Better Information Access Improves Customer Service
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- DocuWare
Tech Stack
- OCR technology
- Web-based access
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Automotive
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
Services
- System Integration
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Fletcher Jones Mercedes-Benz is the largest Mercedes-Benz dealership in the USA, located in Newport Beach, California. With 580 employees, the dealership sells upwards of 700 cars a month and services 440 cars a day. The dealership is devoted to the lasting satisfaction of Mercedes-Benz owners and the long-term maintenance of their automobiles. The documentation generated every time a car is sold is comprised of a stack of documents about a ½ inch thick. Repair Orders (RO) piled up just as fast with an average RO length of 12 pages. Servicing 440 cars a day caused the ROs to quickly add up to over 126,000 sheets a month.
The Challenge
Fletcher Jones Mercedes-Benz (FJMB), the largest Mercedes-Benz dealer in the USA, was struggling with the volume of paper records generated from car sales and repair orders. The company could only store six months of documentation onsite, and the rest had to be moved to a third-party offsite storage facility. This resulted in slow retrieval times, inefficient document management, and high costs, estimated at $40,000 annually. The paper-based system was not keeping up with the volume of records FJMB needed to manage. The company wanted a system that could index automatically without the need for manual intervention, and that had the ability to scan a stack of documents and automatically recognize and separate the pages into individual records. They also wanted a system that stored the images in a non-proprietary format and gave them the ability to backup information on CDs or DVDs that would work as a stand-alone system.
The Solution
DocuWare was installed at Fletcher Jones Mercedes-Benz. After a repair is completed and the paperwork has been processed, the ROs are scanned and automatically indexed. A stack of ROs are placed in the scanner and DocuWare automatically separates the images into multipage repair records. Using OCR technology, the RO number is “read“ from the page and used as a matchcode to pull indexing information from an existing database; indexing the document without manual intervention. For legal reasons, original paper documents are kept for four years and then destroyed. In the event the original document needs to be produced, the electronic record specifies which box contains the record. Sales documentation is scanned and automatically indexed in a similar way. Employees can access the information through the company intranet using a web browser.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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