Concord Hospitality Enterprises, a large hotel management company located in Raleigh, NC, selected LaserVault’s DMS Document Management Solution with Workflow to help them deal with the challenges involved in managing and storing hundreds of paper documents per day.

Today, Concord provides management services for over 90 hotels and 13,000 guestrooms and suites throughout the US and Canada, and has combined annual revenues of approximately $400 million. As the company has grown, the amount of paper, including accounts payable invoices, W-9’s, contracts, etc., and the amount of time and personnel needed to manage it, have also grown.

LaserVault DMS (LVDMS), from Electronic Storage Corporation, is a web-based document imaging software solution that allows documents to be scanned, indexed, stored and retrieved with the touch of a single key. Companies choosing LVDMS for their document management system get a complete workflow application with it, along with full text and zone OCR, unlimited users, interface with scanning, editing, reports, form designers, structured searches, full text searches, user permissions and security.

At Concord, LVDMS with Workflow has transformed the business processes in their Development and Accounting Departments. Andrew Switala, Network Administrator at Concord, explains the impact it has had in these two key departments:

“Our Development Department relies heavily on the Capex (Capital Expenditures) workflow as it removes a lot of manual steps, allows regional VPs, owners, and the Capex team, to approve, deny, or delay spending money based on the type of expenditure, where the item is in the workflow, etc. This workflow automates 90% of the work involved so the process runs a lot better than it ever did when it was being run manually.

“Our Accounting Department relies on the Utility workflow to automate the process of forwarding information to our third party Utility monitoring vendor. When this process was run manually, it was often forgotten, and never done reliably, however, the workflow never misses any invoices and gets them to the right place every time.

“Each of these workflows allows us to remove manual processes (saving cost of labor and removing the possibility of human error) and automates the processes so they work the same way every time.

“In considering LaserVault, we were initially concerned whether it would work as advertised and whether it would be scalable enough. It has turned out to be a very good recommendation. LVDMS has met all of our needs.” He adds, “With the search feature we are quickly able to find stored information with a minimum of difficulty” when compared with handling paper documents. “It is a great product that is very flexible and easy to use.”

LVDMS has enabled Concord to leverage the LaserVault technology to eliminate a significant amount of paper documents, while giving them instant access to the information the documents contained. In addition to being able to automate several processes, they have realized savings in reducing the amount of space needed to store the paper documents, and have been able to reduce labor costs and improve their overall efficiencies.

Brad Jensen, President of LaserVault, says, “We are happy to be able to offer and directly support an all-in-one document management solution with enterprise functionality that includes workflow, and do it at a cost that is readily affordable for most businesses. LaserVault DMS gives businesses all the features of a world class document management solution at one low price.”

He adds, “Our automated workflow helps keep information and customers from falling through the cracks, and allows previously time-consuming manual processes that are subject to possible human error to be completed digitally and at light speed. With workflow, the processes are now done automatically as scheduled, and without the chance of being forgotten or overlooked. Companies no longer have to waste time trying to locate lost or missing documents.”