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IMPLEMENTATION HIGHLIGHTS
- On behalf of CHEMCENTRAL, SpringCM manages more than 1.2 million documents -- growing by more than 50,000 new documents each month -- such as Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), Certificates of Analysis (CoA), product updates, proofs of delivery, price letters, and invoices.
- More than 800 CHEMCENTRAL employees at 36 locations use SpringCM across the US.
- SpringCM processes more than 30,000 inbound/outbound faxes and emails, and delivers 25,000 mailed documents for the company each month.
- CHEMCENTRAL is leveraging its SpringCM relationship to efficiently centralize, manage, and share information among its locations and customers. BENEFITS
- Labor costs associated with managing and distributing 3,000 to 4,000 MSDSs per month have been reduced by up to 70 percent.
- Certificates of Analysis (CoAs) can be accessed from any location, eliminating 60 percent of physical intra-company transfers, reducing distribution costs by as much as 70 percent, and ensuring that an accurate CoA accompanies or precedes every customer shipment.
- Total preparation time for each product update mailing has been reduced from up to 8 hours to only 15 minutes.
- Administrators can access Proofs of Delivery in seconds, and inventory reconciliation times have been reduced by 25 to 30 percent.
- A single solution manages online, electronic (email), and fax delivery as well as inbound and outbound physical mail, ensuring that CHEMCENTRAL's facilities and customers receive information in the manner best suited to each.
- Approximately 300,000 price letters each year are produced and distributed electronically, reducing delivery time and capturing key marginal revenue by ensuring CHEMCENTRAL's pricing is most current.
SpringCM Scales to Support a Global Leader
As the world's largest privately held chemical distributor, CHEMCENTRAL generates $1.2 billion in annual revenue by making a market between 200 materials suppliers and 30,000 unique customers.
The company's success is built on a simple idea: to focus on what they do best ? providing a technically adept sales team, a broad product mix, packaging and blending capabilities, logistics expertise, and the safe shipping and handling of chemicals to customers at over 60,000 delivery points worldwide. Says John Ruther, Director of Outsourced Services, "We try to run lean. Of 1,100 employees, only 200 or so do any kind of administration; the rest are directly involved in getting the materials out to our customers. It's central to us to be able to provide support services without adding headcount."
In keeping with this strategy, CHEMCENTRAL sought a content management provider that could handle large volumes of industry-specific documentation and improve efficiency across a broad spectrum of document types and processes. CHEMCENTRAL relies on SpringCM to efficiently centralize, manage, and share information among its locations and customers; conduct scheduled and ad hoc customer communications; support regulatory compliance; and transform physical documents into electronic form and vice versa. The range and depth of impact can be seen across six distinct content processes fully managed by SpringCM.
MATERIAL SAFETY DATA SHEETS (MSDS): COST-EFFECTIVE REGULATORY COMPLIANCE
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires companies that sell chemicals to send an MSDS to each first-time buyer of a given product, as well as an updated version any time the document is amended. In the past, paper copies of MSDSs ? approximately 2,500 new versions per year ? were maintained and distributed independently from each of CHEMCENTRAL's branch locations, an inefficient and often redundant process that made regulatory compliance difficult to maintain.
Now, CHEMCENTRAL forwards the MSDSs received at each branch location to SpringCM, where they are scanned, indexed, and maintained in a single repository alongside additional MSDSs created by CHEMCENTRAL for its own proprietary blends. Instead of mailing physical documents from 36 different locations, CHEMCENTRAL relies on SpringCM to distribute roughly 3,000 to 4,000 MSDSs each month by mail, fax, email, and online. Employees and customers in any location can also search and retrieve individual MSDSs via a CHEMCENTRAL customer portal created and maintained by SpringCM. To ensure compliance, SpringCM maintains a complete audit trail of MSDS delivery. By taking on the management and distribution of MSDSs, SpringCM has helped CHEMCENTRAL reduce associated labor costs by up to 70 percent.
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