DocuWare > Case Studies > Better Information Access Improves Customer Service

Better Information Access Improves Customer Service

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

DocuWare

Tech Stack

OCR technology
Web-based access

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Inventory Management

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

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

FJMB employees now have instant online access to information and never need to wait for a courier to deliver a box of documents, improving employee productivity and raising job satisfaction ratings.
Moving to DocuWare allowed the company to eliminate the filing room and create one physical location for their call center, contributing to better departmental communication and team unity.
Customer service improved dramatically now that documentation can be retrieved not only by VIN number, but by car model, customer name or date purchased; thus providing the Service Advisor instant availability to the entire repair history for a specific car.
Electronic annotations are now made directly on the ROs stored in DocuWare, giving any Service Advisor the ability to answer customer questions and eliminating the practice of writing notes directly on the hard copy document.

Quantitative Benefit