Electronic Document Management Helps Fleetwood Roll Along

Employees in the Purchasing Department of Fleetwood Folding Trailers, in Somerset, Pennsylvania, were spending far too much time manually distributing documents. As the business grew, so did their overhead costs and employee inefficiency, until they discovered an efficient Electronic Document Management solution — Unifier from Cornerstone Communications.

One of the biggest benefits of Unifier for Fleetwood was to the purchasing expediter, according to Dale Gindlesperger, MIS Manager. He said, "Our expediter had been taking various planning reports marked up by our buyers and then manually writing up expediting request sheets for each item and vendor. It took from four to eight hours per buyer to prepare and distribute these sheets—roughly two to four days per week for just four buyers."

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Upon implementing Cornerstone's electronic document management system, Gindlesperger said his department wrote a fairly simple application that pulled the vendor, order and original item information from the source data files into one document for the vendor. The document was then sent to the FAXAPI output queue and Unifier did the rest, automatically transmitting the documents to the vendors. "This reduced a two-to-four-day-per-week task to a one-hour-per-week task," he said. "There’s just no comparison in terms of efficiency and use of human resources."

Unifier also came to Fleetwood’s rescue in the area of weekly generation of purchase order acknowledgment requests—documents reminding vendors that delivery date confirmations were needed. Again, Unifier proved it had the capability to handle the entire electronic document distribution, eliminating manual management of the initial request for acknowledgment. These two applications alone, according to Gindlesperger, have eliminated an average of 40 hours each week of inefficient, manual work. The best part, he says, is that Fleetwood associates are now doing much more productive work and much less of the clerical drudgery.

In other areas of the company, the Unifier is also making its mark. In Customer Service, for example, it streamlines orders. For Sales, it helps with the sales reporting process. And in Accounting and in MIS-support areas, it provides easy transmission of print screens, job logs and sample reports. "The fact that Unifier can just pull down data from output queues and handle all the distribution with virtually no manual intervention is a major plus," Gindlesperger said. "And since the documents are electronically generated— the output quality at the customer and vendor end is excellent."

He added that Cornerstone’s pattern of product enhancement, excellent reliability, and support makes recommending the company to future customers quite easy. Unifier paid for itself in far less than a year and continues to do so again and again. Savings occur in headcount reduction, improved productivity, improved morale and a more professional image with customers and vendors.

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