Fisher`s has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last two years, including a new ERP system, new CRM system, 26 new employees, a fleet of technician vehicles, a new internal leasing company, Kyocera as a new product line, a separate document and workflow management business unit... and the list goes on and on. Well, it all is resulting in significant growth (33% this year) and we outgrew our facility. We therefore built out a new location this summer and moved in this fall. This new facility, our Technology Center on Veteran`s Parkway and the Boise River, is yet another significant development for the company and has resulted in a dramatic improvement in the way Fisher`s can help our customers.
The key benefits of this facility to our customers are:
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Customer environment simulation
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Service efficiency
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Outsourced document production and scanning
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Equipment, supplies, and parts inventory
CUSTOMER ENVIRONMENT SIMULATION. Via six independent work area "pods," we have the ability to mimic a customer's operations and model document workflow as it would be ultimately implemented in a customer's environment. For example, we can demonstrate how documents are created, scanned, stored, retrieved, printed, and routed through various operational departments. The process of OCR/IRC capture of forms data and automatic document indexing can be experienced live. Efficient document retrieval and simultaneous document access by multiple, disparate users is easily demonstrated across the pods. We can demonstrate the routing and management of document workflow tasks via virtual inboxes on the pods' 50" plasma monitors. All of this can be set up in a manner of minutes for any of our customers.
Furthermore, our technology center is equipped with multiple operating systems including XP, Vista, Linux, and Mac. So we have the ability to demonstrate network connectivity and drivers across most platforms that may exist in a customer's environment.
SERVICE EFFICIENCY. Our service department benefitted from several facility and infrastructure upgrades that have dramatically improved our ability to service our customers. We now have a dedicated service training room where our technicians meet weekly, at a minimum, to review technical publications, evaluate firmware upgrades, distribute lessons learned, and discuss common issues. The team also engages in frequent equipment training programs with the manufacturers to ensure the team has the latest certifications and are current on recent models. While we did most of this to some degree in our previous facility, our space constraints limited the effectiveness of these programs.
Our state of the art service center has the latest technology for setting up, configuring, testing, and repairing equipment. This, along with the sheer size of the center, means that new equipment can be configured quickly and will be fully tested prior to installation. The service center was also built adjacent to our parts inventory room with technician-specific lockers separating the two areas. Technicians can now order parts from the field via PDAs (if the parts were not immediately available in their vehicles) and the parts will be in their lockers when they arrive back at the service center. This means that customers' downtime is minimized even when abnormal parts are needed.
OUTSOURCED DOCUMENT PRODUCTION AND SCANNING. Fisher's now has an internal print/copy shop where we can run jobs for customers. As Murphy's Law demands, equipment always goes down at the worst times. If we can't repair a machine in time to run that mission-critical job, Fisher's will complete the imaging project in our facility at the same cost as the down machine. Furthermore, many companies establish internal production capacity to meet just average volumes only and then outsource peak volume jobs to a print shop. Fisher's can now complete these jobs for our customers within our facility.
Fisher's document management projects also often require a conversion of existing paper documents to electronic, indexed files. This process is time consuming and expensive for our customers to do internally after factoring in the scanning equipment needed, training of personnel to perform the scanning and indexing, and physical space requirements. Our new facility is built out and staffed with a back-file conversion operation to take over these projects for our customers.
EQUIPMENT, SUPPLIES AND PARTS INVENTORY. Fisher's new facility has a 10,000+ square foot/24 foot ceiling warehouse, which allows us to stock a significant amount of equipment, supplies, and parts. What this means to our customers is that we can install most equipment orders on the same or next day and we can keep equipment up and running with significantly less downtime.