No paper, no problem

Case study of a fitness club that improved efficiency with a document management system.

Purchasing - January 12, 2006

Karen Prema

CAN DO Fitness based in Wayne, N.J. manages its clients and procurement activities without printing or storing a single piece of paper. Across its three locations with a fourth in the works, it maximizes the use of scanning capabilities. Although there is a cost involved to implement document management, the return on investment is very rapid, says Stuart Polevoy, chairman of the board at CAN DO.

In the past, memberships were printed from the club management software, Aphelion, and placed into folders along with other forms. There was always a lag time of one to three days between the time a member filled out his or her document and the time that the membership advisor put the documents in the interoffice mail and it got into the corporate office, says Polevoy. Once the documents arrived at the corporate office, the information had to be approved and verified to make sure it matched data entered in the club's software. Applications like this that involve heavy volumes of forms and supporting documentation that must be routed manually, result in time-consuming and error-prone processes.

Outsource advice. In order to streamline its operations and eliminate document inefficiencies, CAN DO sought advice from its solutions provider, Electronic Office Systems in Fairfield, N.J. It wanted to speed up the membership approval process and give better customer service to members, all at the same time. In one club, the copier lease was up, so it put a new Kyocera multifunctional product (MFP) into the club, which includes a copier, scanner and fax machine. In the clubs where leases were not up, the company bought scanners which will be upgraded to Kyocera MFPs when the leases expire.

Less paper, less hassle. Today, when a membership advisor completes the paperwork, they scan the paperwork into the Kyocera device. Equipped on the Kyocera copier is KYOcapture software that routes directly to the club's document management system, which is Documentum/AXIM/Application Extender. Now, when CAN DO scans membership information, it goes into the club's software system and into a folder that is sitting on the contract administrator's computer. It captures the documents and automatically routes them to the appropriate destination. Users can automatically e-mail members with their document information and maintain a directory on file.

Touchless integration. There is no manual routing of paper documents. If a member doesn't remember signing a document, CAN DO can e-mail directly to the member. Nobody has to call the office or access a file in a file cabinet. "Ultimately over time, we can start shrinking the amount of space we spend on storage," says Polevoy. He says he has to rent 200 sq ft for member files alone.

Aside from member records, CAN DO Fitness is taking document management one step further: purchasing. Using the membership management model, it will keep information on preferred vendors in the system.

Document management eliminates file space and having to get up to find files. The system flows much more quickly, the approval process happens quicker, there are no lost documents, and accessing records for suppliers becomes a key task.