Case study: CRH Roadstone
Roadstone employ over 500 people in Dublin and are part of the CRH Group, who employ over 40,000 staff in 19 countries worldwide. With over 5000 customers in Ireland, Roadstone deal with over 15,000 invoices, statements and delivery dockets on a weekly basis.
Previous to the deployment of the SoftCo solution, Roadstone encountered problems in servicing the demands from customers in relation to mislaid paperwork, particularly relating to sales dockets.
With up to 10 sales dockets per invoice, any lost dockets can lead to serious delays in payment and therefore delays in queries. Documentation that was outsourced to scanning bureaus was previously taking 6 weeks to be returned on CD for upload. Roadstone decided to move their document management system in house to address their key requirements.
Key Requirements
- Reduce costs and time of administration of documentation
- Reduce errors in documentation management identifying lost documents and data
- Reduce debtor days
- Increase customer response time and accuracy in dealing with invoice queries
- Provide customers with the opportunity to view all documentation relevant to their account through a secure extranet facility Integrate with existing financial accounts packages
Why SoftCo?
After a detailed examination of various document management solutions, Roadstone chose the SoftCo solution due to its compatibility with Roadstone's stated requirements.
SoftCo R8 provided Roadstone with a secure and scalable architecture, proven performance, broad functionality and extranet capability. Internet access allows customers to view their own account details through secure logins via the world wide web.
SoftCo Solution
The SoftCo R8 solution archives Roadstones' documents, which are uploaded to the system on site in Roadstone. There are two types of documents to be stored on the system, Scanned documents and XML documents.
Scanned Documents
Sales Dockets: Signed sales dockets, otherwise known as delivery dockets, are scanned onto the system for retrieval as proof of delivery when required. Approximately 3,000 dockets are scanned per day. Barcodes were introduced to all dockets to ensure speed of data capture, integrity of the data and automatic data matching with existing systems.
XML Documents
Invoices & Statements: These electronically produced documents are imported using XML (Extensible Markup Language) functionality, whereby the documents are generated using a specified design template, dropping information into the fields as required. The documents are indexed, archived and printed off as necessary.
All documents are indexed and archived according to pre-defined index fields, which allow documents to be searched for, using specified search categories.
Retrieval
Integration with the Roadstone accounts package was a key priority in terms of implementation. Retrieval of documentation is executed using the SoftCo "InfoBar interface", which allows users to retrieve documents in the same environment as Roadstone's existing accounts package and allows for generic retrieval using specified search criterion.
Alternatively, users, including customers, may retrieve documents via their web browser, controlled by secure logins and search permissions to the level of individual customer invoices, statements and credit notes.
Key Benefits
- Customer Service response time has decreased from weeks to immediate response
- Debtor days have been reduced significantly
- Morale of staff has improved, particularly in relation to sales and credit control departments whose functions now integrate more seamlessly than ever before and pressure on administration staff has decreased significantly
- Internal work processes have been improved by using staff more effectively
- Comprehensive exception reporting allowing crosschecking and validation of key financial data
- Extraction File Application - a text file containing all the index information for any scanned documents is matched automatically with corresponding barcode information automating data capture
- CD Export - documents requested by customers may be supplied on CD as a subset of the SoftCo R8 system. This provides Roadstone customers with the ability to manage their own documents and reduces customer queries to Roadstone
Future Plans
Roadstone is part of the wider CRH Group, which plans to implement the SoftCo solution across a number of its other subsidiaries, where they believe further economies and improvements in internal business processes can be achieved.