Junction Transport Services Limited (JTS) is a highly respected and long established road haulage company with over 35 years experience. With a fleet of over 20 vehicles and 40,000 sq. ft. of storage space at their disposal JTS offer a comprehensive transport and distribution service from their premises in St. Helens, Merseyside.
JTS make hundreds of thousands of deliveries to third parties on behalf of their customers each week, each with its own paper trail to be administered at considerable cost to the business. The sheer amount of back office time and space involved in the conventional filing and processing of delivery notes was becoming a real problem. In a competitive world where everything is needed yesterday, this also had a potentially negative impact on customer service. In order to avoid making customers wait longer than necessary for their information JTS realised that they needed a simple solution that would provide them with easier access to and retrieval of delivery notes.
JTS Managing Director, Ian Lewis, explains, "We process almost as much paper as we do goods each week, all of which needs to be filed and made available at a moment's notice to our customers.
"This was proving a huge administrative burden on our staff but all this has changed with the introduction of the document management solution from Invu. We can now find any note in seconds and email it to our customers. While I am still on the phone I can tell clients that a document is sitting in their inbox. It really is mind blowing - I'm completely in awe of it.
"I am by no means what I would call computer literate, but now I use Invu for everything and I've been able to empty filing cabinets as a result. I am constantly recommending it to people."
Following an introduction and support from Marple Ltd, a specialist document management and workflow software provider, JTS purchased Invu's S200 Series Document Management Solution for their Local Area Network and also purchased two Kodak i40 desktop scanners. Delivery notes are now electronically scanned immediately on return to the office, and securely stored for instant retrieval.
John Charnock, Managing Director at Marple Limited says JTS was delighted by the Invu system. "They were particularly impressed with how fast and easy to use the Invu system is as well as the benefits for customer service."
Invu's advanced OCR (optical character recognition) automated indexing enables text searches on almost any attribute of a stored document. JTS can now locate, fax or email delivery notes to their customer within a matter of minutes, which makes life much easier.
Until recently, the competitive advantage of Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems was out of reach for smaller businesses. Nowadays an EDM system can cost as little as £1 per day, per user. This means that JTS now have access to similar technology to the larger courier companies and international haulage organisations in the market.
JTS has also improved customer service by deploying Invu's i200 Web Based View Only Module in order to provide online access to delivery notes. This is hosted on Microsoft Windows 2003 IIS Server with secure access made available via the company's firewall. Selected customers now log onto the system to gain complete access to their own proof of delivery.
As a result of opting for Invu, JTS has seen a huge change in the way it does business and the quality of service it can offer its customers, with an increase in the speed and efficiency of dealing with enquiries and less frustration for staff when it comes to other types of documents, such as emails, faxes and invoices.
"Like many of our clients, JTS was feeling the strain under a growing mountain of paper filing stored in bulky and expensive filing cabinets," commented Jon Halestrap, Invu's Director of Sales and Marketing. "However, by installing our document management solution, it has in place a robust solution that can store and then locate 'Invu'd' files at the click of a mouse."