NABCO Entrances Inc

NABCO Entrances manufacturers a wide range of doors, including automatic and manual sliding doors, swinging doors, activating devices for automated pedestrian doors, doors designed to withstand hurricane-force winds, and specialty doors. Based in Muskego, Wisconsin, NABCO distributes its products across North America.

The company's innovation in this specialty market has led to continual growth—and significant challenges with piles of paperbased documents, says Andrew Lisowski, Network Engineer for NABCO.

"When I came to NABCO a couple of years ago, there was a serious paperwork problem," he says. "There was paper everywhere. Every desk seemed to have about nine stacks of paper that each stood two feet high. Aisles were filled with filing cabinets, and our archive area consisted of barely labeled boxes piled on top of boxes all the way to the ceiling.

But getting rid of the paper was not an option. The documents contained vital information such as past orders, records of quotes provided to customers, and data that had to be saved in the event of disputes.

"The sheer amount of time wasted by people rifling through all this paper was really costly from a business perspective and generally frustrating for our employees," Lisowski says. "We had outgrown our manual filing system and sorely needed a document management solution that was quick, easy, and electronic.

"A big factor was support. It seemed we were always able to get our questions answered very quickly by either KnowledgeLake or Imagetec, and they also let us talk to another company that was successfully using a similar KnowledgeLake solution. That gave us the confidence to move forward," Lisowski says.

Implementing a KnowledgeLake solution with SharePoint system allowed NABCO to tackle the cost, resource, and productivity burdens created by an overload of paper documents. The solution lets users easily work with electronic documents on the intranet and quickly find information instead of spending excessive time manually going through paper files. The ECM solution is powerful yet easy to use, with minimal training required. The company is also recovering office space that used to be cluttered with filing cabinets and stacks of bulging file folders.

Documents Accessed Quickly, Easily

The biggest benefit of the KnowledgeLake ECM solution is the ability to quickly find and pull up documents, including historical data, says Lisowski

"Our company president said that when a customer calls him, he can now do a quick search and easily pull up all the information he needs to address the customer’s questions," Lisowski says. "He loves the new system. He is really good at running the company, but is not a huge fan of technology if it is complicated or doesn't do the job. For him to openly state his enthusiasm is a real endorsement for how helpful the KnowledgeLake solution is for our company."

Minimal Training Required

The KnowledgeLake ECM solution provides an intuitive interface and blends seamlessly into the SharePoint environment, which minimizes employee training and helps extend powerful ECM functionality throughout the organization.

"Most of the users in our company are not computer 'power users'. They just want to get the information they need as painlessly as possible," Lisowski says. "With KnowledgeLake, we can provide a central area where they can expect links for more information to be in one place, documents to be in another, and so on, making it very easy to use. I'm now working on a SharePoint solution that will act as a repository and searchable database for our engineering drawings, and hope to expand the capabilities so our SharePoint, Office Outlook, and enterprise resource planning systems are all seamlessly integrated."

Office Space Recovered

The KnowledgeLake ECM solution has also made a dramatic difference in how NABCO uses its physical office space, with desks that have been cleared of stacks of file folders and file cabinets that are gone from hallways.

"On occasion, some of the employees will chuckle and say something like, 'Remember when we had all of those file cabinets lining the aisles? That was just terrible.' I am actually shocked at how quickly we were able to do away with the bulky storage used for paper documents," says Lisowski. "The main office area used to be crowded with filing cabinets. Now they are gone."