Success Story
Customer: Kings Cars
Country: Australia
Industry: Retail/Distribution
The Client
Kings Cars is a car dealership representing Nissan, Suzuki and Mitsubishi, and operating seven showrooms across western Victoria - in Ballarat, Ararat, Hamilton and Geelong. The business is known for its outstanding customer experience in sales and servicing, making the process of buying or maintaining a car as smooth as possible for its clients.
Kings Cars generates, files and accesses a lot of paperwork, including financing, sales, servicing and creditor invoicing documents - in fact some 3.6 million pages. They rely heavily on their document management system but had become increasingly frustrated at the lack of performance and reliability of their previous solution and the difficulty of getting support when things went wrong.
So when Daniel McCann of Toshiba partner SC Technology Group spoke to them about Toshiba’s Kōdo Digital Safe system powered by ELO, they were keen to hear more.
The Challenge
“We were experiencing a lot of downtime with our previous system”, says Peter Macura, Kings Cars’ Group Warranty Manager, “and it was really impacting our business. We have to submit end of month sales reports back to the manufacturers, and based on those, we receive our bonuses, which are essential to the profitability of the business. Due to the unreliability of our previous document management system, we weren’t getting all our documents through from each site on time, which meant we missed claiming bonuses, at a huge financial cost.”
Kings Cars were ready to look at an alternative solution, and Daniel explained how Kōdo Digital Safe, a true enterprise solution, would give them the reliability they needed. Toshiba’s Kōdo Digital Safe solution is powered by ELO. ELO is a best-in-class industry solution for document management. He introduced Peter to David Cheung and Prakash Lal of Toshiba, who added that Kōdo Digital Safe would also give Kings Cars faster search and retrieval through a sophisticated taxonomy and ‘Elastic Search’.
“I could certainly see the benefits”, says Peter, “but I still had two key concerns: firstly, I was worried about the learning curve for the staff with a new system, and secondly we couldn’t afford to have a long period of downtime while all our documents were transferred from one system to another.”
Further discussions with Daniel, David and Prakash put his mind at rest on both counts.
The Solution
“Toshiba really took the time to understand our concerns”, Peter confirms. “They assured us that they could make the user interface on the new system look very much the same as the old system, so that it would be familiar to our staff and they could get up and running quickly. They gave us a test machine, so that our staff could get used to it, and they organised training for our teams.”
The migration of documents was more of a challenge, because the Toshiba Kōdo solution used a different compression format to the old system. That meant that all documents had to be re-scanned into the system. But Kings Cars’ own server was not all that powerful and the exercise would have taken four weeks.
David Cheung of Toshiba takes up the story; “We came up with the idea of hiring in some additional computing power, which enabled us to reduce the document transfer time from four weeks to four days.”
The Result
The new document management system has made a real difference to Kings Cars. “The biggest plus is that we don’t have the downtime we used to have”, says Peter. “The system is really reliable, and because we’re hitting all our deadlines, we’re not missing out on bonuses.”
“We know that support from SC Technology and Toshiba is readily available if we need it. We’ve been able to rationalise our Multi-Function Device (MFD) fleet too, cutting down from 39 to 22 machines across our seven sites.”
The new document taxonomy uses folders and dates, and enables Kings Cars to drill down on the folders. With a more organised structure, it’s a lot easier to find documents.
They can now enforce policies to secure data and sensitive information, use authorisations to limit access to financial documents, and control who can scan and search.
Kings Cars are delighted with the system, and also excited for the future. “We know there is even more we can do with our Kōdo Digital Safe solution”, says Peter, “such as integrating with our Dealer Management system for even greater benefits.”
The Outcomes
Summing up the reasons why the decision to work with Toshiba and SC Technology was such a good one, Peter says; “This was a complex project, but Toshiba and SC Technology made it happen. They are very responsive and their communication throughout the project was excellent. They tailored the solution it to our needs, and will know they will continue to support us with future developments”.
“They provided excellent service, without being overbearing, and explained and reassured us at every stage - treating us, in fact, in exactly the same way that we treat our own clients.”
Kings Cars Case Study
Kings Cars
491/499 Moorabool St,
South Geelong VIC 3220
P: 03 5227 0400
www.kingscars.com.au
SC Technology Group
116 Skipton St, Ballarat VIC 3220
P: 03 5221 2511
www.sctechnologygroup.com.au/
TOSHIBA (Australia) Pty Limited
1 Eden Park Drive
Macquarie Park NSW 2113
Australia
P: 1300 794 202
New Zealand
32 Lunn Avenue, Mt Wellington,
Auckland, New Zealand
P: 09 570 8530
