CASE STUDY - Save-A-Lot
Save-A-Lot, Ltd. opened its first store twenty-five years ago and has grown to 1000 stores nationwide and 14 distribution warehouses. They are the nation's largest and fastest-growing extreme value, edited-assortment grocery chain with the capacity and commitment to double their store numbers over the next five years. With that type of growth, the need came to streamline their business processes making their good team of people even better with the help of KnowledgeLake.
Challenge
Save-A-Lot estimated that on average, their central accounts payable department would receive over 30,000 documents per day. These documents originated at their remote warehouses, were photocopied and then sent overnight to the central office. Once the accounts payable department received the documents, each one was manually matched up with vendor invoices and/or purchase orders before being filed. All documents were then manually filed and sent off-site for storage.
Whenever research needed to be done to find a document, there were additional costs incurred every time a box had to be pulled and physically searched for a specific document. Save-A-Lot recognized that there was probably a more efficient and cost-effective way to handle this process so they began to research content management options.
Not sure about what they needed, Save-A-Lot called several content management companies and asked for an analysis and proposed solution from each.
Solution
KnowledgeLake of St. Louis, Missouri, was selected by Oakwood Systems Group, Inc for their experience and knowledge of not only the industry but the specific field of accounts payable. KnowledgeLake presented a solid solution to Oakwood Systems Group, Inc and together with key personnel from Save-A-Lot's accounts payable department and warehouses; they began to develop a scope of work through user group sessions. As a result, a complete content management solution was implemented including image capture and report management.
Each warehouse now has their own scanning station and all documents are captured and indexed remotely. These are electronically packaged each night and FTPd to corporate headquarters. KnowledgeLake wrote a release service that electronically files the documents sent from the warehouse into the content repository. A log is automatically generated that shows whether or not all files were unzipped successfully. In addition to the remote sites, the central office is also equipped with a scanning station to capture and index vendor invoices and purchase orders.
Results
This solution has given the warehouse staff and the accounts payable department the abilities to multi-task, work more efficiently and increase productivity. The time involved in conducting research has been greatly reduced as all documents are now accessible at their fingertips by searching and retrieving the documents from the repository. There is less room for error as the documents are not handled as much and off site-storage has practically been eliminated since the actual documents are only kept for six months.
Profile
The nation's largest and fastest-growing extreme value, edited-assortment grocery chain.
Industry
Retail
Application
Accounts Payable
Configuration
15 Kodak I50 scanners
1 Kodak OS2500 scanner
OTG ApplicationXtender
OTG WebXtender
KnowledgeLake TableRock Capture
KnowledgeLake Wappapello Report Capture