Ask most people what trucking is about, and they'll tell you trucks and truckers. But, the administrative managers of most trucking companies know the real force that drives trucking -- paperwork. Each day, every truck on the road generates dozens of pages of paper - bills of lading, delivery receipts, load manifests, logbook pages, fuel receipts, trip envelopes, tax forms, fuel tax forms, licensing - and on and on. It's no wonder then, that document imaging has become one of the hottest buzzwords around the trucking industry.
At its most basic, document imaging is nothing more than taking a picture of a document, converting it into a digital file than can be read by your computer, and then storing it in a place where it can be retrieved. Every time you send a fax, you're imaging a document and sending it in an electronic format. Most document images are captured using a scanner of some type, although many companies capture incoming document images directly from their fax lines. Scanners are available all the way from one-page-at-a-time manual scanners to hi-speed rotary scanners that can handle hundreds of documents per hour.
Document imaging gains its value by REDUCING physical storage space,
REDUCING document retrieval time, and INCREASING the speed of document
work flow through an organization.
REDUCTION OF STORAGE SPACE
A typical four-drawer filing cabinet can hold from 10,000 to 12,000
individual documents. That cabinet occupies about four square feet of floor
space, and requires about four more square feet of space for access to
the drawers. A typical 100-truck TruckLoad carrier can easily generate
enough documents to fill that cabinet in just 10 weeks. That amounts to
five new filing cabinets every year, just to store the incoming documents.
LTL trucking companies can easily double the amount of incoming documents.
A document that has been converted to a compressed digital image at
200 x 200 dpi takes about 50K of storage space. At that rate, a typical
1.2-gigabyte hard drive can store over 20,000 documents, as much as two
filing cabinets.
While hard drive storage is fine for recent documents, when it comes time to archive those documents, optical imaging such as laser disks offer an excellent way to store tens of thousands of documents while keeping them relatively easy to access. A typical 5 1/4-inch laser disk can hold nearly two filing cabinets worth of documents, while some 12-inch disks will hold up to eight or nine filing cabinets.
Compounding that storage capability even further, are optical jukeboxes
that allow remote users the ability to call up a particular document. The
jukebox then finds the correct disk, loads it in a reader, and transmits
the required image back to the workstation. Optical jukeboxes can hold
anywhere from five to 200 disks, allowing the equivalent of 10 to 400 filing
cabinets of storage in little more than the space required for one filing
cabinet.
INDEXING
Once a document image has been captured, it is typically indexed using
one or more identifiers. For a trucking company, this could be the pro
number, the customer number, the driver number or the truck number. Once
a document is imaged into the system, and indexed, the true power of document
imaging becomes apparent.
Follow a typical trip envelope through a company sometime, and you'll
find a days-long process that takes that envelope across half-a-dozen desks,
and creates enough copies to nearly double its size. The first department
to get the envelope is usually billing. They pull freight bills, delivery
receipts and bills of lading so they can start the billing process. Then
the envelope makes its way to the payroll department, the safety department,
and the fuel tax department, each department taking the envelope apart,
making more copies and putting it back together.
Imagine instead, that when the envelope arrives at your office, one person pulls it apart, indexes and scans all of the documents inside, and then puts it aside for storage. As soon as the documents are available online, each of the departments are notified electronically that documents from a certain pro number are ready for retreival. Now, any of those departments can access the documents they need, or all of the departements can access all of the documents simultaneously if they desire. No more waiting for the document flow to bring paperwork to you. When you need it, go get it.
Another scenario that often occurs in trucking companies is the customer who calls in asking for proof-of-delivery on a particular shipment. With a manual paperwork system, the billing clerk has to go to the filing cabinet, find the right file, bring it back to their work area, then send a fax to the customer. That's if the file is properly stored. If another department has the file on a desk somewhere, it can take days to find the right document. Also, by the time the customer calls in, the file has often been moved to a warehouse or storage trailer, which can adds even more time to the retreival process. Time spent on inquiry - 10 minutes to several hours.
With an electronic document storage system, the clerk calls up the required document on their computer while the customer is still on the phone. If the document matches what the customer is looking for, a push of a button sends a copy of the document - complete with signatures - directly to the customer's fax machine. Time spent on inquiry - two or three minutes.
Other advantages to document imaging include the abilitity to combine images from different sources to build electronic 'files', and the ability to allow access to authorized users only. In addition, once a document has entered the system, it rarely becomes lost, as the original image is always available on the disk.