By automating import and export documentation processes with Laserfiche, the jeweler more efficiently manages compliance with customs requirements.

My name is Joseph Colville. I work at Michael Hill International. We’re a middle market jeweler so we sell anything between nine-dollar studs and half a million-dollar pieces. The department I work for is the I.T. Department we deliver the Solutions for the whole business. My particular focus is on the distribution center and import export of all of our goods.

It was about two years ago that we decided that we needed to go down the automation route the bottlenecks and challenges that we had were especially around the mass handling of paper. There’s massive customs requirements and we needed a way to manage those in a more efficient manner. The process before Laserfiche was very manual. It involved building up files on your desk so goods come in. They would have the documents you’d have e-mails coming in you would print out those documents you would stick them in a file you would wait to that file has the correct amount of documents and then that would be archived and then the recall process of those documents , you would have to go to the right box find the right month, the right supplier and then pull out those documents and flick.

The expectations and goals that we had for Laserfiche was basically process automation, clear audit trail and fast document recall. So, these were absolutely essential dealing with. There’s very strict legislation to how we have to keep the documents. It varies between Jurisdictions and we needed to make sure we followed those to the letter. Now we’re not printing out every email that comes in. So, we’ve gone from printing two reams of paper a day to one ream a fortnight. We’ve also dropped the amount of time it takes to recall documents for customs. We have to recall a certain amount of lines go and find the physical documents and do checks. That process could take five minutes to find a doc. Now we can just do a simple search on it. So, there’s massive time saving there and we re-put that time saving into doing more checks to greater increase our compliance.

The most useful piece of advice I could give to future Laserfiche users would be lining up all the pieces, making sure right people are involved at the right time to ensure the project runs smoothly making sure they have access to get into your systems. And also ensuring that the business is heavily involved. So, you have your SMEs coming up and actually using the software. Well before you go live and feeding back the entire time. I’ve attended Laserfiche conferences, I’ve shared my story at those Laserfiche conferences and I’ve also heard stories of other people and being involved in training sessions and continuous improvement of the product. So that’s been really important and really key to our business.