Case Study: Shaw Industries

Flooring Manufacturer Turns Hours into Minutes with OnBase Capture

The Challenge

Shaw Industries Group, a multi-billion dollar flooring manufacturer, was growing concerned with the many potential pitfalls of manually processing documents in its business-critical operations.

With many processes still paper-based, processing documents such as invoices, remittances and bills of lading by hand took too much time. This meant staff in other departments could not retrieve critical documents necessary to keep operations running or respond to a time-sensitive customer inquiry.

That’s when Shaw turned to ISSI to implement OnBase automated data capture solution.

The Solution

Working closely with ISSI, Shaw found the answer to its indexing problems in OnBase. “The OnBase capture solution minimized the time that it takes to index different applications and documents” said James Washington, manager of Imaging Services at Shaw. Shaw uses the capture solution across a variety of processes to reduce the time it takes to get critical documents into their back-end systems.

One of Shaw’s customers sends in a 100-page remittance weekly that includes payments for received items, but also lists some items with problems during shipment. Each needs to be added into Shaw’s claims system along with a copy of the original claim.

Before, this process involved 10 separate touch points and four separate staff members, with two separate trips to their scanning department.

With automated capture, Shaw minimized touch points and only needs to scan the document packet once. “Prior to implementing OCR, it used to take around three to five hours a week to add the new claim documents into our OnBase ECM system. Now, with 85+ percent of the documents matching automatically, the claims analysts only have to work about 15 minutes a week to process the exceptions and it’s done in OnBase so there’s also a significant elimination of paper-based steps,” says Mike Rogers, senior IT project manager.

It is also critical that Shaw retains documentation proving delivery to rebut claims filed or called in by its customers. That documentation is the bill of lading their truck drivers bring back to the office after delivery.

“As it relates to our bill of lading documents and the potential claims against those deliveries, it’s imperative the bills of lading are readily accessible. Without producing the necessary documents to substantiate the delivery, Shaw runs the risk of rewarding unnecessary dollars towards unmerited claims,” Washington said.

To ensure those documents are in their system as quickly as possible, Shaw’s staff scans in the documents and allows the OnBase capture solution to do the rest. The solution pulls relevant values from each document to index them in their OnBase content management system. Employees then have immediate access to those documents and can easily search for them in the system as they are responding to customer complaints.

Shaw also uses their capture solution for invoice processing. In addition to processing customer product invoices, they regularly create miscellaneous invoices, about 600-1,000 monthly, for fees not associated with specific products. Shaw sends one copy of each miscellaneous invoice to the customer while another is kept internally, in its OnBase system, for reference. As staff imports the invoices, the OnBase capture solution quickly extracts values, such as the invoice number and customer number, to quickly index the invoices alongside related documents.

The Difference

Reduces Processing Time

Processing a 100-page remittance document used to take staff four-to-six hours per week. After Shaw implemented the automated capture solution, processing that document now takes five-to-10 minutes per week and saves at least 200 hours of productivity per year.

Allows Employees to Focus on Higher-Value Tasks

“It has minimized the time it takes to index different applications and documents. Now, employees can successfully manage other areas within the department as opposed to the mundane tasks of prepping and shuffling paper.” said Washington.

Minimizes Touch Points

The solution automatically classifies documents, extracts critical information and pushes the information and documents into Shaw’s back-end systems without the need for human intervention.

Improves Processes with Quicker Document Accessibility

“I think the most important thing for our business is that it makes documents more readily accessible. Whether it’s bills of lading, invoice processing or other areas where we’ve taken advantage of the OnBase capture solution, we have leveraged the ability to increase our process efficiencies while allowing our employees to focus on the areas of their job that contribute the most value,” said Washington.

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