Electronic Document Management
Case Studies:
Sur-Seal slashes costs and cycle times.
Providing top quality Gasket and Sealing related products has been the goal of Sur-Seal for more than 35 years. Sur-Seal is a family owned business and features a team based Management system that is committed to putting customers first. To Sur-Seal, this means continuous quality improvement, on-time delivery and involved employees who look out for a customers best interests. Several years ago, after using an obsolete print to fill a customer order and having to sustain a costly rework, Jim Wilz VP of Finance, was determined to find a better way than was offered by the current folder based paper system.
Although lots of effort and expense went in to maintaining the paper based manufacturing order system, it was prone to mistakes by it's very nature. Drawings were misfiled or lost .The sheer quantity of orders and the fact that there was a folder created for each order was claiming more and more room for filing space. Four employees spent a good part of their day making copies of drawings to go into the files along with associated specifications to build and ship the order.
Quality is critical to Sur-Seal and knowing what materials were used to fill customer orders is often information needed by management to respond quickly to customer requests. Searching through multiple folders to find these answers was becoming a daunting if not impossible task.
After reading about Docuvision in a trade publication, Jim Wilz invited Terry Wright, President of Docuvision in to look over the current system and to suggest software that could address the challenges inherent in the paper-based system. After studying the problem to gain an understanding of SurSeal's needs, Docuvision returned with a demonstration showing how the existing customer print files could be scanned into a "document management" system called Keyfile.
Once captured, the prints would be permanently stored on the existing Novell network and accessible to anyone who needed to see it from their computer workstation. Now, anyone could look at the print get the information they needed without leaving their desk. The next step was to bring manufacturing into the picture and after another meeting or two, a way was devised to incorporate bar-codes with the printing of the actual shop order so that drawing numbers could be referenced right on the shop order and a person out on the shop floor could use a computer and a laser wand to access the drawing out on the shop floor. Gage information at the inspection station is now written right on the two-sided shop order and even the shipping information is printed on labels and a copy stuck on the order. The last stop for the shop order is back in the office where the order is scanned on a two-sided scanner.
The bar codes on the order are used again because the Docuvision software can read them and electronically file the image on the network by customer and by part#. The filing clerks have now been reassigned to the Sales and Quality departments. The space formerly used for filing storage is now used for engineering. Jim Wilz says "ISO inspections are now a breeze. Customers who visit are more confident in us as a supplier. It's hard to imagine how we could ever go back to the old way."