Community Title & Escrow (CTE) is a title insurance company that maintains an archive of every land transaction in Northeast Arkansas since the early 1800s. The company was facing challenges with the manual process of researching property ownership. Documents were geographically indexed in “tract books” that directed employees to numbered boxes or binders to access the physical documents which make up the chain-of-title. As CTE grew and acquired other title companies, manually maintaining all these records became very difficult. The company needed a solution to digitize all information into one searchable database for easy employee access, eliminate manual, handwritten processes subject to error, and speed up the title insurance workflow to quickly meet customer’s title insurance needs.

opta data group, a company that supports healthcare sector companies, was facing challenges with their invoice processing. They received over 3,500 incoming A/P invoices monthly, mostly paper-based. These were recorded in Excel and sent to the responsible departments and locations for approval. Due to a multi-stage approval process and a basic division of invoices into split amounts with allocation of cost centers, the processing times were long. Accounting also lacked any overview or transparency of the processing status during the approval process. Searching for information also took a lot of time and effort.

HB Munters Group, an international company specializing in systems for temperature, humidity, and climate control, was facing a challenge with their document management. They had run out of storage space for their paper documents and were having difficulty locating individual documents. To address this, they began digitizing all of their order documents over twenty years ago. This initially provided some relief, freeing up office space and providing employees with access to important documents. However, hundreds of documents had to be manually indexed every month for later retrieval, a process that was time-consuming and inefficient. In 2009, they decided to enhance their ERP system and revisit their use of the document pool and DMS.

Rawlings Sporting Goods Company, a leading manufacturer and marketer of sporting goods in the United States, was facing challenges in managing custom orders and effectively communicating order information to their vendors. The company needed a solution that could tie custom specifications and artwork back to the original order and share this information with vendors worldwide. The solution also needed to maintain version control and allow document and file sharing with vendors across the globe. The company's customer service team works with clients to create custom products such as apparel, uniforms, sporting equipment and other licensed items. With so much information to manage for each order, it was challenging to keep track of all the details and ensure that the correct information was readily accessible.

Talbot Marketing, one of Canada’s largest providers of promotional products, corporate apparel, and uniforms, was struggling with a manual, paper-based sales order process. The process involved using a manila envelope, referred to as a docket, to collect all documents relating to an order. This included everything from the initial order, to artwork approval, and shipping and invoicing. The docket was then transferred from department to department. This method was time-consuming, prone to errors, and made document retrieval difficult. The management team was unable to effectively manage cash flow, balance workloads, avoid bottlenecks, and ensure no orders were lost or stalled.

JTE Recruit, a recruitment agency startup, was struggling with the management of hundreds of documents daily, including emails, client contracts, and candidate documents. The recruiters stored all these documents on their own laptops, making it difficult to capture much of this information within a central organizational structure. Searching for information was particularly problematic with this form of decentralized storage. As the company grew, it became increasingly untenable to work in this way and both their employees and customer service would suffer for it.

Before the implementation of DocuWare, Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation faced several challenges in their accounting department. The process of mailing completed invoices and accompanying documents to the corporate office for filing was time-consuming and occasionally resulted in lost documents. Staff also spent a significant amount of time searching through files to find paper documents. As a publicly traded company, Cabot is also required to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, which was a cumbersome process with their previous system. The company needed a solution that would streamline their workflows, improve access to information, and help them adhere to compliance standards.

Hydratech Industries, a company specializing in high-pressure solutions, was facing challenges with their document management system. The company had accumulated countless documents over the years from various departments including R&D, Quality Assurance, and Sales. These documents, stored in a simple folder structure on the server, included production documents, technical drawings, emails, and contracts in both English and Chinese. Each project group had its own filing system, resulting in different folder structures and access rights. This led to confusion among employees who often did not know where to find important documents or which version was the most current. Long search times were common and when documents needed approval, large amounts of data had to be sent back and forth by email. Team members often only learned about new documents late on.

Marketing Personal SA, a Latin American multinational company, faced challenges in tracking orders and ensuring their delivery. The company's operations team was responsible for administering new orders, managing issues relating to package deliveries, and responding to inquiries and claims made by advisors. However, tracking was complex, and the shipping costs invoiced to Marketing Personal by the delivery carriers did not reflect effective monitoring of deliveries and inquiries to customers. The Customer Service Department did not have clear and timely information about the various phases of delivery, so they could not give real-time responses to inquiries. They had to rely on projected delivery information and paper documents from the operations team. All documents generated during the transport operation are stored for several years as proof of delivery for payments and as legal back up documents. There are risks associated with manually processing transport documents - they can get lost or damaged making them ineffective as points of reference.

Mercy Health Network, a nonprofit organization operating hospitals and healthcare facilities across 18 states, was facing challenges with its Mercy Clinical Laboratory. The lab, which analyses over 1,800 samples a day from patients across 17 hospitals and 300 facilities, was struggling with a slow and inefficient paper-based system for processing lab orders and billing. The lab contributes approximately $30 million to the hospital’s annual revenue, so digitizing processes was a high priority. The lab needed to speed up the processing time from when a specimen is received to the time it is billed. During the period the lab was looking for a new system, it had $7-8 million in lab work waiting to be billed. The goal was multi-pronged: automate processes; reduce time-to-bill; streamline document sharing between patient access, medical coding and billing teams.

Berwick Retirement Communities, a family-owned company that builds and manages retirement homes in British Columbia, Canada, was facing challenges with its vendor invoice approvals and payments process. With six retirement homes to operate and more being built, plus two head offices in different locations, the process was complex. Invoices had to circulate between different offices, in paper or email form, to collect the necessary signatures and approvals. This led to unnecessary redundancy and complexity, with several copies of invoices being made in different locations. Staff had to call different offices to locate the invoices and ensure all signatures were collected. When vendors called to inquire about payments, Berwick personnel weren’t always able to locate specific invoices and had to contact other offices to track down the missing paperwork.

Young Automotive Group, a premier car sales company in Layton, UT, was facing challenges with its new employee orientation process. The process required all newly hired employees to travel, sometimes from remote locations and out of state, to a specific location to complete paperwork. This was not only inconvenient and lengthy, but also increased the company’s expenses as it reimbursed new employees for travel expenditures and gas mileage. The company was also dealing with cumbersome paper processes for HR procedures, including processing exit interviews when employees leave the company, and managing bonus rewards and other employee benefits.

Criterion Tool & Die Inc., a third-generation family-owned company, manufactures precise components for no-failure industries such as medical, aerospace, and photonics. The company is required to retain documentation about the parts it supplies for the lifetime of the products and instruments due to government regulations. These requirements resulted in thousands of paper documents stored in the company’s facility over many years. The paper and large storage space made locating documents time-consuming and difficult. In addition, the company had to produce all supporting documentation in a timely manner when requested for audits.

Century Fence, a family-run custom fencing provider and pavement marking contractor, was looking to reduce its dependence on paper-based files, speed up workflows, and ensure records were easily accessible. The company wanted to implement a digital mobile solution to provide field superintendents with remote access to project documentation. The solution needed to integrate with their existing ERP and accounting programs and manage documents such as quotes, contracts, insurance, site plans, email correspondence, and more. The company's project folders remain open and active for about three months during the quoting, staging, installation, and billing phases of a project. It was crucial for Century Fence superintendents to be onsite and have quick access to project files during this time.

Adams Fairacre Farms, a Super Farm Market with four locations in New York’s Hudson Valley, was struggling with inefficient, paper-based processes for invoice processing and price comparison. With over 2,500 invoices being processed weekly by 100 managers across different stores, the lack of transparency and efficiency was a significant challenge. The company needed a digital solution to streamline these processes, improve accuracy, and enhance workflow speed.

As Kowalski’s Markets grew and expanded, managing paper accounting records became very difficult. It took one corporate accounting employee 3-4 days a week to type the invoice information into the accounting system. Department managers were also typing the invoice information to compile a weekly report. The process was time-consuming and inefficient, leading to a need for a more streamlined solution.

Culinaire International, a hospitality management company, was dealing with a large volume of paper flowing through their central accounting office. Each of their remote locations was sending a weekly FedEx package with copies of accounts receivable and accounts payable documents for processing. This workflow was inefficient and costly. After evaluating outsourcing accounting functions or finding a basic digital document repository, Culinaire realized what they really wanted was a more robust solution that had search functionality, optical character recognition (OCR), digital workflow, and the ability to automate indexing and eliminate paper filing.

Elit, a Romanian meat business, experienced significant growth in recent years, leading to an increase in daily deliveries and the creation of over 4,000 delivery slips and outgoing invoices daily. The customer confirms receipt of the goods on these documents, which are then returned to the company. For the company’s invoicing department, this process meant a lot of work. Before using a document management system (DMS), employees had to check each signed document individually and manually. Especially in disagreements, the manual approach was especially negative: sometimes several weeks passed before the money was received. In addition, a productivity test revealed that hundreds of invoices remained unpaid every month - resulting in a correspondingly large number of follow-ups and time wasted.

Before the introduction of a Document Management System (DMS), each branch of the Arab Islamic Bank (AIB) had its own paper archive. This led to inefficiencies as customer service staff often did not know which customer documents were already available and which ones were still needed. This resulted in customers often being asked multiple times for the same information or the documents had to be requested externally. Given that AIB conducts hundreds of transactions every day, this led to significant delays. Another challenge was the approval of documents across departments. Contracts and applications are reviewed by various departments, and the shifting around of paper documents, especially between a branch and their headquarters, was inefficient.

Mosscare Housing Ltd. is a charitable, not for profit housing association committed to providing a high quality, high value housing service to communities and individuals in Greater Manchester. This includes the City of Manchester, Tameside and Trafford. Mosscare was founded in 1967; today the association manages around 3500 buildings and apartments. All administrative maintenance for managing the properties are handled by the 100 employees of Mosscare. Many of the buildings were previously the property of the city. Before introducing a Document Management System (DMS), about 150,000 pages of paper had been collected in their paper archive. Every Mosscare employee must be able to comprehensively advise potential tenants. To make this possible, all of the company’s documents must be easily retrieved and viewable by multiple employees at the same time – without spending valuable time on copying or searching for documents on a colleague’s desk. Their existing software, Link2 (a housing property management system), should remain in place, and documents should be readily accessible from within this system. Employees work on about 70 computers running Windows 2000. They planned on storing all kinds of information about real estate properties and existing and interested tenants in the DMS system. This means that many different types of documents from a variety of sources would need to be processed. Multiple employees working in different departments would also need to access the information.

ADM Investor Services International (ADMISI) was facing challenges in managing and storing customer-relevant documentation. The process of creating new documents was cumbersome, involving filling out different Word templates and then printing them out. The company also had to deal with the authorization of letters by financial managers, which required manual intervention. Retrieving information was a time-consuming process, with employees having to search for hours in the paper archive. The company also had to comply with data protection regulations (GDPR), which was difficult due to documents being stored in different file cabinets or server drives.

Marcon International, a marine vessel brokerage company, specializes in transportation vessels including tugboats, barges, crew and supply vessels as well as ocean towing and smaller passenger ferries. The company maintains a vast amount of information about vessels worldwide. Although only about 3,000 vessels are available for rental or sales at a given point, Marcon actively tracks about 17,000 vessels and barges. Marcon also retains information on about 26,000 archived records for vessels that have gone off the grid. The company maintains a customer database of over 12,000 records and has three people dedicated to adding, updating and achieving this information. Due to the volume of information, Marcon always used an electronic data management system, which was a precursor of DocuWare.

Shelter Products, a distributor of lumber, plywood, and other building materials, was facing challenges with its accounts payable system. As the company's operations grew, so did the need for an efficient accounts payable system. The company was missing out on early payment discounts due to lost or incorrectly routed paperwork. The company had to process around 100 invoices a day, and paper processing took hours to route invoices to the appropriate trader assistant. The company needed a solution that could streamline its accounts payable processes and improve efficiency.

Chicagoland Fat Loss Camps, a company offering nutritional counseling and exercise programs in the Chicago area, was facing challenges with its paper-based client enrollment and tracking system. The company held kickoff events every six weeks, with 50 to 70 attendees at each location. Attendees interested in the program would fill out paper forms, which often resulted in incomplete or illegible information, requiring employees to follow up. This caused delays and presented barriers to converting event attendees to clients. Additionally, staff kept track of weigh-in numbers, supplement orders, and referral bonuses on paper. Employees worked long hours to input data into the company’s ERP system, costing about $3,000 per event.

Corestruc, a South African conglomerate active in the concrete, real estate, and agricultural industries, was struggling with paper-based administration due to the geographical distribution of its subsidiaries. The decentralized employees only travelled to the headquarters in Polokwane once a month, leading to an average processing time of four weeks for incoming A/P invoices. Urgent documents were sometimes scanned and forwarded by email, but this often led to a loss of control as it was unclear if the copy of the invoice had been processed or not. Additionally, when a document was filed away at their headquarters, subsidiaries were dependent on their colleagues in Polokwane to look through the documents to answer an inquiry. This required documents to be retrieved, copied, and sent out repeatedly.

Community Action Agency of St. Louis County (CAASTLC) was facing a significant challenge due to its paper-intensive programs. The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), for instance, received up to 500 applications during peak times, generating about 20,000 paper files. Each application required proof of income, a utility bill, and other personal information, which were rarely submitted together. As bills and other documentation arrived, staffers had to retrieve the physical files and add new information. When the state’s requirements for LIHEAP grew stricter while the number of applicants increased, CAASTLC became buried in paper. Another challenge was CAASTLC’s drug and alcohol education program that stored some older files offsite, which cost money to retrieve.

Josep Bombardó's textile company, based in Sabadell, Spain, had been using electronic document archiving for some time. However, they encountered problems with using Windows folders, especially when collaborating on documents or assigning editing rights. Stricter data protection regulations led the management to look for more professional solutions. The lack of security in the storage of personnel documents, which were still in paper form, was a significant concern for the management. They needed a solution that could not only store documents digitally but also optimize previously manual and time-consuming work processes.

The All Service Group for Facility Management, a company that offers comprehensive services in the field of facility management, was struggling with an inefficient invoicing process. Every month, around 800 work slips for services signed by the customer were collected and sent by the branch offices to the financial accounting department in Bad Homburg. The invoices were then created and printed out in their Sage ERP system. Work certificates were sorted, manually stuffed into envelopes and sent. A lot of time and many documents were lost in the mail. It could take up to 30 days before a service was invoiced. At the same time, the flood of paper was immense, with 30 binders filled every month.

Daviess County Public Schools (DCPS) in Owensboro, KY, was facing challenges with its traditional method of collecting and exchanging information with parents via paper forms. This process was time-consuming, inefficient, and frustrating for both parents and staff. Parents with more than one child had to fill out the same information on multiple forms, which was inconvenient. Additionally, the school had to keep track of document retention schedules on paper, which was a daunting task due to different document types being purged on different schedules. For instance, attendance data had to be kept for 20 years while health information obtained by school nurses was kept for only five years.

The Porter County Sheriff’s Department was facing challenges due to budget cutbacks and the need to manage a large volume of documents including warrants, case reports, tickets, and jail documentation. The process of storing and retrieving these documents was inefficient and time-consuming. For instance, warrants were stored in file cabinets and had to be verified by dispatchers who were also handling emergency calls. Case reports were typed, printed, and re-keyed into a law enforcement management program, taking up to six hours a day. The department was also dealing with a large volume of jail records and a county requirement to store a copy of every ticket issued for 10 years.