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Headquartered in Traverse City, Michigan, Priority Solutions International is a leading global non-asset-based supply chain management company that provides mission-critical logistics services for clients in pharmaceuticals, healthcare, government, aviation, and retail, among others.
The company extends its capabilities through a nationwide network of qualified local delivery resources, multiple warehouse locations, international air freight forwarding and a wide variety of value added services that assist customers in simplifying, automating, measuring, managing and improving their supply chain.
In connection with the company's pharmaceutical sample distribution business, Priority Solutions is required to capture a POD, which provides verification of receipt of each shipment.
In the past, the company each day received, from various delivery vendors, 1,000-1,500 PODs, which individuals would manually sort first by client, then by project. Each POD, essentially a Bill of Lading (BOL), was then manually marked as received to initiate payment for the vendor. Finally, the document was filed in a cabinet by its BOL number. "That part took forever," recalls Systems Analyst Tamara Ylitalo. "We tried to get the PODs into the system within 24 to 48 hours, but sometimes we just couldn't get it done."
Although client contracts require Priority Solutions to retain a physical copy of each POD for up to four years, its reliance on paper-based processes was laborintensive, costly, difficult to scale, and limited the company from delivering optimal customer service.
As a result, the company sought to implement an electronic document management system to capture and manage each POD, streamline and automate the delivery verification process, and provide self-service accessibility to delivery information for its clients.
INTEGRATING AN OUTSOURCED SOLUTION
Having recently completed a core competency exercise, Priority Solutions determined that an outsourced document management solution would best allow it to focus on its supply chain business. As the company evaluated the available managed service providers, two things about SpringCM stood out immediately:
"The functionality met our needs, and SpringCM was also open to the kind of back-office integration we were hoping to accomplish," says Shannon Core, Priority Solutions Chief Operating Officer.
"As a Web-based model with a Web services layer, SpringCM makes integration more straightforward than it would have been in the past."
While Priority Solutions wanted to provide self-service document retrieval for clients, it preferred to securely expose relevant documents through its existing customer portal, rather than allowing clients direct access into its document management environment. SpringCM developed a Web service that allowed Priority Solutions clients, in real time, to pull requested PDF format documents from the SpringCM environment and access them through Priority Solutions customer portal.
"It was a very positive engagement. We discussed what we needed, SpringCM developed it, and now the integration speaks for itself," reports Core. "People at SpringCM took the time to understand our process and validate the needs that flowed from it, not just repeat back to us."
AUTOMATED, HIGH-SPEED DELIVERY VERIFICATION IMPROVES PRODUCTIVITY
As BOLs are printed, a bar code that contains index metadata is applied. This enabled Priority Solutions to utilize a highspeed scanner and barcode reading software to automate the association of physical documents with the orders maintained in the system.
Now, as PODs arrive at Priority Solutions accounting department via fax or mail, the staff loads them onto the scanner, and uploads them to SpringCM ? at rates as high as 4,000 per hour. This process not only adds fully indexed and retrievable electronic PODs into SpringCM, but also enables an automatic-verification step that confirms that respective deliveries have arrived and initiates the vendor (A/P) and customer (A/R) payment processes.
The process, through SpringCM, has greatly improved the productivity of Priority Solutions customer service personnel in responding to requests from clients or vendors. "We can look up a POD and send it out with just a couple of clicks," says Ylitalo. "You see a lot fewer people digging in the file cabinet and walking over to the fax machine these days."
While the company still retains paper PODs to satisfy client and regulatory requirements, the company simply sorts these by date, rather than by client, project, and BOL number. "It means that one full-time person can do it all, rather than five part-time people before," says Ylitalo.
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