ACOM Touts WebView Use at Grecian Delight

April 3, 2012 Alex Woodie

Paper-based processes are no longer the productivity bottleneck they once were at the Chicago-based Greek food company Grecian Delight Foods. Thanks to the WebView software from ACOM Solutions, the company has transitioned from paper- and fax-based processes to electronic document distribution, which has freed more time for Grecian to concentrate on customer service.

Pushing the paper was becoming a burden for the folks at Grecian Delight Foods, which ships specialty Greek and other ethnic cuisine across the country via a network of 400 distributors and 50 brokers. Jerry Czupryn, the company’s IT manager, explained the problem in a recent case study that posted to the ACOM website.

“When we would get a purchase order from a supplier, we’d print it out and go over to the fax machine, fax it, and sit there and wait for the confirmation to come back,” Czupryn says in the case study. “In the purchasing department alone they do at least 15 faxes per day … at three to five minutes each. We felt that there has got to be an easier way to be doing this.”

Even more faxes–upwards of over 80 per day–were being sent through Grecian’s customer care and credit management departments, which put even more reliance on printers, toners, fax machines, and phone lines.

Grecian was already using ACOM’s document management software to generate checks, invoices, and acknowledgements from its IBM i-based applications. Based on its 10-year history with the Long Beach, California-based company, Grecian decided to give try ACOM for improving its current fax-and-printer-heavy workflow.

The products that ACOM brought to bear on the problem included EZEmail and WebView. EZEmail would be used to email the documents that were previously printed out and then faxed, while WebView would give Grecian employees a quick and easy way to manage the various documents and their distribution.

Grecian signed onto the deal and installed the software. Today, the two new pieces of software help to streamline much of the cumbersome work that Grecian employees formerly did. “In the past, you’d have a fax document and you’d have to sit there and wait,” Czupryn says in the case study. “You could sit there 5-10-15-20 minutes trying to send that one document. Now, you can actually go on WebView and know it went out, no ifs or buts about it. It just goes seamlessly.”

WebView, in particular, has been very empowering for Grecian employees. “… [I]t gives the users a tool to access their own data and answer their own questions,” Czupryn says in the case study. “And if they still can find something or if they have a problem, then they call us. It eliminates a lot of calling the IT department for little things.”

Grecian plans to add more ACOM software in the future.