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Horry County Telephone Cooperative (HTC)

Telephone service is an integral part of daily life - one that is often taken for granted. Prior to the explosion of mass communication service companies, inhabitants of rural areas of the United States considered telephone access to be a luxury. In many states, these communities were unable to attain service due to the vast distances between residencies. In 1952, Horry County, South Carolina, was one of these regions. To respond to their need for telephone communications, county residents formed Horry Telephone Cooperative, Inc., a non-profit telephone company. To receive service, each customer simply had to buy 2 shares of stock, a total cost of $10.

Home to Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strands, Horry County is now a popular vacation destination. Horry Telephone Cooperative (HTC), based in Conway, SC, has become the largest telephone cooperative in the country with 75,000 users, and is the 30^th largest telephone company overall. Services include local and long distance, wireless and cellular, cable television, and Internet access. "We’re a unique company," explains Sid Blackwelder, HTC’s chief executive of information systems. "We plan our own buildings and self-engineer all service networks."

About five years ago, HTC began coping with the challenge of storing huge amounts of growing paperwork -- over 1.3 million pages of checks, engineering schematics, vouchers, invoices, deposit statements, work orders, allocations, and the general ledger. With new documents coming in every day, the yearly cost for paper alone exceeded $5000. Storage space cost another $62,000 annually, and available space was quickly disappearing.

The amount of paper being stored significantly slowed document retrieval. Prior to automating, when retrieving any document, like account payable checks, employees had to go to an onsite storage vault, find the document, make a copy, and return it. Blackwelder estimates that employees collectively spent about 80 hours every year retrieving checks alone -- costing the company almost $11,000 in employee time and almost $5000 in handling. "The cost of manually dealing with company information more than justified an investment in a more efficient system," said Blackwelder, who was also concerned with document safety. "Disasters like flood or fire were also a concern. That potential cost is immeasurable."

Another major obstacle of the paper storage system was the possibility of inaccuracies. After making a copy of a document, users would frequently update information or add notes. Occasionally, the altered information would not be returned to the vault to replace the original copy, resulting in the possibility of the same document being in the hands of several different employees.

With this in mind, Blackwelder made the commitment to migrate to document management. He contacted Palmetto Microfilm and Imaging, a team-based solutions provider in Lexington, South Carolina, and defined the Co-op’s needs. "I specified the different features we needed for maximum efficiency - access to multiple users simultaneously, ability to monitor usage, ability to add electronic notes to existing documents, ability to make only portions of documents available for security reasons, ability to route information through E-mail, open data base compliance, and the guarantee of document preservation," said Blackwelder. " It seemed like a lot, but I knew we needed all of these tools. I did my homework."

Bill Talbert, an account representative at Palmetto, responded to the demands, and recommended OTG Software’s solutions. " Looking at what HTC needed, I clearly felt that the correct solution included OTG’s applications," said Talbert. "OTG easily covered all of their problem areas under one umbrella and allowed them to more effectively and efficiently serve their customers."

Talbert enlisted the help of Jesse Morris, the lead technical supporter at Palmetto, and set up a comprehensive software demonstration for the future users at HTC. "We wanted to assure the staff at HTC that this really was the right solution," said Talbert. "We don’t make promises we can’t deliver."

HTC adopted a solution consisting of OTG software’s DiskXtender, ApplicationXtender, and ColdXtender. The general staff found OTG’s products to be comprehensive and user-friendly, and the technical staff noted OTG’s open- platform and cost-efficiency. "One reason we so highly recommend OTG is the ease associated with installation," said Talbert. "When we left, people couldn’t believe we were finished."

Using OTG’s DiskXtender (DX), HTC’s employees upload scanned images of documents such as work orders and engineering plans onto an optical jukebox. The documents are therefore available through the company network and can be routed by E-mail to the accounting, customer service, and engineering departments, as well as any others who depend on them.

HTC uses ApplicationXtender (AX) to perform all document imaging processes, including the input of files, storage, retrieval, and post-storage processing like fax and E-mail. This allows for immediate customer service and problem resolution on a desktop level. For instance, when a customer calls requesting a balance statement or a copy of their bill, a customer service representative can retrieve the necessary information in a matter of seconds. If the customer is online, the information can be emailed to them directly. Furthermore, the AX annotation feature allows changes to be made and saved in the document, eliminating information inconsistency among users, and security features can be easily implemented to limit access to view or alter specific documents.

HTC’s billing register and other computer-generated data is now automatically cached and indexed by ColdXtender (CX). This data is then accessible over the company network. "The billing register used to be a nine-inch-thick book that we had to periodically copy and send by courier to all of our offices," says Blackwelder. "It was worth buying the system just to get rid of that hassle."

OTG’s DX, AX, and CX have expedited and simplified the office activities of Horry Telephone Cooperative in a cost-efficient manner. Technicians and users enjoy the system’s ease of use, and customers appreciate the improvement in customer service that OTG’s software has provided. "I even wrote a letter of appreciation to Palmetto, our vendor. I’ve only done that twice in 19 years" says Blackwelder. "You wouldn’t believe the way things have changed around here."

Updated November 09, 2005