Park West Landscape – California

“Contentverse had it all, plus, the automated input processor that would allow us to integrate with our existing accounting system. That saves time retyping redundant information into the document management system. To top it off, the price was reasonable.”

 

Successful landscape development projects require the highest level of expertise and professionalism. Park West Landscape was founded in 1979 and is headquartered in scenic Santa Margarita, California. They are among the leading landscape construction and maintenance companies in the Western United States and have 11 divisions across the west.

Their 11 companies generate about 68,000 invoices per year and maintain a 7-year retention schedule, so paper piled up fast. At the point that they outgrew the available space in their HQ warehouse they had to outsource excess storage. Park West’s onsite warehouse holds over 1,100 boxes, and they stored 900 additional boxes offsite at a high monthly cost per box, with additional charges whenever they needed to get something out of remote storage.

The Search for a Solution

Park West IT Manager, Bret Frohlich, decided to turn to electronic document management, however their first attempt wasn’t sufficient for their needs, with it taking two months for an invoice to get into their document management system. In their old workflow, scanning was outsourced to an outside service bureau that would pick up all the paper once a week and return a disk the following week when they came to pick up the new paper.

Frohlich also learned that not every piece of paper was making its way from the outer divisions to Headquarters because each division had its own variation of how they treated the paper. Some even made their own set of copies as a safeguard. This generated excessive handling costs. “Expensive solutions are for large companies. I couldn’t find a solution tailored for a mid-sized company with all the right features, priced appropriately for a mid-sized company’s expenditure capabilities,” says Frohlich.

There Has to Be a Better Way

Frohlich, realizing he had to find a more efficient management system, created a list of requirements Park West needed and started his search for an electronic document management system. In his search, he was also able to see there were missed opportunities to obtain deeper discounts. Park West had extensive conversations with Computhink over the telephone, “There was never a question that Computhink would have come out here if it was necessary,” says Frohlich, “But I wanted to do the whole install myself across 10 locations. The telephone discussions we had before I bought Contentverse gave me absolute confidence that Computhink would be there for me after the purchase.”

Frohlich looked back at his wish list and added the following Contentverse features he finds are most noteworthy in daily usage:

  1. The SQL-based product works well over our wide-area network and the browser-based interface is very convenient.
  2. We have Contentverse linked to our Intranet and we don’t have to roll-out any client software.
  3. The file-cabinet storage system is extremely flexible and intuitive to navigate.
  4. The security functionality, which only shows users the files they have access to, keeps people from thinking about or requesting access to restricted areas.
  5. The storage management functions, which allow us to back up just the current year and archive prior years.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Park West estimates the savings will pay for the document management system many times over in the first year alone.

Conclusion

”Computhink support is excellent. Since I installed Contentverse myself, I really learned the ins and outs of the system, and they were able to solve a couple of unforeseen problems that challenged me. In the final analysis, Contentverse was the only product we could find that met the criteria at a reasonable price for a mid-sized company. I was shocked no one else had anything close to Contentverse, and I looked hard,” says Frolich.

Post a Comment