Forgital Goes Paperless - ' Fighting Commoditization ' (
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Stargel said that, as a Questys channel partner, he gets plenty of front-line support from the vendor. "They helped us make this sale happen," he said.
Pavlovic said the copier market is so highly commoditized that many resellers have started looking to sell document management solutions to improve their profit margins. Questys supports about 250 channel partners with varying levels of expertise to make a document management solutions sale, Pavlovic said.
"Not all of our resellers are cut from the same cloth. Some are highly technical and have the personnel and know-how to implement and support a solution," Pavlovic said.
"At the other end of the spectrum are smaller resellers who don't have the solutions group [and] don't know the copier business or have the sales staff to make sales calls."
To address the needs of all its channel partners, Questys developed a tiered dealer structure. "We looked at the needs of our resellers and decided to focus on different plans and methodologies to help all of them, from helping them make the sale, to implementation to ongoing help desk support," Pavlovic said.
Stargel, he said, is in the middle of the pack. "Stargel knows the product [and] the pitch and pulls in Questys for support as needed," he said.
Getting the ball rolling
A review group at forgital looked at about a half-dozen document management solutions before selecting Questys. "We understood that the product would not only meet our needs, but all of the other solutions were more complex and twice as expensive," Fisher said.
In addition, Stargel was the only solution provider that offered customer references.
"That was a big plus. Stargel had no hidden agenda; they just gave us customer names and telephone numbers and said to give them a call," Fisher said.
Forgital called three Stargel customers, met with each company and saw the Questys solution in production.
Forgital contracted with Stargel to deliver the document management solution that consisted of Questys Enterprise document management software, Questys Enterprise Automation Server and Questys Enterprise Web. Questys Enterprise Automation Server is a collection of modules designed to speed up the data entry process. Enterprise Web provides users with a virtual office that can be reached from anywhere in the world and enables document generation, scanning, authoring, and search and retrieval.
"We have employees in the field using laptops and BlackBerrys," Fisher said.
Stargel also assumed responsibility for ERP integration, system installation, training and product support as part of the purchase, which included up to 10 days of professional services.
"Questys helped us write scripts that would allow the document management system to pull files from the ERP system into Questys," Stargel said.
According to Pavlovic, the automated capture component extracts information, based on specified data fields such as customer name, invoice number and delivery date, from the Sx.Enterprise ERP software and automatically pulls it into Questys Enterprise without the need for human intervention. "It saves the customer hours of data entry time and also eliminates the potential for human error," he said. The integration work also required some input from NxTrend.
Questys Enterprise sits on a Dell server configured with 60GB of storage.
Clutter gone
Today, Forgital is paper-free; the company has kept only six of the 40 file cabinets it used to have. More important, "Questys Enterprise is one of the easiest-to-use systems that I've been exposed to," Fisher said, adding that the auditors at ISO—the International Organization for Standardization—love it.
Since installing Questys Enterprise at Forgital, Stargel has returned to train new employees on the system and provide refresher training for employees who want it.
Before the month is out, Stargel expects to meet with Fisher to discuss upgrading the Toshiba e-Studio 3511 color copier to the Toshiba e-Studio 451c digital copier. Forgital leases its copier. "The biggest advantage to the new copier is the native integration to Questys," Stargel said. "So instead of pulling documents into Questys, which is what the system currently does, it will push them into the system, eliminating a couple of steps in the process."
Another benefit is native integration with Microsoft Exchange that allows users to scan e-mail to a customer directly from the copier.
The Stargel-Forgital relationship isn't likely to end there. In 2008, Questys expects to release its next version of Questys Enterprise, which has been in the works for several years, according to Pavlovic.
