By Leslie Sanders
Xerox DocuShare has brought a Sault Ste. Marie area insurance company’s filing system up to date and uncovered its employees from mountains of paperwork.
Algoma Insurance Brokers Ltd. has recently shifted to an electronic system to streamline business processes and cut costs. In the past, finding an electronic document management system that could alleviate paper usage has been too costly, even though the company makes broad use of the Internet, an internal network and digital photography, says Ross Weatherby, technical administrator for Algoma Insurance.
DocuShare is a Web-based solution for managing knowledge throughout a networked company. It provides a secure and convenient environment for managing scanned and electronic information, using any current Web browser on any platform to post, search for and manage information.
“We use it in many different ways,” says Weatherby. “We now scan and store everything into it - digital images, documents, even employee appraisals. It’s so handy.”
The program solved their paper management problem.
“We looked at how we were doing business,” says Weatherby. “We often spent up to eight hours a day just locating and pulling paper documents from our storage files for reference and claims, we were drowning in paper. We used to have an employee whose job was to look for files, we’ve been able to eliminate that position now.”
The DocuShare program allows paper documents to be scanned into digital files that can be stored, shared and accessed by everyone on the server.
Weatherby estimates that the system saves the company as much as $40,000 per year in labour costs associated with searching through paper files.
“I figure document centre paid for itself in the first three months of operation, in salary savings alone,” Weatherby says.
