Electronic Document Management Improves Information Sharing, Customer Service
Growing 30 acres of high-quality plants and flowers is an art at Garden State Growers. Managing the volume of delivery receipts and invoices that are generated when the company’s beautiful plants are sold to big box retail outlets and local garden centers from Maine to North Carolina, however, is a challenge.
Garden State Growers is ranked one of the top 100 greenhouses in the country. The company makes thousands of product deliveries a month, especially during its busy spring and summer seasons. Each delivery generates a bill of lading (BOLs) acknowledging the delivery and condition of the Garden State Growers products. “Bills of lading are money to us,” says Scott Acker, director of accounting for Garden State Growers. “If we can’t produce proof of delivery, we don’t get paid.”
Garden State Growers also needs to access the BOLs whenever a customer claim is filed to document the quantity and condition of plants delivered. Claims can lag delivery by several months to a year.
“We used to have rooms of file cabinets,” Acker says. “When we needed to find a bill of lading, an employee would have to search through the files, locate the document, make a photocopy of it, re-file it and then fax or mail it to the person who needed it. Once a year we would clean out one set of file cabinets to make room for a new year’s worth of documents. Then we’d move the old documents to another set of files. With business expanding, we were running out of room for more files.”
Garden State Growers decided to replace their space-eating, time- and labor-intensive paper document system with an electronic document management system from Digitech. Using PaperFlow capture software, the company began scanning and indexing BOLs as soon as they arrived at the company’s offices in Pittstown, NJ. The images were then stored securely on a company server. Using PaperVision Enterprise software, system users could then search for, retrieve and distribute documents as needed. The system was soon adopted by the accounting and purchasing departments which could match receipts and invoices and other product and customer documents.
“We’re down to two small filing cabinets,” Acker says proudly. In addition to saving office space, Garden State Growers is saving time and getting quicker access to information.
“Anyone can call here at any time and request a bill of lading,” Acker says. “We can find it immediately – a level of service our customers really appreciate.”
The ability to share information more readily is another benefit.
“Even though we are all in the same location, our offices are spread out.” Acker says. “This has really improved our ability to get documents from one place to another in a fraction of the time and with fewer employees looking for information.”
A final benefit is document security.
“We used to have to keep customer documents in locked files. Now we can control access to information electronically,” Acker says. “We’ve also created a secure back up in case of a fire or other disaster. That gives me peace of mind.”