Sell The ROI Of Document Imaging Solutions

You never know where you’re going to find your next customer. One VAR, ComDoc, recently landed a document imaging project with a warranty company called Dimension Service Corporation after a sales call originally intended to promote copy machines. During the cold call, the ComDoc sales rep inquired about document imaging and found Dimension was experiencing a variety of problems.

Identify Your Customer’s Workflow Inefficiencies
Dimension writes extended warranties for used cars, RVs, boats, and trailers. Due to the nature of its business, the company was imaging between 60,000 to 80,000 images each month. At the time, all of the electronic imaging of contracts and claims files was performed by a third-party company for Dimension. Contracts were imaged and returned to the company in .TIFF format, and claims data was microfiched and returned. Once Dimension received the images back (on average two months later), its IT team would archive the data for future use. The microfiche was filed away. In total, Dimension was paying more than $224,000 a year on its outsourced imaging and microfiche.

According to Dan Nihiser, director of sales for ComDoc, not only was Dimension paying a lot of money per year for imaging and microfiche, the process to gather and enter the contracts was lengthy and cumbersome. In fact, throughout the process the contract batches were passed to various people or departments seven times. This often led to the losing and misfiling of contracts.

In the year leading up to the installation, Dimension had worked with a consultant to figure out the company’s workflow. Therefore, over the 90-day sales cycle, ComDoc asked document management software provider Docuware to be a part of a number of the planning calls to ensure the VAR was meeting the right criteria being set forth by the customer’s very thorough consultant.

For its solution, ComDoc sold Dimension five Kodak 1400 series scanners, an 18-user Docuware license, and various Docuware modules that include a recognition module, active import, auto indexing, and a content folder module.

ComDoc and Dimension also created different scanning templates. “Because Dimension brands itself under different names, contracts with various appearances would come in,” says Nihiser. “The software was set up to recognize the different templates and then file the information accordingly. Also, different states have different requirements on what can and cannot appear on a contract. We adjusted templates based on what contracts came in.”

The entire installation took two weeks. ComDoc flew in a Docuware employee to perform the workflow training for Dimension power users. The VAR also had one of its employees perform general Docuware training.

By creating a single e-filing cabinet within Docuware to accommodate the contract batch process, Dimension was able to reduce the physical touches of the contracts to two, thus reducing errors and lost contracts.

Additionally, Dimension was able to set up a claims file cabinet to image its backlog of claims data. Docuware enabled the company to instantly have links to the claims images from its central administration application, thus greatly reducing the two-month wait.

In the future, Nihiser says he plans to sell Dimension another $100,000 in hardware. “Currently, there are no MFPs (multifunction peripherals) worked into their workflow,” he explains. “By adding such devices, Dimension will gain the ability to scan and index documents from multiple locations.” Additionally, Nihiser says Dimension has branch locations that could benefit from a similar solution. He hopes to earn that business in the coming months along with a project that will link the document imaging system to Dimension’s CRM (customer relationship management) software.