A Century of Experience Leads Van Ausdall & Farrar to Select Ephesoft for Smart Document Capture
Labor costs
Efficiency
Flexible services
Industry: Office Solutions
Application: Business Process Outsourcing
Partner: Van Ausdall & Farrar
With over 100 years of service Van Ausdall & Farrar (VAF) is one of the largest privately-owned office Technology companies in Indiana with a long-standing tradition of partnering with well-respected manufacturers and technology vendors in the industry. In 1914, VAF was chosen as a distributor for the Thomas Edison Company, the inventor of the original wax cylinder dictating machine. Over time, VAF has experienced steady growth while earning the reputation of a company with an extensive technological reach to meet their customers’ needs and goals.
Today, VAF provides services in over 40 states as well as internationally to clients, who now use their business process solutions (BPS) to drive digital transformation, document management, IT, networking, speech and voice recognition and many other business solutions. VAF’s clients span across many industries, but several high document and heavy process-related verticals such as mortgage, healthcare, legal, manufacturing and both state and local government, are often the organizations seeking automation and technology support.
The Challenge
Four years ago, VAF opened their own Document Conversion Center, focused on transforming paper to electronic documents. They were manually keying in data so their customers could search the images (or PDFs), which was a tedious and time-consuming project. Brian Courtney, Director, Business Process Solutions and Jeff Jenney, Vice President & General Manager both knew there was a better and easier way to streamline their manual processes – both internally, and for their customers.
The Solution
Although they already worked with other capture companies with competitive solutions, it was an easy decision to select Ephesoft’s Smart Capture® platform as their sole solution. “Ephesoft aligns with a cloud, flexible strategy and will give us the best capabilities,” said Jeff Jenney at VAF. “Our business starts with the customer. Being able to offer our clients a flexible, scalable and agile solution is logical and strategic for most organizations.”
With an emphasis on cloud solutions, VAF can offer Capture-as-a-Service (CaaS) to their customers. There are many advantages to using CaaS, but the most noteworthy is that VAF can have customers “try before they buy,” stated Brian Courtney. As more and more organizations move to cloud technology, they can budget the project as an operating expense, with the bonus of no acquisition costs for servers, data centers and IT staff.
VAF runs Ephesoft’s current version Ephesoft Transact in its BPO operations as well as a reseller of the platform. They use the platform to streamline all document processes starting with document ingestion, classification, extraction and then exporting the metadata into the client’s repository, which could be an ERP or Content Services platform like Box, SharePoint, Square9 or OnBase. “We have already taken advantage of all the Box Export Web Services APIs tool,” commented Jeff Jenney.
On one of VAF’s first projects using Ephesoft’s platform internally showed some staggering labor savings and allowed VAF to provide more data points to the customer for future search and retrieval efforts. For this standalone project, they reduced their staff by 3 full-time employees and dropped their labor costs by 80%. For VAF, over 90% of their costs are labor-related, so this dramatically helped them quickly recognize ROI and improve the service delivery from their BPO center. They now have many customers using the system, including a large mortgage company, who is seeing excellent results with their high-document volume of mortgage documents.
“We’re happy with our partnership and Ephesoft’s functionality. We liked it so much, we’re using it ourselves! We look forward to being in lockstep with the Ephesoft team every part of the way and continue to grow,” Brian Courtney concluded.
Results
- Selected Ephesoft as the sole vendor for smart document capture technology
- Reduced labor costs by 80%
- Enabled mortgage customer to streamline processes, increasing efficiency by over 80%
- BPO can offer flexible, cloud services
- Strong partnership and customer relationship
