to the appropriate people by Enterprise Workflow. Thus, the labor-intensive and error-prone paper-pushing that used to be an essential part of the process has been eliminated.
Putting the “barn” out to pasture
TRC is also working its way through the imaging of the paper in the “barn.” Once the documents are stored in WebDocs, they become immediately accessible online by anyone who needs them. Rather than hunting through files stored in another building, authorized personnel can now use indexed keys to retrieve documents without ever leaving their desks.
Big savings, improved efficiency
TRC is saving about $7,900 per year in paper costs and expects that number to rise as more work areas and processes, including accounting, invoicing, purchasing and human resources, begin using WebDocs and Enterprise Workflow. Paper cost reductions may be the most obvious and tangible benefits, but they are far from the only ones. For example, TRC used to require about ten days to approve proposals; now that time is down to about one day.
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