Document Management Case Study.

Document Management at Hydram Sheet Metalwork

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Established in 1977, Hydram Sheet Metalwork supplies components and sheet metal fabrications to market-leading companies in industries such as construction, shop-fitting and point of display, lighting, earth-moving machinery and white goods. The company's work can be seen in Marks & Spencer®, Tesco®, Royal Mail® and on projects including the Royal Opera House, Heathrow Terminal 5 and Boeing 737 aircraft.

Quality Control

Every batch of parts Hydram makes for a customer is accompanied by a Job Sheet, and on completion of each batch, this sheet becomes a quality control record, which needs to be kept on file for 10 years. With over 40,000 job sheets a year, filing these was very labour-intensive. Finding and retrieving job sheets was equally time-consuming, not to mention a waste of office space. Offsite filing was not an option due to the requirement for quick retrieval.

Choosing Document Manager

Hydram initially shortlisted Document Logistix because of their professional approach during the sales process and their product demonstrations. Representatives from Hydram then visited the reference sites of the shortlisted vendors and spoke to current users of the systems.

Hydram felt that the Document Logistix solution was more professionally presented, making it easier to use. It was also more flexible with concurrent user licensing, and there were aspects, such as the web client, that appealed to the company, making the solution scalable for future growth. The ability to apply security settings to different types of documents and folders at user level is also a great benefit to Hydram.

Benefits of Document Manager

1. Time saved filing job sheets
2. Ease and speed of retrieval
3. Office space released for better use
4. More professional response to customer enquiries
5. Adaptable to other business areas and functions

The Document Manager Solution

Hydram required expert assistance from Document Logistix using a remote connection to achieve some of the automation requirements of their installation. Due to the complexity of their requirements, it took some time to get up and running. However, since installation, the system has been very reliable and requires almost no intervention on the server side. Hydram find that the client installations run very smoothly and they have not had any difficulties with them.

Users at Hydram have found that the Document Manager software is very easy to use for document retrieval. The scanning and indexing software is also easy to use and Hydram have automated the indexing task using barcode recognition, which minimises user intervention, making the whole process very quick.

Hydram were particularly impressed at the ability to link index fields with their existing database systems in order to populate the Document Manager database with additional search fields. This makes document retrieval even more powerful and with no performance penalty or user intervention. Similarly, they are able to link back to existing databases to show that related documents exist in the Document Manager system, and even in which area of the system they exist. This makes the Document Manager system even more useful, in ways they had never considered at the time of purchase.

Andrew Jordan, Systems & Technical Manager at Hydram had this to say about Document Manager: “The performance is brilliant. The scanning, indexing and retrieval components of the software are very quick indeed. We now have 200,000 document images on the system and there has been no reduction in performance.”

Reducing costs and increasing productivity are key drivers for Hydram’s business improvement activities. In both these areas, the Document Manager software has already proved to be successful, and Hydram recognise that there are opportunities in future to further reduce paper handling and potentially systemise document workflow.