AS400 AS/400 FabSoft Success Story - Frank's Crafts and Nursery

FabSoft Success Story

Frank's Crafts and Nursery

Reform provides Frank's Crafts & Nursery with a
superior document management solution to process their workflow

Frank’s Crafts & Nursery, a national Home & Garden retailer located in Troy, Michigan was generating approximately 140,000 purchase orders a year. Frank's uses JDA software, running on AS400 and Windows NT systems. 10,000 of these Purchase Orders were printed, folded and mailed, and 130,000 were being printed and faxed by the buyers. File copies that needed to be retained for future reference were being filed on a daily basis. Changed Purchase Orders followed the same process procedures as regular Purchase Orders. Reform provided Frank’s Crafts & Nursery with a superior document management solution to process their workflow. This resulted in greater productivity, reliability, and consistency and thousands of dollars in savings.

The Issues:

Faxed Purchase Orders required 24 to 30 hours in order to be delivered to the vendors.

Manual entries had to be noted on Purchase Orders prior to faxing to accommodate shipping time from their over seas vendors.

There were no fax transmission records to verify the delivery of the Purchase Order to the vendor.

On an annual basis, faxing Purchase Orders was taking away thousands of productivity hours away form buyers.

If a vendor called with questions regarding the Purchase Order, the merchants had to manually retrieve the Purchase Order from the file to discuss or to refax.

The Purchase Orders were kept in files on the premise for two years, then boxed and warehoused for an additional five years, and then later shredded.

The process for changed Purchase Orders was the same as for regular Purchase Orders.

With Reform's automated document delivery and archive solution, the Purchase Order data is merged with a Purchase Order template and automatically delivered to the vendor without human intervention via email or fax. All of this information is then archived on their network for instant retrieval.

The Benefits:

Purchase Orders and Changed orders are delivered within minutes of being processed.

The administrator is notified via email if a faxed or emailed Purchase Order is not deliverable.

Frank's Craft & Nursery now has reports that detail the status of pending faxes, and confirms if the fax was delivered.

All Purchase Orders can be viewed immediately online and re-faxed directly from the desktop if needed.

Copies of all Purchase Orders are kept online and will be put on tape at the end of two years, then kept for five more.

Eliminates the cost of paper & toner.

Eliminates the cost of purchasing file cabinets.

Eliminates the space required to store the filed Purchase Orders.

Eliminates the cost to warehouse and shred documents.

According to Frank's management this process improvement will save them $366,360 over a five year period or $73,372 per year, not including intangible costs.