Efalia ECM & Black Hills Electric Co-op : Over 12,000 Records to Store

For over 56 yea

rs the Black Hills Electric Cooperative (BHEC) has been a part of South Dakota history. With records for over 12,000 current and past members to keep, inevitably storage becomes an issue.

“We don’t have a lot of space for storage, but we have rooms full of documents that we have to keep,” said Alice Job, Manager of Office Services for the Black Hills Electric Cooperative in Custer, South Dakota.

Since June 20, 1946, the rural co-op has served customers in parts of six western South Dakota counties. Today with nearly 7,300 residential and business users, BHEC manages over 2,380 miles of line in a 5,000 square mile area.

“With that many customers we generate a lot of reports. Many of those reports we may only need to refer to a couple of times a year, but we still need to keep them,” said Carla Woodford, Staff Assistant.

After reviewing the products and services of several providers, BHEC selected Active Data Systems (ADS) and an Efalia ECM document imaging and management system to scan and store years of paper records.

“Efalia ECM has all the features to enable BHEC to file, index and retrieve their documents in one easy-to-use software solution,” said Mark McClung, President of ADS.

The Efalia ECM system allows access to information quickly.

“Now, our employees need to spend less time ‘looking’ for customer data and have more time to do other tasks,” says Job.

 

Once a Customer, Always a Customer.

BHEC is required to keep permanent records on all customers they have ever had. Stored documents of electrical users occupied a garage-sized area.

“We have filled up 11/2 DVDs worth of data. That would equate to enough paper that would fill up the back of a pickup truck,” said Woodford.
Efalia ECM offers the added benefit of interfacing with the co-op’s data processing systems.

“BHEC manages large amounts of documents and data,” said McClung, “They have done a great job of integrating the Efalia ECM system with their mainframe.”

 

Other Cost Savings

The co-op used to print many of their documents on “green bar” paper. Now that scanned documents can be directly input to the mainframe, BHEC has discovered other cost benefits.

“We had a $6,000 printer we would have had to replace, however with the Efalia ECM document imaging system we no longer need to print out that information,” said Woodford.

Efalia ECM supports hundreds of black & white, as well as color scanners, ranging from small flatbed scanners to high-speed document scanners. Efalia ECM includes a range of features to make indexing the documents as easy as possible, with support for barcode reading, as well as full text OCR functions. There are also several functions to ensure that electronic format documents, such as spreadsheets and word processing documents, can be filed easily and quickly.
As a dealer of industry-leading document management solutions, Active Data Systems is able to assist many organizations, like the Black Hills Electric Cooperative, to find the best solution for their needs.

“Before we propose anything, we spend time analyzing customers’ document workflow and personnel requirements,” said McClung.