CUSTOMER PROFILE
COMPANY: Carter Machinery Co., Salem, VA
INDUSTRY: Caterpillar Heavy Equipment Dealer
ISSUES
- Expense of handling heavy volumes of paper documents
- Need to capture customer signatures on shipping orders
- Multiple types of documents to manage
KEY SOLUTION
LaserVault DMS with LaserVault Reports
KEY BENEFITS
- No longer printing 1000’s of pages of paper
- Additional savings in toner and staff time
- Ability to email shipping documents directly to customers
- Capturing customer signatures provides proof of delivery
- Fair price
- Very good support
CHALLENGES
After 60-years in the heavy equipment industry, Carter Machinery has become one of the largest Caterpillar dealers in the U.S. with over 20 locations and 1,100 employees. With their success has come an overwhelming deluge of paper documents and reports. Dealing with over 175,000 documents each month was an increasingly expensive investment of paper, toner, business equipment, and personnel time.
SOLUTION
Seeking a simpler way to handle the large number of documents and one that would reduce the escalating costs of paper, supplies and managing and processing it all, Carter Machinery selected LaserVault Document Management Solution (LV DMS) and LaserVault Reports (LVR).
Bill Wright, System Administrator at Carter Machinery tells us:
“We now use LaserVault to manage our PDFs, TIFFs, shipping docs, several daily parts reports, and several month-end reports. The volume of documents managed using LV DMS and LVR includes approximately 4,000 per day, another 22,000 per week, and an additional 50 at the end of each month.”
LV DMS, a browser-based document management solution, is perfect for companies like Carter Machinery that are involved with handling large amounts of paper documents and are looking for a cost-effective solution.
LVR’s secure report management features enable them to manage their iSeries reports without printing them. With the two LaserVault solutions they were able to eliminate the paper while gaining instant access to their documents without leaving their desks. Bill adds:
“Stopping printing has saved 1,000’s of pages of paper, toner and time! We can now email a shipping document directly to the customers, and being able to capture customer signatures on our shipping orders allows us to go back and prove if someone signed for them.”
SUMMARY
Carter Machinery selected LaserVault based on the recommendations of another Caterpillar dealer. Bill liked what it did for them and liked the fair price.
“This system has been good for us over the past few years, and we’ve utilized it for far more than we ever thought. It began as a signature capture system for parts docs, now we utilize it for DBS report capture, custom reporting, as well as the signature capture on parts docs.
“We have been on it for approx. 6 years. We capture several reports, many of which are month-end reports, which saved several thousand sheets of paper a month.
“Before moving to Laservault we printed about 4,000 pages at month-end, we now print 1 report! The signature capture on parts documents works very well. Plus, the LaserVault people are very good to work with.”
