Consolidating four separate sites into one location is a good reason for an organization to analyze how much storage space they need for archived documents. In planning for their new facility, Meeker Cooperative felt the time was right to look at electronic scanning and archiving methods to minimize their storage requirements.

When Mary Walters, Customer Service Supervisor for Meeker Cooperative, started to evaluate solutions, their goal was two-fold: to avoid having to move many documents – some dating back to 1956 – to their new facility. And most importantly, to reduce storage costs by minimizing the amount of space needed.

Mary relied on Ann McCann, their Marco technology advisor, to suggest a document management solution to fit their needs. “Marco has helped us with many of our technology services,” said Mary. “So it just made sense to keep everything under one umbrella.” Ann put Meeker Cooperative in contact with Marco’s document management specialist, Shawn London.

Shawn met with Meeker Cooperative and conducted a question and answer session about their document work processes. He then provided them with a demo of Captaris Alchemy – a powerful and easy to use document management software that allows them to scan, archive, and search their documents. Mary commented, “For us, it’s the document retention that we needed to address. We found that the Alchemy solution was more compatible with our in-house system.”

Several months before their move date, Khoa Bui from Marco installed and implemented Meeker Cooperative’s Alchemy software and a Fujitsu scanner with a 200-page automatic document feeder. Khoa conducted training sessions for their staff on how to use the software and helped them set up an electronic filing structure. He showed them how to convert the JPEG images they had initially scanned into TIFF files and bring them into Alchemy to index for quick and easy searches.

Meeker Cooperative’s goal was to get as many of their documents scanned as possible to avoid moving them to their new location. They hired a part-time person to scan documents such as inactive member records, financial ledgers, historical documents, and capital credit checks and records. They also looked to Marco’s Service Bureau to help scan documents to meet their move deadline date. Mary explained, “Marco scanned all of our larger documents at their office and then stored the information on an external portable hard drive so we could just transfer all the information into our database and didn’t have to deal with multiple DVDs.”

Mary was pleased with the implementation process. “We are really impressed with Marco’s accessibility when we need them.” She explained, “When we have a question, I email Ann and she gets back to me immediately. It’s not like we have to wait a half a day to get a response. Marco is large enough to provide us with multiple services, yet small enough to be right at our fingertips. All around, they are just real pleasant people to work with.”

Marco also provided Meeker Cooperative with a Windows server and backup solution for document storage. All documents are now scanned and archived into one centralized data base. The Captaris Alchemy software allows them to easily search and run queries to access the documents as needed.

Mary cited an example of how the new system improves their operations today. “We must have had 45 bankers boxes full of copies of capital credit checks we mail our customers regularly. We need to save the check records showing the customer signatures, and we store them forever.” She went on, “We now scan and archive all of the checks. About three times a year, we get a call from a customer questioning if they received a check. Now we can quickly search the database by customer name or account number and pull up the back side of the check to show proof of payment.”

Not only does this save storage space for Meeker Cooperative, what used to be a time consuming task manually searching bankers boxes for check records now takes a matter of seconds electronically. According to Mary, “We’re down to just the immediate documents we need to keep on file.”

Meeker Cooperative is a member-owned cooperative that provides electricity and other services to more than 8,400 residents, businesses, and industries in six central Minnesota counties, including Meeker, Kandiyohi, McLeod, Renville, Stearns and Wright. In December 2005, Meeker Cooperative combined their four separate sites into a new facility at Highway 12 East in Litchfield.