Mill Auto Supplies Ltd is a leading supplier of automotive parts and accessories in South West England. Dealing predominantly with the trade, the company has a network of 17 branches from Penzance to Weston-super-Mare with a total of 150 vans on the road delivering parts all across the South West.

Despite difficult trading conditions, Mill Auto Supplies has thrived. Success does however bring its own challenges. One such difficulty that Mill Auto Supplies was experiencing, was the problem of where to store the high number of documents generated by the business, such as purchase invoices for parts and other documents pertaining to company expenses.

Space saving

Tony Watson, Company Accountant for Mill Auto Supplies, explains "Storage space is at a premium in the car parts business and having a large area taken up by documents isn't a profitable way of using the space we have. Documents such as purchase invoices are referred to frequently for the first three months following a sale and so we need to keep them close and readily accessible. After that first three months we move these documents to a holding warehouse, and eventually send them to an old archive store where they are kept for a statutory period of six years.

"Each invoice is handled four or five times during the course of its lifespan which is a lot of labour, effort, time and cost, not to mention the cost of space which could be better used by holding stock."

Tony decided it was time for a change, and contacted Neopost to explore alternative ways to manage the company's laborious and costly document process. Following a consultation with Tony, Neopost visited Mill Auto Supplies head office in St Austell to meet the team and provide a demonstration of its IMW-20 document management system.

Quickly process, digitise, store and retrieve documents

Neopost's IMW-20 provides the facility to digitise, process and electronically store internal documents such as receipts, invoices or incoming mail with just a few clicks. An A4 full duplex scanner with automatic 50 page feeder can scan up to 2000 pages per day, simultaneously saving these pages to its 1000 GB hard drive.  No external server is required; the IMW-20's hard drive has enough capacity to store literally millions of documents. A comprehensive range of search options combined with automatic OCR (optical character recognition) and an ergonomic touch screen interface make retrieving stored documents simplicity itself.

Tony continues "When Neopost gave us a demo of the IMW-20 we were really impressed with how easy and fast it was to process documents. We had looked at similar solutions in the past but the software to search and retrieve invoices had been much more limited. To successfully retrieve documents you had to input a lot of data during the scanning stage which took far too long to be economically viable. Neopost's IMW-20 is much simpler and faster than the competition and seemed perfect for our requirements.

Easy installation

"We had a second demo to make sure we knew the ins and outs of the system, before deciding to place an order with Neopost for the IMW-20. Neopost were very thorough during the installation and took great care to ensure that everything was set up correctly. Following the installation Neopost's engineers have revisited our site a few times to check how things are going and have tweaked the machine to get it working in the optimum way for our company. Reliability and quality of scanned documents is everything we expected, and on the rare occasion that we've experienced a fault Neopost have been very quick to resolve the issue."

Improved efficiency

The introduction of the IMW-20 to Mill Auto Supplies work flow has greatly improved efficiency through increased availability of documents. Tony continues "Once scanned you can access documents either from a desktop application on the IMW-20 itself or from a web browser if you're working remotely. It's eliminated the need to go searching for a document; instead all you need to do is tap a few keys to retrieve a document without even leaving the desk. Increased document availability coupled with reduced handling and storage has saved a lot of time, and although we're not back scanning any old documents, we will notice storage space rapidly opening up as we begin to get rid of old files which will provide greater savings and allow us to make more profitable use out of our storage space."

Excellent service support

Tony concludes, "We've been really pleased with both the IMW-20 and Neopost's service. From the demo stage to the installation to subsequent after sales support, Neopost's staff  have been excellent and highly responsive. We're also exploring ways in which the IMW-20 could help us to manage the flow and distribution of incoming mail, which could in time lead to further improvements in efficiency."

 For more information  visit  www.neopost.co.uk/nb