Korte Construction

One of the recognized leaders in commercial, industrial, and educational facilities design and construction management, the Korte Construction Company oversees large scale building projects throughout the United States. In business since 1958, Korte's corporate headquarters are located in a sprawling facility in Highland, Illinois, within an hour's drive from St. Louis.

In 1998, five large rooms in the Highland headquarters were jam-packed with boxes full of construction documents -- contracts, invoices, change orders, punch lists, telephone logs - as well as the entire range of Human Resources documents that a large employer needs to maintain. After installing Datacap Taskmaster, the boxes filled with paper were replaced by a single rack of compact disks, and one by one, the rooms were returned to productive office space.

The Challenge

When the expanding backlog of paper lead Korte's IS managers to approach a service bureau for a "backfile conversion," they were stunned when the bid approached a million dollars. Seeking less expensive alternatives, they began considering an in-house capture system that would enable them to convert all their existing paperwork to digital images as well as new documents as they arrived in the mailroom.

The Solution

By selecting Datacap Taskmaster, Korte became their own service bureau and began scanning and archiving documents themselves. Not only did it save them almost $900,000, but they don't have to worry about confidential documents being seen by people outside their company.

The Korte solution is built on the flexibility of Datacap capture software, which can be adapted to suit a variety of needs simply by using its built-in scripting capabilities. As documents are gathered for scanning, each batch is accompanied by a cover sheet, which indicates the document type, date and job number of the pages that follow. As documents are scanned in, Taskmaster creates a name for each Tiff file according to the attributes on the cover page, adding a page number at the end. Directories are created dynamically, according to the document type, and the images are stored in these directories with their new names, making retrieving document images later on easy and expedient.

Staff required for the project is minimal. In fact, Korte is employing college interns for the project from nearby Southern Illinois University. At night, a Yamaha CD burner writes two copies of the archived images to compact disks, which are easily stored for future reference.

The Results

If Korte opts to install a document image management system in the future, the images on CD can be quickly uploaded to populate it. Until then, Datacap software is the foundation for a simple solution that meets the business needs of the company. Korte is not only reclaiming unusable office space, but is making administration of the company more efficient by saving valuable time that used to be spent searching through boxes of paper for a needed document.