Successes - Greenheck Fan Corporation
Manufacturer Gains a Global Edge with Fortis

One of the first Westbrook Technologies' document management software installations in Wisconsin, Greenheck designs, manufactures and ships fans and ventilators, centrifugal and vane axial units, make-up air units, energy recovery ventilators, dampers, louvers, laboratory exhaust systems and kitchen ventilation systems around the world. With sales in excess of $500 million annually, Greenheck employs more than 2,500 people and has over 1.5 million square feet of manufacturing space. Most manufacturing takes place in Schofield, where their Fortis system has been in place since 2000.

Greenheck's selection and assessment process utilized a Business Process Re-engineering methodology that recognized Fortis could address several challenging document-intensive workflows. Employees process an average of 800 orders per day, and they needed to manage the paper surrounding those orders more effectively.

Improving Order Entry and Processing At the time they adopted Fortis, most of Greenheck's orders came in via fax. Today the majority of the orders arrive electronically via the Internet. An unattended, automated workflow called Direct Order Entry (DOE) processes, archives, and indexes the orders into Fortis.

First, DOE sends data to SAP, Greenheck's business management system, and creates an order in the Fortis document management system. Then Order Entry and Sales Support use Fortis as their work queue. By using multi-value fields for the order entry status, billing status and engineering status, different product areas can work on the same order simultaneously. Since a customer can place one order that includes different product lines, the ability to do parallel processing is important.

In addition to archiving and indexing for future retrieval, Fortis serves as the primary interface for human interaction with DOE workflow in review, processing exceptions, engineering artifacts, etc. Each department uses a different color for annotations to flag questions about an order. Fortis is also used in related processes in Marketing, Engineering, and Finance.

The order-processing database consists of orders and a number of auxiliary documents related to them. The majority of document types are PDFs, faxes, Word, Excel, email (sent to Fortis as Word or as an image), and straight text files. If annotations are necessary, PDFs and certain text files are imaged within Fortis; otherwise documents are maintained and edited in their native format.

Payback on the entire DOE project was less than one year. Greenheck estimated a savings of five FTE's (Full Time Equivalents, or head counts) due directly to the document management implementation alone. "Actual return on investment was probably greater than that. Less quantifiable returns were equally important. For example, we could not have implemented our DOE program without document management in place," said Sue Webber, systems analyst at Greenheck.

"We selected Fortis because Westbrook emphasized document management rather than simple storage and retrieval or 'imaging' like some of the other products we looked at. Fortis was scalable and easy to extend, and was relatively easy to deploy, administer, and use. The licensing structure allowed us to deploy it in many areas of the company, giving access to users who might only need to see documents very infrequently," said Webber.

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