Established in 1973, Brightways Travels is one of the country’s leading independent travel operators providing worldwide travel services to both corporate and personal customers. Through their specialist travel division, Mysteries of India, they provide a range of unique itineraries to the Asian region. The company has three sales offices in the UK and a back office function located in India.

Brightways were already using imaging technology to send documents to their back office in India. However, there were considerable operational inefficiencies with the system being used.

The Glasgow and Manchester offices raise their own sales and purchase documentation and also complete their own banking. These office sent photocopies of their documents to London on a daily basis, where they would be scanned along with the London documentation. This caused two issues:

• The first was the delay in scanning the documents caused by posting the information to London, which in some cases could be up to three days.
• The second was the administration time it took to confirm the documents have been successfully received in London, and requesting missing documents to be faxed down to London.

London would scan all documents, saving them to an area on the server that the Indian office has access to. The images were saved in a directory structure that required each image to be individually saved with a unique file name. This was a very time consuming process that was becoming an increasing issue as sales levels increased.

The Indian office would open the images and process the sales and purchase information into the accounts system, in order to produce the management accounts. The Indian office faced two challenges.

• The first was to accurately manage the new documents through the accounting process. Without an electronic workflow the team relied on a manual log, which not only took time to maintain but also could not be relied upon.
• The second issue was the difficultly in locating images of particular documents. Delays in getting documents to London meant that documents were not presented to the team in a chronological order. This resulted in significant amounts of time trying wasted to locate images documents.

Brightways Travels started using Intelefile in January 2007. Intelefile allows multiple sites to add documents to an Intelefile repository, and therefore the Glasgow, Manchester and London offices all scanned their own documents. Immediate cost savings and benefits were realised:

• Documents were no longer being photocopied.
• The Glasgow and Manchester offices saved the postage daily costs.
• The London office no longer spent time confirming the Glasgow and Manchester offices documents had been correctly received.
• The postal delays were eradicated.

The Brightways Travel team opted for the expedited processing service, which means their documents are available in the Intelefile system within 12 hours of being scanned. This not only meant the documents were available to the Indian office much more quickly than before, but also allowed the UK offices to access each others documents instantly – leading to increased customer service levels to their customers and the ability for the offices to cover for each other at time of peak demand.

The accounting team, located in the Indian office, were now able to make use of Intelefile’s workflow functionality to manage the processing of documents through their accounting operation. The images were available online for the accounts team to process and they were no long reliant on the temperamental link to the server in London. Where document queries arose, it was now possible to get immediate access to the images without wasting time searching through directories of images.

The increased speed of processing documents means the accounts system is now updated within 24 hours of a transaction taking place, were previously it often lagged five days behind.

Because the images are now available online, the original documents will be shredded after one year. This will save considerable storage space, allowing the sales teams to grow without the additional expense of moving offices.

The choice to use Intelefile was very easy for Brightways Travels. Managing Director, Harash Jain, summarised the position “Although we were using imaging technology already, the process was time consuming, expensive and prone to error. Intelefile resolved most of our issues without providing expensive functionality that we would not use. It was the ideal solution for us to manage our paperwork efficiently and cost effectively.”

Intelefile provided our business with four key advantages:

• The process of scanning the images and transmitting took a few minutes a day and Intelefile’s data entry service meant that this was all it took to get the documents into the repository.
• Brightways Travels did not have in house technical skills and relied on expensive external supplier to support and maintain their systems. Because the Intelefile model is a hosted solution, there is no hardware or software to maintain – avoiding delays and saving money.
• Intefile solutions means each of our business sites are responsible for scanning their own documents and the company is no longer reliant on the increasingly expensive and unreliable postal system. The need to check documents have been received in London has been eliminated and the time spent on administrative activities is now minimal.
• Now each office has access to all our documents, which are quick and easy to find. This has meant customer queries can be dealt with while they are on the telephone and the offices can assist each other dealing with customer enquiries in peak periods.