Tech Electronics

Tech Electronics provides a broad range of technology services for customers in the St. Louis metropolitan area. The company, which began in 1963, provides services such as computer network design and deployment, installation of security and fire alarm systems, and custom design and installation of telephone systems and integrated communications. Tech Electronics, which has a network of regional offices, is involved in some capacity in about 75 percent of all new construction in the St. Louis area.

Tech Electronics has a long history of using paper documentation on projects, such as technical information provided by vendors, project documentation for customers and service technicians, accounting records, and engineering documents. Years of generating paper documents led to inefficiency and shrinking options for storage.

“We were outgrowing our physical space and needed a solution that would reduce the amount of paper files we were retaining and the file space in our offices,” says Kay Pinner, Director of Organizational Development for Tech Electronics. “It was also time consuming to locate files, and documents were sometimes misfiled or not returned fast enough, making it hard for other employees to find the information.”

In early 2009, Tech Electronics deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create a corporate intranet, and to store and distribute electronic documents as well as paper documents that were scanned and uploaded to the intranet. However, it was cumbersome to upload scanned files, and employees lacked good tools for rapidly finding and retrieving files.

“We had a lot of electronic and paper data we needed to convert to the SharePoint system,” Pinner says, “and it became a high priority to find a solution to minimize the time that our users spent scanning, indexing, and retrieving information.”

A local IT services company that helped Tech Electronics with its SharePoint implementation recommended KnowledgeLake. Tech Electronics decided to deploy a comprehensive enterprise content management solution based on KnowledgeLake products. These include KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint, which transforms SharePoint into a production imaging system; KnowledgeLake Capture, used for batch scanning and indexing of paper documents; and KnowledgeLake Connect, a PC-based application that lets Tech Electronics users save electronic documents or e-mails directly to SharePoint in a single step.

Tech Electronics uses Kyocera and Konica Minolta multi-function devices, which it owned prior to installing the KnowledgeLake solution, to scan documents. The Advanced PDF Rendition module in KnowledgeLake Capture uses optical character recognition (OCR) during a scan to create a full textsearchable PDF document. This expedites the indexing process and provides searchable fields such as the project order number, the technician who worked on an order, and where the work was performed.

With the indexing functionality, Tech Electronics employees can locate and access records on the intranet in a matter of seconds. The KnowledgeLake software also provides highly intuitive search fields that make it easy for users to locate files.

“We looked at other options, but the competition wasn’t even close,” says Pinner. She adds that the KnowledgeLake solution was installed very quickly in late April, 2009. “KnowledgeLake told us it would take them three days to deploy the project from end to end. We didn’t believe it. But they not only delivered in that time frame, they came in under budget.”

The Tech Electronics decision to deploy a KnowledgeLake enterprise content management solution is helping the company’s internal processes, its interactions with customers, and its profitability.

“The KnowledgeLake products have delivered tangible gains for our company, including file centralization, reduced storage needs, greater staff productivity, and better service for our customers,” says Pinner.

Reduced Costs

The KnowledgeLake solution makes it easier and much faster than before to store documents.

“This means we can migrate the data with fewer administrative resources,” says Pinner. “Now, because it’s so much easier for staff to scan documents than to file them in physical containers, we save a lot of time. It has also allowed us to significantly reduce our physical storage space. The KnowledgeLake solution paid for itself almost immediately.”

Greater productivity

“This has greatly enhanced the success of our SharePoint project,” says Pinner. “For example, our accounting department scanned and fully indexed three file drawers in less than two hours, converting a lot of documents without the need for any additional staff.”

More customer satisfaction

Being able to rapidly search and retrieve documents helps Tech Electronics employees get customers much faster than they could in the past.

“They no longer have to search for and pull physical files that may or may not be in the archive, or ask someone in another department to find documents for them,” says Pinner. “Our employees can now retrieve documents quickly from their PCs. That’s a huge benefit to our customers who want accurate and timely data."