Taking Paper Out of the Equation

Manufacturers Monthly Magazine - April 2011

The Metal Manufactures Group (MM) incorporates a number of businesses involved in electrical wholesaling, PVC, plastic products and distribution.

The Group produces high value invoices for goods that are shipped around the country. Often deliveries are disputed, which makes proof of delivery (POD) documentation crucial to ensure invoices are paid.  MM had employed a dedicated full time resource to manage POD documents, which were manually stored in a cumbersome hard copy filing system.

Group IT manager Trevor Batten felt the burden of maintaining a widely distributed and aging fleet of printers in over 200 locations across Australia.

“The logistics of internally managing the supply, maintenance and replacement of all our printers was expensive and complex,” explained Batton.

“At the end of the day our core business is not printers, and I didn’t want to have to waste resources looking after them.”

Because the majority of printers were dot matrix, pre-printed stationery was required to produce forms and corporate documents. Each time a pre-printed form had to be updated, all old forms were thrown away and new versions brought in.

“The forms just cost too much; they were wasteful and gave us an unnecessary administrative hassle,” said Batton.

Technology supplier Upstream was engaged to overhaul the Group’s printing processes, including its proof of delivery (POD) documentation system and forms production.  With Upstream’s uscan solution, a new POD docket was designed incorporating two encrypted barcodes, one on each half of the docket.

Upon delivery of goods, the truck driver leaves one half of the docket with the customer.  The other half of the docket, containing the customer’s signature, is returned to the distribution point where It is scanned and uploaded to the central head office document storage server.

In addition, high volumes of transactions are ‘counter based’ and these also form part of the POD process.  POD documents are made available to head office, all branches, and even customers within minutes and archived electronically for ease of retrieval and storage.  To complete the process Upstream tailored uscan to automatically update the legacy ERP system with the POD number and close off the job.

“The new uscan system means we have instant recall of PODs, which couldn’t be lost once filed on our server.  And because external freight operators are only paid once they return the signed POD docket to the local warehouse, we don’t have a problem with missing documentation,” said Batton.

 Manufacturers Monthly Magazine - Upstream customer - Metal Manufactures Case Study