Achieve A 12-Month Payback With Integrated EDMS

A credit union saves more than $200,000 a year with an integrated electronic document management system (EDMS).

Kinecta Federal Credit Union has nearly $4 billion in assets with 22 Member Service Centers (MSCs) located in Southern California. The credit union serves about 200,000 members nationwide. During a period of membership growth, the credit union realized it needed a new way to handle the paper associated with daily procedures such as file storage, records retention, and loan document processing. The credit union had a legacy EDMS in place, but key functions such as COLD (computer output to laser disk), imaging, and workflow were not integrated. This meant Kinecta had to rely on a third party consultant/programmer to perform tasks such as creating reports. "Each report request entailed a minimum of eight hours of coding costs and a five-day turnaround," says Phil Nielsen, document and workflow department manager at Kinecta. "At a cost of $125 per hour, we were paying more than $200,000 a year in consulting/programming fees."

Nielsen began the EDMS replacement process by attending an AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) show, where he discovered 12 potential vendor candidates. Following the show, he met with the credit union's committee, and they created a list of about a half dozen criteria by which to select the right vendor. After comparing the initial list to its criteria, Kinecta narrowed its choices to five. The next phase entailed the remaining candidates providing product demonstrations, which helped the credit union narrow its choices to three. During the third and final phase, Nielsen and Jeff Niedenthal, supervisor of the document and workflow department at Kinecta, contacted references from the remaining three vendors and visited the references' facilities. "During our research, we discovered that some vendors required customers to use VARs, and they didn't allow customers to choose their own service providers," recalls Nielsen. "Other vendors had imaging systems that weren't integrated with their other document management modules, and some other vendors had issues with technical support."