Challenge

To be competitive and maintain customer / vendor satisfaction, Standards of Excellence has to stay on top of its paperwork. Their system for printing business documents was neither efficient nor user friendly. Their system funneled spool files into a PC system where outside consultants had to figure out where things should print. They had so many errors that they were spending at least six hours a week troubleshooting.

At the heart of almost all of Simmons’ problems was document conditioning. They needed the same document to display different information and graphics based on the company division producing the form, and where the form was being printed, among other factors.

Lastly, Standards of Excellence had to use another third party vendor to print checks.

Solution

Using Formatter and Formtastic, Standards of Excellence was able to create a template for each form type. Within this template, they could include an unlimited number of conditioning statements to automatically control how data and graphics were displayed based on numerous customizable factors including the user creating the form, the destination printer, the end recipient of the form, and a lot more. Also, Standards of Excellence can now control the overall appearance of all of their forms by including color graphics,barcodes, lines, shading, numerous font types and treatments, as well as custom margins and text alignments. Even better, if they need to change a form type in the future, they only have to edit one template. Because Formatter and Formtastic made forms production easy and automatic, they were also able to cut the expense of an in-house consultant and outside consulting services. They were also able to integrate the solutions with Standards of Excellence’s archiving system and VAI’s System 2000 to further leverage their investment into their ERP.

In addition to Formatter and Formtastic for forms, Standards of Excellence implemented Formtastic Checks to print AR reports and AP checks. As Standards of Excellence continues to use Fresche’s electronic forms solutions, they increase their ongoing ROI through streamlining workflow, cost savings, improved response time to customer and vendor requests, and overall improvements to efficiency and security.

Results

All I can say is that I think it’s a wonderful product. I had a friend using VAI in Arizona and I was trying to get her to buy it because she was having similar issues with forms. So, it’s something I tell people about if they have an issue similar to mine. I sat through a demonstration and they worked with me on what the solutions could do. I just didn’t see a single problem with it.