Arver Lastbilar drives up efficiency with Compose DocMan

To read a Swedish language version of this case study, please click here.

Arver Lastbilar is one of the largest private distributors of Scania trucks and buses in Sweden. A fourth generation family company founded in 1919, the company now has approximately 180 employees with operations in ten locations across the country. Arver offers customers a complete solution for convenient and economical truck ownership, from sales of the trucks themselves, to service agreements and spare parts.

“Proper documentation of service job sales is a crucial aspect of our business process,” says Ulrika Arver, owner of Arver Lastbilar. “Our industry demands the keeping of meticulous records – the total number of reports represents about 100,000 work hours, spread over about 2.5 reports per employee per working day. We used to have our employees enter the information directly into Microsoft Word documents on our fileserver, but this system was extremely time-consuming and error-prone. Staff had to wade through our file directory to find the correct template, and it was very easy to input data into an incorrect field or even the wrong template entirely. This posed a business risk, as these records are vital for our company audit.

“In addition to these flaws, neither the warehouse nor the office administration servers was secure – there was only one level of access to both our office administrative fileserver and the warehouse reporting server. We felt it was also very important to develop a set of custom permissions for our IT system.”

Arver Lastbilar wanted to increase the security, efficiency, and manageability of its reporting system. In order to achieve this, the company needed a secure online reporting solution, capable of creating, managing and storing a large volume of reports.

Finding a solution
Arver Lastbilar engaged Business Partner Compose IT to design and install an online reporting system for use at all the company’s outlets. “We found it very easy to work with Compose IT,” comments Ulrika Arver. “They listened carefully to our specifications, and delivered a solution that precisely met our requirements.”

Compose IT developed an online reporting programme called Compose DocMan, built on Lotus Domino. Now, all the company’s warehouse reporting is done on the new system, accessible from any workstation connected to the company’s intranet.

“Before, warehouse staff had to trawl through many levels of the file tree manually, find the correct Word Document template, fill it in, and then save it,” continues Ulrika Arver. “There were so many stages of that process where errors could creep in, and there was no way of ensuring that the reports were being completed correctly. Since implementing the IBM solution, it only takes members of staff a couple of minutes per report.”

Accelerating change
Since implementing the solution from Compose IT, Arver has dramatically reduced the amount of time spent by employees on filling out reports, freeing them to focus on more profitable activities. “By using the Compose DocMan solution, we’ve made very significant savings, both in terms of time and costs,” says Ulrika Arver.

Now that Arver Lastbilar has gained a reporting system with an interface tailored to suit its business processes, the present level of user-friendliness stands in stark contrast to that of the legacy system.

“Staff simply open up the web browser in the company intranet, and the online reporting page is the first thing they see,” continues Ulrika Arver. “Today, it’s almost impossible to enter incorrect information. If someone tries to type the wrong kind of data into a field – a letter rather than a number, for example – Compose Deviation Reporting won’t accept it, and issues a warning. Overall, the whole process is now so much easier.”

One unanticipated benefit of the new DocMan reporting system only became evident a few weeks after the implementation. Ulrika Arver explains: “Because everyone in the company has switched to the new reporting process, we’ve had a massive increase in traffic to our intranet. Now that staff are visiting so frequently, it’s been transformed into an invaluable hub to broadcast news and announcements to the company.”

The reliability and availability of the business critical reporting system has been augmented by a disaster recovery site managed by Business Partner Compose IT, to which data is replicated in real time. “We now have confidence that we have immediate access to our business critical information any time we need it,” says Ulrika Arver.

Security for the future
After the great successes of the Lotus Document Manager system implementation, Arver is now preparing to further augment its system with the next generation of information management software, Lotus Quickr.

“We’re very excited about the new possibilities offered by Lotus Quickr,” concludes Ulrika Arver. “Previously, all the documents on our fileserver were unencrypted and not password protected at all. In effect, there was one level of access – anyone within the company could see the information. With Quickr, we’re building different levels of user permissions to ensure that vital company data is secure, and only available to those staff members who need to use it.”