Established in 9171, Irish Waste Services is a progressive, professional and innovative company with long and valuable experience of the full range of waste management issues. They set high standards which are reflected in accreditation and quality standards – vital in this highly regulated arena. They have an excellent reputation for their waste management services with over 90% of the waste treated by Irish Waste being recovered or recycled.
ANALYSIS
The waste industry is very paper intensive, particularly when working with hazardous waste. A normal hazardous waste collection could generate between 6 and 16 pieces of documentation. Although they could produce many of these documents in a digital format, industry regulators wouldn’t accept them. This meant that in addition to producing large volumes of paper documents, Irish Waste also had to store them all.
This resulted in rooms and rooms full of paper documents in folders. Not only was this wasting valuable office space, it made finding a document for a customer or an audit, difficult and time consuming.
Irish waste had a Document Management (DM) system but it was a lengthy process to converting paper files into digital ones.
Before any documents could be filed, the team had to scan and complete them by adding relevant information such as the service record number and code reference. The document was then filed in the correct folder in the DM system.This process could take a single administrator up to 5 hours a day, was extremely monotonous and nobody liked doing it.
As part of the invoicing process, the finance team sent a copy of job documentation with the invoice to customers to prove that the job had been carried out as agreed. When completing and filing the paperwork was delayed, so was invoicing which had a financial impact on the business.
Irish Waste were keen to explore how automated document processing and workflow could help improve their filing processes.
“The waste industry is very paper heavy and managing our documents was a big challenge for us. For a normal hazardous waste collection we could have between 6 and 16 pieces of documentation to accompany that one movement of waste.”
Warren Devine, Director at Irish Waste Services
YourDMS SOLUTION
To help the team at Irish Waste to streamline the way they worked with their documentation, improve document capture, filing, storage and retrieval, YourDMS implemented Abbyy intelligent document processing software.
Abbyy would be used to capture and digitise documents. When a document is scanned, the Abbyy platform can focus on particular fields or areas that contain specific pieces of information such as the service record number, an invoice number, or a code reference. This information can be pre-populated into the correct fields by Abbyy. If a reference number isn’t clear, Abbyy will query it and one of the team can amend the digital document.
Once completed, YourDMS created a workflow to automatically upload the completed document into the DM system and file it in the correct location, removing the need to file documents manually and keep physical copies. This also ensured that processes are standardised and documents would not be misfiled.
RESULT
The way Irish Waste manage their paperwork has been transformed, and the team are delighted. Integrating Abbyy and the DM system has increased efficiency, saving time, money, reducing errors, and reducing the amount of time taken dealing with paperwork from job completion to invoicing.
Warren Devine, Director, explains the impact that auotmating document capture and filing has had on the team. “No one liked doing it and it wasted a lot of time. Once the automation was up and running, everyone said that it was really nice that they didn’t have to do that anymore.”
The benefits of integrated systems
“The difference we found from a time factor, we were processing up to 60 documents per day, every day. For someone to scan them, complete all the fields and save them in our DM system, you’re talking 10 minutes per document. It could be up to 4 or 5 hours a day if you have a single administrator doing that. The Abbyy solution from YourDMS completely removed that.” comments Warren.
Utilising technology has standardised Irish Waste’s processes and greatly reduced the chance of human error. All documents and data are filed with the correct references and in the correct location.
Storing all documents in a centralised location (DM system) means they can be shared easily with the finance department to ensure customers are invoiced promptly. The amount of office space being taken up storing paper files has reduced.
The powerful search functions and user friendly interface in the DM system allow the Irish Waste team to find the documents they’re looking for in seconds. “From a retrieval perspective, the way Invu was set up and explained to us at the very beginning meant that retrieving documents was very very simple,” says Warren.
Irish Waste use their DM system across their digital platforms to read the information in the same way. As more business documents are created or shared in a digital format, the systems Irish Waste have in place are ready to deal with them.
YourDMS are advocates for powering up your team with the right technology and processes and have seen first hand how doing this can have a positive effect on employee’s mental health and staff retention.
On working with the YourDMS…
“In my mind they’re very, very good because you don’t have to talk to them. I mean that in a positive way. Invu really is one of those platforms that does what it says on the tin. So, once it’s set up and it’s going… then it goes.”
Warren Devine, Director at Irish Waste Services
