McDowell Research

McDowell Research Builds Successful Data Management System with IMS

McDowell Research is a 14-year old company, wholly owned by Ultralife Batteries, Inc. of Newark, NY. They design and build their own brand of accessories for communication equipment used by the US military and certain foreign allies. Their products include power supplies, battery chargers, battery eliminators, RF Amplifiers, mounting hardware, cables, speakers, and Kit systems that allow our soldiers to maintain communication with their commands. Specifically, one department does all the handling of accounting, finance, and cash management for a $25 million dollar defense contractor. They make 300 to 500 vendor payments each month, so storage space and efficiency were definite problems.

Frank Alexander, (VP of Finance), states "We were being buried by paper. We prepare bids or quotes for most of our sales transactions. These are documented by individual contracts from the purchasing office that controls payment for the unit requesting our products. These can be 4-5 pages up to 50 pages in length. We prepared multiple copies of these contracts and maintained the original in the accounting office. We spent thousands of dollars on copies and hundreds of hours looking for lost or misplaced files."

They desperately needed a cost-effective document management software system to improve their document workflow processes and increase office efficiency.

"We were filling about 4-5 filing cabinets every year with documentation," continues Alexander. "You can imagine the storage problems we encounter with records retention requirements. We have a 110-125 full time employees and their related payroll information files, plus we executed numerous non-disclosure agreements each year with various suppliers and customers."

IMS was able to provide exactly what McDowell Research needed. "We no longer look for lost files. They are always available and no one has to get up and pull a file for the accounting department, shipping department, and salesmen. They are only a few mouse clicks away from everything they need," exclaimed Alexander.

Their storage problems have disappeared completely. Paper is still an unavoidable necessity, but once utilized it may be scanned into IMS and then permanently destroyed. "I would much rather replace worn-out paper shredders than add more file cabinets to our confined quarters!"

All of their legal documents are electronically stored and retrieved as needed by the staff. "If you have any idea of what you are looking for, you can find it in the database. We put a lot of documentation in the indexing phase, but it saves countless hours in the view process."

When asked for a statement about his experience with IMS, Alexander replied, "Reducing a smile to written text is hard to do. The system is so easy to use both from the imaging/indexing process to document retrieval. Compared to other systems I have reviewed over the years, this one is by far the most cost efficient and customer friendly