ABC INOAC
Case study
Efficient and secure document generation and delivery in more than 100 manufacturing locations
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing
Intelligent Output Management Solution with tight integration into QAD Enterprise Resource Planning.
SITUATION/CHALLENGE
Reducing operational costs and ensuring regulatory compliance while replacing legacy output system, providing end-to-end operational flow: from creation of electronic document templates, and the production of individual or batch documents, through multiple distribution channels and their archiving in the company’s repository.
SOLUTION
DocOrigin® optimized both document production with internationalization (language and currency) and the multichannel delivery of documents in formats including pdf, html, fax, e-mail and printing.
BENEFITS
DocOrigin provided significant savings in software licensing plus additional cuts in document management and maintenance costs by about 50% in relation to the closest alternative proposition. A total return on investments was achieved in less than 18 months.
ABC INOAC is a world leader in the field of polymer chemistry with over 100 facilities operating in 20 countries for more than 90 years. The company produces a broad range of products for a variety of industries including automotive, information and telecommunications, healthcare, cosmetics, industrial materials and housing.
DocOrigin made our job much easier in what was already a complex and mission-critical undertaking. We had our hands full, and not only did DocOrigin perform beyond our expectations, so did the implementation team.”
ANNETTE SWARTZ
Systems Analyst, ABC INOAC
INITIAL SITUATION:
Many companies manufacture products that limit them to a single market, but at INOAC USA, President and CEO Chuck Little says, “We’re a little different from the rest.” And that difference is reflected in its corporate philosophy: “Rather than raising a single tree, INOAC intends to create a beautiful forest comprised of many trees of varying characters.”
INOAC produces a wide variety of interior, exterior and functional parts, including polyurethanes, plastics, elastomers and advanced materials. This business model brings a lot of opportunities on one side and complex daily paperwork on the other side. On a daily basis, the employees of INOAC create documents related to the manufacturing, warehousing and logistics processes.
Inoac works with all major automotive players, such as BMW, FCA, Toyota, Honda, Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and more. At INOAC approximately 5,000 employees work in more than 100 locations worldwide. The company’s products are in use at over 5,300 manufacturers in 90 countries.
The company operates in North America, Europe, Japan, China, South Korea, Southeast Asia and ships their products globally. When a product is ready, INOAC employees have a short window of time in which to print all required product information and necessary labeling, as well as documents for regulatory compliance and product transportation. INOAC relies heavily on their print capabilities, because problems with their production can slow down logistics, increase the risk of fines and unsatisfied customers.
INOAC recognized that their legacy document system (Jetform) was no longer being supported and the division needed a more modern and efficient solution to manage delivery and printing of large amounts of packing slips, pick tickets, restricted article forms, invoices, bills, certificates of analysis, material safety data sheets and more. In addition, they were looking for more current presentation and delivery methods that would meet their future mobile and IOT strategies.
THE REQUIREMENTS
In order to be able to deal with all manufacturing related paperwork, INOAC needed a high-performance document generation and output management solution to take on the preparation and distribution of mission-critical documents like product documentation, product labels, acknowledgments, invoices, statements, picking and packing slips, accounts payable checks and more.
The new solution needed to provide a single design tool that allowed the team to easily create any form, document or label template with convenient preview capability, or customize their existing document templates. Plus, they needed to test the new templates with existing or new data produced by QAD before they moved them to production.
Another important criteria of the research was finding a document generation system that was compatible with Enterprise Resource Planning, Warehouse and Logistics systems without making any changes to existing business systems.
The new solution had to be fast and reliable, should be able to handle all the product, customer, supplier and partner data flows and could also respond to the internationalization of factoring demands.
THE SOLUTION
After an extensive market research and proposals analysis process, the company chose DocOrigin for this mission. The solution made sense because of DocOrigin’s ability to not only meet, but also exceed ABC INOAC’s document related business requirements.
The Result
RAPID MIGRATION
The automated template conversion tools from DocOrigin made their migration from the legacy to the new system transparent, easy and secure. After a short training the INOAC team could migrate their old templates using DocOrigin, thereby reducing the service charges by tens of thousands of US-Dollars and empowering the company to create and edit templates in-house to respond to changes speedily.
TIGHT INTEGRATION
As this is a critical corporate production process, it was crucial for ABC INOAC that the new system could run with a high level of performance and reliability. DocOrigin is a versatile solution allowing to be tightly integrated and seamlessly working with Windows OS, QAD Enterprise Applications, Jetform IFD forms, Warehouse and Logistics systems without making any changes to these systems and business applications.
AUTOMATED DOCUMENT LOCALIZATION
As INOAC operates in more than 100 facilities worldwide, being used in thousands of manufacturing process, DocOrigin had to simplify a rather complex business environment. The new solution needed to handle documents in different languages, currencies and comply with relevant laws, policies, and regulations and had to work with the data previously generated for a competitive forms product. DocOrigin enabled the company to reduce template quantity by nearly 50% by creating smart templates with intelligent logic and rule-based automated distribution channel selection, which could be customized to the needs of a global manufacturing company. The result was a consolidation of the document template quantity by almost half and reducing document maintenance costs about 50%.
BUSINESS PROCESS OPTIMIZATION
DocOrigin brought the document related business process to a new level of security, compliance and professional quality. Not only are all the documents generated faster, but the system also ensures that only the latest approved template versions are used around the world, thereby reducing non-compliance risks, minimizing human error rates and facilitating brand integrity throughout the entire production stages.
Future Opportunities
Confident from the success of DocOrigin, INOAC intends to implement additional user-friendly modules. As such, the company will be able to offer internal non-technical users new functionality. The departments will be able to use pre-approved templates with pre-defined editable fields to create routine documents on an as-needed-basis. On one hand, it will enable INOAC to minimize document preparation time, and on the other hand it will also significantly reduce the human error rate. The employees will also be able to add dynamic notifications, collaborate in workflows, define document approval logics, and automatically sort & bundle generated documents before delivering them.
At a Glance
- Securely migrated document templates from legacy system
- Reduced template quantity and maintenance time by approximately 50% through using intelligent template design and smart logic with comprehensive localization possibilities
- Created a central point of control to ensure security and compliance with relevant laws, policies, and regulations over all document related processes in all 100+ manufacturing locations
- Ensured the integration of the new solution into the company’s ecosystem without making any changes to existing business software
- Improved document design and brand integrity in all manufacturing related document types, such as invoices, bills, labels, picking and packing slips, statements, reports and more
- Made the daily process of creating, managing, modifying, approving, maintaining and distributing manufacturing related documents efficient and appropriate
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