Technology bins builders’ paper wait

Trade

Pictured: Kodak’s i1220 document scanner

Roofing and cladding specialist Duggan Steel has installed an electronic document management (EDM) system developed by Filestream, along with Eastman Kodak’s duplex i1220 workgroup scanners.

Duggan says the new technology lets the firm manage “the vast amount of paperwork” involved in supplying steel and steel-related products to the agricultural and construction industries in Ireland.

The Filestream system was supplied by Irish reseller Woodsoft.

Duggan said it needed to simplify document management and speed retrieval of steel test certificates, which precisely record chemical and mechanical properties of steel batches and their associated products.

James Flavin, Duggan’s group IT manager, said: “Builders want to know that the steel they are buying is strong enough based on its iron, zinc and copper make up, for example, and we process 80 to 90 test certificates a week, totalling over 4,000 annually. As various products may be covered by one certificate and, as we have to keep this information for up to seven years, we were storing thousands of pieces of paper – making it difficult and time consuming to retrieve information when details had to be checked for customers.”

Duggan also plans to install a company-wide bar-coding system to assign unique bale numbers to steel received on site and then connect the related documentation to it.

Read More: Deals done