Air Liquide specialises in industrial and medical gases and related services. The company operates in 65 countries and employs more than 30,000 people world-wide. When its Auckland division found its old scanning system was incompatible with its upgraded Windows 2000 software, the company decided it needed a total solution to bring its invoicing and archives online - and called in Iron Mountain (formally Pickfords).

“Iron Mountain didn’t just look at the one job we had for tender,” says Air Liquide administration manager Ann Robbie (pictured left), “they were pro- active, looked at our overall needs and came up with a total solution.”

Better business processes
According to Robbie, prior to implementing an electronic document management solution, Air Liquide had been relying on original copies of its delivery dockets and invoices to deal with most of its customer inquiries.

“Now everyone has fast, easy access to the information,” she says, “without having to search through a pile of manual files.” Personnel and hardware are also being better utilised. For example, prior to the Iron Mountain solution, two of Air Liquide’s printers and several staff were tied up for two days when doing the company’s debtor print run. With the new solution in place, however, they’re now freed up for more productive duties.

Cash flow has also been positively impacted says Robbie. “It wasn’t easy for our clients to deal with our old sized invoice/statement (it was almost A3 she says) and as a result they tended to deal with us last – but Iron Mountain assisted us in reducing the size of our invoice/statements down to A4 – making it easier for customers to pay us. We also get our statements out a day earlier now, which improves the debt collection ratio.”

Easy searching
The key technology component in the Air Liquide solution is Alchemy – a document management package frequently described as ‘an electronic filing cabinet’. Iron Mountains’ imaging division product manager, Dean Marcussen, picks up the story. “As a document repository there’s nothing that I’ve seen that’s better than Alchemy,” he says.

“It compares very well to products like Documentum, with the same kind of feature set but at a significantly lower price point. [Iron Mountain is a New Zealand agent and implementation partner for Alchemy]. It’s the ideal repository for any type of image or text document. Once you place a document into it, its searching capabilities are amazing – the speed is just fantastic.”

Amongst other things Marcussen says all Air Liquide’s invoices, proof of delivery notes and statements are indexed and scanned into Alchemy every month, enabling customer services or accounts staff to retrieve any document virtually instantly. The search/retrieval process is made even easier because of Alchemy’s Windows explorer style web browser interface (see picture below).

Return on investment
After moving its document management to Iron Mountain, Air Liquide has saved time, valuable storage space and money. Specifically;

• Iron Mountain collects delivery dockets daily from Air Liquide. These are scanned, indexed by docket number and put into a database. A searchable CD carrying the information is delivered back to Air Liquide weekly.
• All scanned documents are then catalogued and stored at Iron Mountain Records and Information Managers’ Records Centre. Marcussen says Iron Mountain can satisfy the records management requirements of any sized organisation. “Our Records Centres manage thousands of retrieval requests every day,” he says, “and can provide clients with original or copied information within time frames as short as four minutes - or clients can access their records themselves using our online records management solutions.”

For more information about this case study contact:
0800 899 IRON (4766)
sales@ironmountain.co.nz
www.ironmountain.co.nz

December 2004

Iron Mountain staff scanning delivery dockets and documents for the required three day turnaround from hard copy to electronic cataloguing and storage.