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Park West Landscape, Rancho Santa Margarita, CA - Successful landscape development projects require the highest level of expertise and professionalism. Park West Landscape, headquartered in scenic Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, has been surpassing that requirement since their founding in 1979. They are among the leading landscape construction and maintenance companies in the Western United States and have 10 divisions spread out across the west to meet the demand created by their reputation.
Of course, success has its price, and one of the problems created by Park West’s success involved paper. The 11 separate companies (including their headquarters) created paperwork havoc for their Accounts Payable (AP) Department. They required an electronic document management alternative that could meet their criteria to standardize the process for all 11 companies. They needed this at a price that would enable them to realize return on investment in a reasonable length of time.
There Has to be a Better Way
When Bret Frohlich, IT Manager for Park West, came upon the scene, his first job was to organize all the paper files in the warehouse. The 11 companies generate about 68,000 invoices per year. Park West is on a seven-year retention schedule and paper had been piling up to the point that they outgrew the available space in their HQ warehouse and they had to outsource excess storage.
Park West’s onsite warehouse holds over 1,100 boxes. They stored 900 additional boxes offsite at a high monthly cost per box. Plus, they incurred additional charges whenever they needed to get something out of offsite storage. The first thing Park West did was reorganize the warehouse so they could save the outsource fees, but it still cost thousands of dollars to get their outsourced boxes back.
With the warehouse under control, Frohlich turned his attention to newly generated invoices to find why their existing imaging system was not meeting their needs. Park West did have an existing imaging system that had been operational since 2000. However, their existing imaging system didn’t function properly at their divisions. They needed a system that would work quickly across their network, so their records would be immediately available company-wide.
The Old Method
Park West quickly realized that it took two months for an invoice to get into their existing document management system. In their old workflow, scanning was outsourced to an outside service bureau that would pick up all the paper once a week and return a disk the following week when they came to pick up the new paper. Frohlich also learned that not every piece of paper was making its way from the outer divisions to Headquarters. Each division had its own variation of how they treated the paper. Some even made their own set of copies as a safeguard.
The existing workflow generated excessive costs. Frohlich was able to pinpoint exactly where the money was being lost. For example, missed opportunities to obtain deeper discounts for rapid payment of invoices.
Frohlich added up all the costs of their existing inefficient system. He realized that Park West could save a significant amount of money by centralizing AP processing electronically.
The problem with centralizing AP processing was that their existing software couldn’t enable efficient viewing by the divisions. The database consisted of a 68 MB applications file and 15 GB worth of storage. In order for a person at a satellite location to view a single file, they had to first download the whole 68 MB application and keep it running on their desktop to view files from the 15 GB of storage. It was impractical. They needed a network document management system that worked over the WAN in real time.
The Search for a Solution
When Park West evaluated the specific requirements of a document management software solution, they came up with the following: minimum specifications:
1. A SQL based product that would allow it to work over a WAN. Says Frohlich, “The difference between a WAN and LAN is huge!”
2. Multi-level security and multi-level storage that could be integrated with the existing Windows network.
3. Storage Management capability that would enable them to back up the new files without having to back up the entire 15 GB every time.
4. A Web-based client so users could connect to imaging without first having to install proprietary client software.
5. A responsive software vendor that offered the software at a reasonable price and took pride in highly responsive service and support.
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