Cap manufacturer improves service with forms processing

Today, Dec 1999

Information overload was the best way to describe the situation at the New Era Cap Company, a 79year-old baseball cap manufacturer in Derby, N.Y., that produces 24 million baseball caps a year.

Keeping track of paper is difficult at the best of times, but it's almost impossible when you recieve 2,100 pages of orders every day --- and use a manual document management system similar to the one that the New Era Cap Company implemented when it opened in 1920.

"The system was slow and time consuming," says Dan Marmion, New Era's information services manager. "Many of our orders are small, in some cases as few as 72 caps. When you consider that 35% of our caps are customized, you can see why each order has so much paperwork."

In the past when an order came in, the envelope was opened manually and the form was keyed into the business system to generate a work order. The paper was then manually filed. "This was very time consuming because one day's worth of orders took more than one day to file," says Marmion. "Sometimes orders were misfiled, making the original almost impossible to find when the paper was needed."

In 1993 New Era realized its systems needed to be updated and installed a forms processing system. While this seemed liked a great idea, it was a total disaster because the software could not work with their existing hardware. "We spent months trying to get the forms processing software and the scanner to communicate, but it just wasn't to be, so we pulled the plug on the whole thing," Marmion said.

The company continued to grow and orders piled up. But the backlog was only part of the problem - keeping track of orders was the other because there was no way to quickly determine an order's status.

"The filing, the retrieving, the faxing it was too slow, too cumbersome," Marmion admits. "The paper forms also had to be stored, and we watched as filing cabinets ate up our space. We needed that space for something more valuable - people," he recalls.

Despite having been burned once with a forms processing system, New Era decided that they would again look to see if there was a solution that could meet their needs.

They approached local integrator Biel's Information Technology (716675-2121). Biel's recommended OTG's (301-897-1400/www.otgsoftware.com) imaging solution that used Microsystems Technology's (813-222-0414/ www.mti-info.com) OCR for Forms.

"We were very impressed with the presentation and the system," says Marmion. "We checked out their references and found a hospital in Ohio that turned filing space into an x-ray room after installing their software. "That hospital reference really caught my eye," Marmion said. I was impressed with the product's user-friendly design and its ability to process our sales orders with ease during the presentation. "

From the beginning, the plan was to take OCR for Forms beyond order processing and expand the application into inventory management and payroll. But order processing was the first step. "The application was simple and I knew it would have a quicker payback," Marmion explains.

With the new system, the staff batch orders into lots of 100 or 200, while checking for torn or skewed pages. The pages are then fed into a Kodak (800-243-8811/www.kodak.com) 3500 scanner at headquarters. OCR for Forms retrieves the scanned characters and places them into an electronic, onscreen version of New Era's form. The software flags forms with missing fields or information and staff at verification stations manually review the form images, make corrections and forward the information to a database. Order information can then be called up on a computer in seconds.

The system, which cost less than $ 100,000 to install, consists of an OCR for Forms processing/server station, two scanning stations and three verification stations at headquarters. In addition, each of the three production centers uses one OCR for Forms scanning/ verification station and two Canon (516-488-6700/www.usa.canon.com) DR 3020 scanners.

Immediate Payback

The payback was immediate. A fourperson filing team was reduced to one full-time and one part-time person; the extra staff were transferred into other areas. Space formerly occupied by filing cabinets has been turned into a conference room, two offices and a product display. Customer service has also been significantly improved.

"Staff at our manufacturing plants can now look up orders and confirm cap details - color, embroidery and style - instantly from their desktops, instead of having to call headquarters and wait for them to retrieve the information," says Marmion.

"This used to take anywhere from four hours to two days. We have not only improved the speed of retrieving order information, we have improved the quality of the information customers receive. Because our old process was so time-consuming, information was often out of date."

Accuracy has also improved. "Misfiled forms are a thing of the past and every file is instantly accessible to everybody," says Mannion. "We no longer have to search desks when the file is not where it's supposed to be.