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Ben Arnold – Sunbelt Company, Ridgeway, SC
The Ben Arnold-Sunbelt Beverage Company is the largest wholesale wine, spirits and non-alcoholic beverages distributor in South Carolina. Each day, approximately 1,000 invoices are generated for products delivered throughout the state. Managing this volume of paper was becoming a challenge for Ben Arnold-Sunbelt. The invoice workflow process consisted of the following steps: once the deliveries were made, these invoices were signed by the customers, returned by the delivery drivers and then were stored onsite by invoice number. When the accounting or customer service department received an inquiry from a customer, the invoice was manually found and routed to the requesting person for review.
In the summer of 2002, Ben Arnold-Sunbelt contracted with Palmetto Microfilm Systems, Inc. (PMSI) to design a document imaging system to automate the capture of invoice data and to provide on-line access to the signed documents once they were returned by the delivery drivers.
PMSI proposed a system consisting of Micosystems Technology’s OCR for Forms to scan and OCR the invoices, Legato’s ApplicationXtender to store the documents, Legato’s COLDXtender to extract the daily invoice print file from the IBM AS/400, Legato’s WebXtender to provide search and retrieval of the documents through a web browser and Legato’s DiskXtender to manage the images. Also proposed was Microsoft SQL server to store the document indexes and a Plasmon jukebox to store the images for redundancy.
Ben Arnold-Sunbelt uses an IBM AS/400 for its accounting software platform which produces the invoices on a daily basis. Using COLDXtender, these print spools are captured and the necessary document search fields are extracted and imported into ApplicationXtender. Once the delivery is made, the signed invoice is scanned into OCR for Forms and the Invoice Number and Customer Number are extracted. To ensure 100% accuracy, these fields are compared to the data captured from COLDXtender and the documents are paired with the correct field values. Furthermore, a custom program was written to provide the Accounting department with a list of invoices that are missing the customer signed copy.
Now that the invoices have been scanned and indexed, Ben Arnold employees are able to retrieve invoices from their desks using their web browser and WebXtender. This allows for instantaneous phone support, improving efficiency and customer relations.
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