Watch our manufacturing client in an interview with our Senior Account Executive, Kevin Smith.
We had the pleasure of speaking with John*, a continuous improvement manager for a global manufacturer based out of southern New England. What started as a simple way to provide information to their field technicians turned into a complete digital transformation within their organization.
“We needed to get up-to-date documentation to our shop floor and field service employees as well as make sure it was accurate and up to date at all times. Out of our 650 employees, roughly 500 are in the field in teams of one to three people at a time,” said John.
“We use Laserfiche primarily to make sure that they always have up-to-date documentation readily available. It’s more common that our field technicians don’t have access to Wi-Fi than them having it. Although they have mobile hotspots, it doesn’t always do the trick. So, we worked with MCCi to build out a workflow that pushes to a cloud service that monitors everything with given tags. We also took it a step further and built a custom integration to make sure that even if they don’t have an internet connection, the information will update locally on their laptop.”
That was only the beginning; John goes on to further explain that they were able to leverage Laserfiche for more than just their field technicians.
“Not only have we currently digitized all of our employee files, but we are also currently in the process of automating our entire HR process. This automation will remove a lot of paperwork. It’s probably our most paper-intensive process other than accounts payable, which we plan to tackle in short order,” John added. “We’re also applying this to our engineering actions, driving our engineering change control and conforming to our change process throughout the company as well as working on automating our contract approval process so that we don’t leave any risk or liability on the table.”
It wasn’t long before his organization could quantify a monetary return on their investment. “The technology we use is not cheap technology to operate. We manufacture it ourselves, and we operate it ourselves, so downtime is a critical factor for us. In the first four months that we operated with this tool, it reduced our downtime by eight percent. The reduction is directly attributable to our guys having access to documents so they could troubleshoot and maintain it right where they were and not have drive a half-hour to get cell service.”
“That eight percent equated to $110,000 to $120,000 of substantial savings. Over a year, it’s over a half a million dollars saved. It’s been a significant impact on the company.”
But the benefits didn’t stop there. “We’ve taken this from a one-game show, which is what it started out as, to the full-fledged business process automation that we’re able to use in conjunction with our continuous improvement activities,” emphasized John. “As we run Kaizen and Six Sigma events, we include that right in with the process. We now walk out of the event with the process mapped out, and we’ve even had a couple so far where we’ve walked out, and it’s been two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through.”
We were able to connect with John at the Laserfiche Empower Conference and he was thrilled to learn of even more uses for Laserfiche for his organization. “I was so excited to learn about the Connector, which is a piece of the Laserfiche software that we’ve had all along and never touched. My mind was just blown at the possibility of being able to tie into other systems that we have that don’t always play nice in the sandbox. We can fully integrate our systems together and allow our employee base to be more efficient with the work that they’re doing.”
John’s advice for those wanting to implement Laserfiche into their organizations? “It is so easy to do the development. From a quick meeting with my stakeholders, I can develop what they’re looking for really quickly and easily,” John stressed. “Just get it out there, it’s not going to be perfect and you’re going to improve on it, but just get the functionality there. Fast is good, don’t let best be the enemy of better. My advice would be that the tools are out there, MCCi has outstanding support if you need it and use the resources at your availability.”
*Client name changed for confidentiality purposes
