Tri Palm International Success Story

Chances are, if you've stopped for a refreshing drink of water in any public place, you may have bent over at an Oasis drinking fountain. The renowned 95-year-old brand now owned by Tri Palm International, is the worldwide leader in the design and manufacturing of pressure and bottled water coolers. They also produce office coffee systems and dehumidifiers.

Tri Palm's products are distributed to more than 100 countries around the globe. With headquarters in Columbus, Ohio and facilities in Ireland, Poland, and Mexico, Tri Palm employs some 1,000 people worldwide. They have received two awards from the U.S. Department of Commerce for excellence in export sales.

But even with all of these accolades, Tri Palm was faced with major processing difficulties. The Customer Service department was continually being bombarded with calls and requests that were taking days to resolve. Because Tri Palm stored most of their information on paper, when a client called in concerning an order, representatives were left to search through piles on desktops or through filing cabinets lining the office halls. Without the right information readily available, the customer service department was finding itself to be ineffective and inefficient.

After struggling with these outdated business processes under the name Oasis Corporations, Tri Palm decided to learn from those mistakes and make some drastic changes by implementing PaperWise. Although they are implementing the system slowly, the Customer Service, Accounts Payable and Collections departments are already seeing drastic improvements in day-to-day tasks. Tri Palm went live with the system in early 2006.

Matt Karsten, network administrator for Tri Palm, identifies two key motivators for seeking out a document management system like PaperWise. First of all, they recognized there were a lot of processes that needed to be fixed. Customer orders were continually getting lost. Thirty filing cabinets full of paper lined their hallways. "There was just paper everywhere," Matt says, and it was causing a lot of time to be wasted. The second motivator: Corporate executives were having great difficulty finding many legal documents they really needed.

A Smooth Transition

At first, many were apprehensive and even resistant to the changes PaperWise would bring. But once they tried it, they were pleasantly surprised. "After just a few one-hour training sessions, everyone picked up on it really quickly," Matt says. The Customer Service representatives, Collections and Accounts Payable employees in particular, found the system to be very user-friendly. After just a few months of using the system, Matt says they don't know how they lived without it. "Even joking about taking it away gets them a little upset," he says.

A Productive Process

At Tri Palm, a typical call to the Customer Service department will prompt users browse information in their JD Edwards system and see if they can resolve the problem. If they need more information, they'll push a hotkey and pull up all the related documents in PaperWise. Without PaperWise, they were left to search through filing cabinets full of documents, and after days of searching, they still may not find what they were looking for. This resulted in angry clients, frustrated employees and lots of time wasted. Now, customer calls bring users to use JD Edwards and PaperWise simultaneously on their dual monitors. If they are requesting a document, they find it in seconds. "You can hear the customer's e-mail ding right over the phone and you know they've got what they wanted," Matt says. Customers will never have to wait days for a call back again. The 14 Customer Service representatives who had to spend hours a day looking for documents in their files and then re-filing them, can now do their work in a fraction of the time.

Their efficiency gains stretch from individuals' tasks to department-wide gains. Matt says one of the greatest improvements has been adding continuity to their processes. When everything was manual, each person had their own system of filing, making documents even more difficult to relocate.

Now, their filing system always works for them, never against them. Not only does the system act as an easy-to-search single repository for all their corporate information, but Matt has been able to customize specific functions to help the customer service department be more effective. Using the skills the PaperWise implementation team taught him, Matt learned to add fields and write scripts that customize the system to meet Tri Palm's needs.

Because they were already using JD Edwards as their management system, PaperWise implementation specialists helped configure a tight integration between the two systems. Although JD Edwards is a mainframe, green screen application and PaperWise is Windows-based, it integrates with ease. Tri Palm users can now hit one key to fill in all the fields in their database. With a single hotkey, they can bring up all the documents that pertain to an account.

A Paperless Office

Overall, Customer Service has seen the greatest turnaround. After years of losing documents and attempting to manage desktops stacked high with manuals and paper, Customer Service has been rejuvenated. They have gone from losing several orders a day to losing none. "They haven't been able to lose anything yet," Matt says.

The system has also improved accountability and performance management. Managers can now see exactly when a representative receives a document and when they finish working on it. PaperWise has become a useful tool for quality control, tracking errors with orders and forcing users to enter data in accordance with the information in their JD Edwards management system. With the help of document management, Tri Palm has been able to make their business processes virtually paperless. Their fax server is integrated with PaperWise, and most other documents never even have to be printed.

"Even purchase orders don't have to be printed out," Matt says. The office functions with as little paper as possible. "I would say about 95 percent of our documents are routed to the system electronically," Matt says. "Paper is only used when executives need it for meetings and reviews," he says.

Tri Palm has a busy schedule ahead of them as they open a second location in Mexico. But PaperWise only takes away from, rather than adding to that heavy workload. They plan to do a full-blown PaperWise installation south of the border in the very near future.

Overall, Matt says everyone at Tri Palm is extremely pleased with the software. The reliability of the PaperWise back-up process is also important because they have lost documents to flooding in the past. The management is pleased to know their corporate data is safe from fire, water, or any disaster. "We'll never lose any documents," Matt says. Their long-term goal is to get all paper off their desks. "The next big step is backlogging all of these old documents in our offices," Matt says.

The change has been so drastic that Matt's already sure it was worth the investment. "We can just see how much easier it is for them to do their jobs and we don't have to quantify that," he says.