Case Studies

All County is a 28-year-old wastewater services company and a division of Earth America. Earth America is a comprehensive service organization with business units serving the waste needs for residential, commercial, industrial and government customers. Services include septic service maintenance, bulk transportation/ waste disposal, wastewater management, sewer and drain cleaning, and portable toilet rental.

All County is the largest septic cleaning company in New Jersey and New York and has a staff of approximately 78 employees and has 40,000 customers.

All County found itself in an enviable position. Business was good, they were adding customers daily and the company was growing rapidly. In fact, the company had grown so much that they remodeled their building, adding on more space to accommodate new employees.

With the help of DocuWare, consulting engineering firm, American Engineering Testing Inc., automated its invoice approval processes, eliminating lost invoices and realizing cost savings from the ability to easily track documents through the approval process. With quick secure access to information, employee productivity has improved and document retention regulations have been met, limiting legal liability and positioning the company for future growth.

American Engineering Testing Inc., (AET) is an employee owned multi-disciplinary consulting engineering firm offering geotechnical, environmental, construction materials, and forensic testing services to public and private sector clients. Headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, the firm has eleven branch offices and employs a staff of 255 fulltime employees, increasing to approximately 350 with the addition of seasonal employees.

Are You Asking Yourself…

• How much am I really spending on desktop, workgroup, internal production print, and outside print services?
• How do our total document expenses compare to those of our key competitors?
• What factors contribute to these costs?
• How much money can we save and how?
• How much of an investment in time and money is needed to assess my document costs?
• Does this require a detailed on-site audit?

Challenges

• Getting to the true cost of documents across your organization
• Cost reductions
• Determining peer performance & benchmarking
• Developing an enterprise document strategy
• Increasing efficiency & optimization

Introduction & Objectives
The proliferation of output devices such as printers, copiers, fax machines, and scanners has significantly contributed to the dramatic increase in document output volume and cost over the years. While the majority of today’s organizations acknowledge the potential savings from better document management, many still lack the understanding and expertise to address the problem. Third-party providers including office equipment manufacturers, document outsourcing firms, and independent service providers are offering assessment services that focus on identifying costs and inefficiencies around document output.

These days, IT operations are under a microscope like never before. The pressure is on to run compliant, cost-effective operations that maximize productivity and minimize costs. At the same time, decreased operational costs and proven returns on investments have become baseline requirements. There is, of course, no single solution that can achieve all
these goals. However, there is at least one very prominent area that businesses of all sizes and types may exploit: the opportunity to streamline and organize imaging and printing strategies. Resolving this situation is a no-brainer, because it can enhance the bottom line, increase employee productivity, and ultimately, create competitive advantage.

DOCUMENT PRODUCTION TRENDS
How have organizations reached this current state of imaging and printing chaos? A number of factors come into play here. For example, the sheer number of imaging and output devices deployed has steadily proliferated year after year. While everyone was waiting for the paperless office to arrive, waves of single- function hardcopy output devices were deployed, oftentimes haphazardly. It’s not surprising that market research firm International Data Corp. projects the number of document pages printed annually by U.S. companies and consumers to burgeon to nearly two trillion by 2006.