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Buffalo, NY-based Gibraltar Industries is a leading manufacturer, processor, and distributor of metals and other engineered materials for building products, vehicular, and other industrial markets. Until recently, they also dealt in paper. Too much paper, especially in their accounting and finance areas. Since 1993, Gibraltar has acquired 22 companies, growing to 73 facilities in 26 states, Mexico and Canada. When they purchased Air Vent in 2003, they discovered that company using an innovative automatic file management solution called Cabinet NG Software that eliminated paper record keeping while delighting workers and customers. Rob Barton, Gibraltar’s Corporate Financial Systems Manager liked what he saw, and set out to learn more.

Manufacturing
“Air Vent had been utilizing Cabinet NG Software for almost three years when we acquired them,” Barton recalls. “We did some due diligence and discovered that this solution was allowing them to store everything electronically and gain immediate access to every document quickly.” Before long, Barton and the management team determined that Cabinet NG Software, combined with KODAK i40 Scanners, would be an ideal answer for the overwhelming volumes of paper passing through Gibraltar’s accounting and finance departments.

Cabinet NG, based in Athens, AL, bills itself as “the document management industry’s only automated filing solution that begins filing as you begin typing.” With their Shared Access Filing Environment or SAFE, companies like Gibraltar manage large volumes of documents, optimize workflow, enforce privacy, and improve efficiency, all without burning a path to a wall of filing cabinets that consumes precious floor space.

That wall of filing cabinets was exactly what worried Barton. “When we had to find a certain vendor file, we’d go to file cabinets and banker boxes and it could be quite time consuming,” he notes. “Now, everything is stored electronically. No more paper. It’s an immediate payback. We used to output four-foot high piles of ledgers and statements each month, and now we don’t need these printouts.” Today, all statements, fixed asset reports and other financial documents are stored, backed-up, and accessed electronically (and far more quickly and efficiently).

Step One: KODAK i40 Scanners
As the first part of this process, productive scanning is critical, and Barton relied on a recommendation from his Cabinet NG sales representative. “He suggested the KODAK i40 Scanner and after seeing what it could do, it seemed like an excellent front end for our needs,” he says. “We’re very happy with the throughput and the automatic features like the deskew and cropping as the images are of consistent high quality. We had people who’d never done this before, and with a bit of training it really was a plug and play productivity kind of experience.” Barton specifically notes the robust paper handling as a key advantage. “We’ll put a stack of documents into the auto-feeder and just let it run. It doesn’t need babysitting and there’s rarely a misfeed or a jam,” he says. Gibraltar primarily scans in black-and-white, processing both single-sided and double-sided documents. Barton estimates a monthly volume of 2,000 documents at Gibraltar headquarters, but anticipates significantly higher volumes at other offices. With a rated daily capacity of 1,000 pages, his KODAK i40 Scanners will be more than up to the task.

“We like the KODAK i40 Scanners so much that, within a year, we’ll have one in every one of our main branches,” Barton states. “We’ve selected it to be the standard scanner for each of our installs, based on our experiences here at headquarters.”

Barton compliments the ease of use and graceful interface of both parts of his solution. “Both Cabinet NG Software and the KODAK i40 Scanner are intuitive and easy to use. As I said, this was a new experience for some of our people, and with just a bit of education they quickly saw the advantages and loved the benefits this system provided. Everyone who uses it comments how much they love it. I’d say our overall level of satisfaction is very high.”

Taking Full Advantage of System Capabilities
Within a year, Barton hopes to roll out the KODAK i40 Scanner/Cabinet NG Software combo to 20 important locations, and he wants to further maximize the possibilities the solution offers. “We’ve started an initiative to add a COLD-extract tool to Cabinet NG Software so that we can take reports off our main platform at corporate and retain the pagination, keep fields indexed, do queries, sorts, and so on,” he says. Barton also sees advantages for Gibraltar’s ongoing compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. “The requirements there are so demanding, and with this system we have the capability to capture critical paper and electronic documents like e-mails, forms, memos, faxes, reports and such. It gives us the reporting and information sharing capabilities that are necessary today.”

“We’ve really been on the leading edge of technology for processing and manufacturing steel products,” Barton says. “Now this combination of Cabinet NG Software with the Kodak Scanners allows us to create the same sort of momentum and innovation to boost productivity and achieve savings in our financial area. We’ve achieved new efficiency, security, and access advantages, and slashed our paper and storage costs. It’s been a winning solution for every aspect of what we wanted to accomplish.”