A new, high capacity business information warehouse from Macro 4 enables US gas and chemical giant, Air Products, to drastically reduce its annual bill for issuing and retaining copies of shipping documents and invoices to its customers. The system boosts customer service and efficiency by creating a fast access, online repository of shipping documents and invoices. The solution went live in mid-March and already holds over 500,000 shipping documents and over 390,000 invoices.
The Macro 4 solution, called Retriever, helps Air Products` customer service department to speed up the turnaround of some 2000 monthly customer requests for copy invoices and signed proof of delivery shipping documents and will enable the company to hold its entire 10 year statutory document archive online. As well as improving customer service and operational efficiency, the system will deliver an improved cash flow and future savings in office storage space.
Shipping documents - signed by customers when their orders are delivered - arrive by post at Air Products` Allentown, Pennsylvania head office every day from the company`s 170 US regional offices. On average, 6500 single and multiple page documents are prepared, scanned and indexed in the company`s Imaging Center, and the scanned images are transferred nightly to an Windows NT(r) server running Retriever. All customer invoices are also indexed and transferred electronically to Retriever nightly from Air Products` mainframe billing system. Over 450 staff, including the Customer Service Department and Credit department in Allentown and other office sales and distribution employees located throughout the country, can easily retrieve documents on the system.
"When a customer telephones to request a copy of their invoice or shipping document, the customer service department can use Retriever to access it on their PCs within seconds - and print or fax it immediately so any queries can be resolved and potential payment hold ups avoided," explains Mike O`Rourke - Customer Service Specialist for Air Products.
"The system drastically cuts the time it takes staff to locate documents, and in the long run will save on storage space as we no longer need to hold on to hard copies," he adds.
Previously, shipping documents were stored as paper copies at Air Products` regional offices. When a customer requested a shipping document through customer service in Allentown, it had to be requested from the regional office and it could take several days before the customer would receive the information. Sales invoices were held on the corporate billing system for an initial three months and then converted to microfiche. It could take up to a day for the correct invoice to be located on the microfiche system, and microfiche invoices could cause confusion, as they were a different format to the originals.
Macro 4, which has implemented a similar solution for Air Products in Europe, was chosen because of its ability to deliver a flexible solution that integrates storage and retrieval of both the computer-generated invoices and the scanned shipping documents.
As part an overall e-commerce strategy, Air Products is planning to put the online business information warehouse on the web, giving customers the convenience of self service query resolution by providing them with secure internet access to invoices and shipping documents.
"Delivering these documents over the web is the obvious next step," explains Mike. "It will provide an even greater service boost for our customers and free up customer service staff to handle other tasks."
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