FabSoft’s Reform streamlines processes and improves efficiency for Superior Seafoods

Superior Seafoods has been servicing the food industry for over 50 years. Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, they serve more than 2,000 customers throughout the Midwest in both retail and food service accounts. Superior Seafoods deals with a tremendous amount of orders from these customers on a daily basis and processes up to 360,000–400,000 forms a year. Due to such high volume, Superior Seafoods faced a number of challenges and inefficiencies when it came to effectively managing these documents. One of FabSoft’s Resellers, Applied Imaging, introduced Reform as a solution to alleviate these issues.

The Challenges

Prior to Reform, Superior Seafoods was printing their invoices to three-part forms on a dot matrix printer, bursting forms and collating them into routes. When the products were delivered, the customer would sign a POD to confirm receipt. All signed PODs would be collected and manually matched up to the manifest. If there were any credits or returns, they would have to be entered into AS400, printed and sent out. All copies of invoices and credits would then be manually filed to file cabinets. If any of these documents needed to be referenced in the future, personnel would have to manually search through and retrieve them from the file cabinets.

The Solution

Using Reform, OnBase DMS, a new Ricoh CL7200 Color printer and a scanner, Superior Seafoods was able to simplify and streamline all of their processes. Now, Reform captures the print stream from AS400, creates an electronic file for import and prints the documents to a high speed color printer. This allows Superior Seafoods to produce legible and professional looking forms rather than using their old multi-part forms and dot matrix printer. The two invoices that are printed are a delivery receipt and a POD and both of these invoices contain unique barcodes. The original text file is then automatically imported into OnBase DMS. After the products are delivered and the signed PODs are returned, they are scanned using a scanner. Upon scanning, the barcodes are recognized, the associated text is used in order to populate keyword values and the documents are stored to OnBase DMS accordingly. So whenever a document needs to be retrieved in the future, a search can be performed using specific keywords in order to quickly find it. When handling credits or returns, they are entered into ERP. Once they are entered, they are printed with Reform as well as automatically sent to OnBase DMS. Furthermore, DMS generates an exception report once a week which is used in order to identify any missing documents. All supporting documents are imported and cross referenced automatically.

The Reform solution provided Superior Seafoods with a more streamlined method to efficiently manage documents as well as a way to perform effortless search and retrieval.

The Benefits

Implementing Reform provided Superior Seafoods with a number of benefits:

• Eliminate costs and waste due to using three-part forms and dot matrix printers

• High speed color printer allows Superior Seafoods to produce enhanced, professional looking forms

• Printed documents can be scanned and easily imported to OnBase DMS

• Instant access to invoices and backup documents

• Perform keyword searches in order to quickly retrieve documents – no more sorting through file cabinets

• Reduced storage costs since file cabinets and storage space are no longer an issue

• Streamlined AR process reduces errors, increases productivity, shortens collection times and increases cash flow.