Costco Utilizes Content Management To Improve AP, Legal & HR Processes

Costco operates an international chain of more than 386 membership warehouses that carry brand name merchandise at substantially lower prices targeted for small to medium size businesses.

In order for Costco to provide high quality products at lower prices it had to be able to communicate quickly and effectively with thousands of vendors. The company could no longer afford slow response times when accessing accounts payable documents such as purchase orders, debit memos or invoices. There was no direct access to these transaction documents. The image quality from microfilming was unsatisfactory and storage space was becoming limited. Costco also processes and stores a large volume of legal documents including agreements and claims which need to be stored and accessed easily. They began searching for a technology that could handle the growing volume of paper, microfilm and microfiche.

The original solution was designed and integrated by ImageSource executive staff members in 1992. They utilized a largely unknown product from a start-up software company located in Simi-Valley, California named Optika. That software company would later become a recognized leader in the Enterprise Content Management software industry. Costco continues to utilize Oracle Imaging and Process Management software for content storage and retrieval. Captovation® Capture is used for image scanning and automated barcode indexing process. Initially, 50 Costco users scanned approximately 25,000 documents per day, which equaled to 550,000 images per month and 6,600,000 per year.

To date they process more than 40,000 documents per day and store more than 75 million images per year. Their response time for accessing those image documents has decreased from 2 to 10 days, to anywhere from 1 to 10 seconds.