Rexair Taps Quadrant to Improve Document Processing

Corrected: March 22, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Vacuum maker Rexair faced some difficult choices when it came to upgrading their business processes. The 71-year-old Michigan company relied heavily on people and paper to keep orders and payments humming along. But the manual processes, and lack of agility proved too costly, which is why Rexair called in Quadrant Software to help automate many of its processes.

According to Quadrant, Rexair's business processes were archaic. For starters, the company relied on expensive pre-printed forms generated from its Infor System21 ERP system. On top of that, Rexair implemented a forms overlay solution; however, it required costly and time consuming programming to make even minor changes. The company also relied heavily on fax machines for its business, but hadn't yet automated them.

These manual processes were labor intensive and unnecessarily costly to Rexair. Employees manually faxed more than 60 documents every day, amounting to a loss of 25 employee-hours per week. They were also spending about $2,500 a year outsourcing their broadcast faxing. And while the forms overlay solution provided some flexibility in how Rexair presented itself to its distributors, located in 70 countries around around the world, the package required $1,500 in custom programming work to change a single form, making it costly to change invoices, purchase orders, and statements.

To solve these problems, Rexair purchased two products from Quadrant Software, including the Formtastic electronic forms solution, and the FastFax fax software. The software brought a new level of automation to the 300-person company, including the capability to automatically fax documents from its System21 green screen interfaces, Outlook, Word, or Excel, and to send and receive faxes from Outlook.

Formtastic brought other benefits. The company also was able to bring generation of benefits statements back in house (it had been outsourced), and it was also able to move away from pre-printed checks and use Formtastic's check-printing module, which works with blank safety stock. That change was an important one, says Steve Prill, Rexair's IT operations manager. "It takes a few minutes to change our A/P check and we do not have to order new checks or throw old ones away," he says.

All in all, the new software helped Rexair clear out the cobwebs of outdated business processes, saving the company $10,000 per year. "We didn't calculate ROI [return on investment], but the changes were drastic. We know we drastically improved productivity and communications," Prill says. "We eliminated 15 fax machines and, consequently, our monthly phone line charges. We cut postage costs significantly. . . . We feel that the software paid for itself in a very short time."

This article has been corrected. Rexair has distributors in 70 countries, not 70 distributors. The company employs about 300 people, not 360. IT Jungle regrets the errors.

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