S.J. Smith Co., Inc., is a family-owned company that provides welding and other industrial supplies and services to businesses in the Midwest. Founded in 1950, the company operates from 13 locations in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana. Its services and products include safety and industrial supplies, high purity specialty gas manufacturing, welder repair, resistance, spot welding and a welder training program that is used by S.J. Smith customers to educate, certify, and upgrade their welding capabilities.
As the company grew over the years it began scanning and storing customer order and invoice records as digital records. The goal was to provide employees with a way to look up customer information without having to deal with paper files. However, the initial solution used for digitizing the documents eventually proved inadequate.
“As our business expanded, the solution we had in place for working with these digitized documents no longer addressed the volume of our needs,” says Kyle Shradel, Systems Development Specialist for S.J. Smith. “The solution saved the images in a proprietary format that required client-side software to view the images. Plus the interface to scan and apply optical character recognition to the images was cumbersome and outdated.”
By 2008, the company began looking for a technical solution that could help fulfill its core business goal of providing its business customers with value through continuous improvement and innovation.
Solution
Following up on a recommendation by RSM, a business and tax consulting firm and Microsoft® Certified partner specializing in IT enterprise solutions, S.J. Smith decided to deploy a KnowledgeLake solution and Windows® SharePoint® services from Microsoft.
“We found that KnowledgeLake’s integration with Microsoft SharePoint was the easiest solution we could deploy for our enterprise content management,” says Shradel. “SharePoint addressed our need to provide a searchable library interface that displays scanned images in a non-proprietary, Web-compatible format. Compared to the competition, KnowledgeLake shined in all the areas we looked at.”
The company started planning in April 2009, and deployed the solution a month later with KnowledgeLake® Capture, a high-volume capture system that scans and indexes the documents with metadata tags, and then stores them in TIFF, PDF or XPS file formats. KnowledgeLake Capture is integrated with SharePoint, and stores the electronic files in the appropriate SharePoint repository after the scanning and indexing processes are completed.
To scan the documents, S.J. Smith uses a Fujitsu fi-6670, a high-speed, duplex-capable document scanner that lets the company scan about 90 pages per minute, nearly triple the volume of the old system. During the scanning process, KnowledgeLake Capture lets S.J. Smith establish templates for the different types of documents being scanned.
Benefits
With its KnowledgeLake solution in place, S.J. Smith has improved core business processes surrounding the storage and accessing of customer orders and invoices. The KnowledgeLake software combined with SharePoint provides a fast, simple way to make electronic documents available throughout the company. The tight integration of the products extends to other enterprise software, turning the KnowledgeLake solution into a seamless, integrated part of a larger enterprise system. And the indexing and search capabilities delivered by KnowledgeLake help employees quickly find and access important customer information.
