Business Metrics U.S. accounting department alone has scanned in 168,490 documents Continuous scanning of approximately 8,025 documents per month Document sharing between offices across the globe Met industry regulations on record retention

Atlantic Container Line is a leading carrier of containers, oversized cargos and vehicles between North America and Europe. With three North American and 10 international service centers, worldwide document sharing and retrieval seemed impossible to streamline.

Tony Greco, General Manager of IT, said that the company had critical information such as invoices, check copies and other accounting-related documents stored all over the world and files were localized in each country. A staff member at each location would have to search for a particular document and fax it to another office which in many cases could take hours.

Greco worked with Stephen Young of InfiNet Business Systems to implement SmartSearch to connect the company's international offices with a global document management system. SmartSearch was rolled out to the accounting departments at each location which included accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger.

InfiNet integrated SmartSearch with ACL's JD Edwards accounting package to further enhance efficiency. By making data residing in JD Edwards available to the SmartSearch database, Atlantic Container Line has saved thousands of dollars each year by eliminating redundant data entry. InfiNet also provided the ability to view stored images directly from the JD Edwards interface.

Since implementing SmartSearch in 2003, the U.S. accounting department alone has scanned in 168,490 documents and they continue to scan approximately 8,025 documents per month.

The accessibility of information from around the world has impacted our day-to-day business tremendously,s Greco said. We can now share information easily and securely from across the globe as if we all worked in the same office. Our accounting departments from New Jersey to Sweden have saved hundreds of hours in time and can perform document-related tasks in seconds. We never thought such ease was possible.

Another benefit of document management is the ability to store the company's thousands of documents electronically indefinitely. Our industry standard states that we must retain documents for seven years. This varies in each of our locations and we must also abide by Swedish laws due to our international status on top of that, Greco said. We are in the process of having an auditing firm assess our document storage and if it meets their criteria, we can get rid of our off-site facility. That would be a savings in the thousands that we could attribute to SmartSearch.

In addition to eliminating their off-site storage facility, Greco plans to roll out SmartSearch to the company's human resources department this year and continue to expand the software throughout the offices around the world.