Location: Blackmore Vale and Shaftesbury, Dorset, United Kingdom
Industry: Dairy and Food Processing and Manufacturing
Website: www.bvdairy.co.uk
Founded in 1958 as a family farm in England’s West Country, BV Dairy is now a thriving modern business. Each year, the company purchases 35 million liters of milk from dairy farms within a 25-mile radius of their production facility in Shaftesbury, Dorset and turns them into dairy products for food distribution and manufacturing firms. BV Dairy’s range includes their award-winning Dorset clotted cream, as well as yogurts, buttermilk, soft cheese, and mascarpone.
Our customer was a relatively small school district in Kansas serving 10 schools enrolling children from kindergarten through 12th grade. The school district’s Records Office had five full-time employees whose responsibilities included filing and storing roughly 300 paper documents weekly, and retrieving about 500 documents every week.
The school district purchased DocStar ECM to capture, store and retrieve student records, school board minutes, purchase orders and invoices.
The school district was experiencing all the problems associated with traditional paper filing-shortage of file space, slow document retrieval, and the potential for lost or damaged documents.
Because the district had to maintain school records indefinitely, they stored records in traditional metal file cabinets for six years and then transferred them to cardboard boxes which were then stored in a warehouse. Searching through these boxes proved to be a very lengthy and cumbersome process, wasting much valuable employee time.
Also, when the office had previously relocated, two boxes of records were lost. Compounding the problem, a few years earlier the district’s warehouse had experienced a fire, resulting in many destroyed and damaged docs. The customer’s need for a state-of-the-art file management and backup system became obvious.
“DocStar gives us the power to add and retrieve more documents to and from the system. It increases our accuracy, efficiency, and traceability. Furthermore, this solution has plenty of flexibility that lets us tune and tweak workflows as our business processes change and grow. Most of all, the introduction of DocStar has allowed us to streamline processes and save time—notably in terms of invoice approval and delivery note processing—because it brings all of the relevant information and documentation together in one place.”
-Mark Damen, ERP Systems Manager | BV Dairy
With DocStar ECM in place, the school district was able to complete all conversion of their files dating back to 1950 to electronic documents, which meant the shortage of off-site storage was no longer a problem. The district hired a summer temp to implement and complete the scanning and storing of all these records.
Documents are now easily scanned and stored on disk. Currently, three secretaries have access to the system and can retrieve records in seconds. There’s also no longer any off-premises searching, giving employees more time to perform other tasks. Duplicate disks are stored off-site, a backup system that guards against the very real possibility of the loss or destruction of these critical documents.
The records staff has found DocStar ECM extremely compact and easy to use. The system was installed in just a few hours, and the staff was up and running after a brief training session.
