Success Story:
Hillco, Ltd. (Britthaven, Inc.)

• Hillco/Britthaven
• Industries: Health Care & Insurance
• Integration: Accounts Payable
• Location: Kinston, No. Carolina

Case Study: The Problem

Hillco is a multidimensional conglomerate that owns the nation's largest privately held chain of nursing homes as well as an insurance company for group health and auto coverage. With involvement in such paper-intensive industries, family-owned Hillco needed to find a way to stay organized, increase productivity and keep costs in check.

The answer for Hillco was to implement a comprehensive document imaging system that would support the storage and retrieval of the company's accounts payable records, invoices, checks and the like. In Hillco's business, Federal, state, and local audits are standard and being able to produce any given form on demand is critical to smooth operations.

Selection Criteria: The Decision

When Hillco decided to implement its imaging system, the company was running on a UNIX platform and needed a vendor that could work with this specification while still offering all of the sophisticated features of imaging technology. Feith presented the most attractive solution for Hillco's imaging needs and did so with an unparalleled degree of personal attention. The chosen package was the Feith Document Database (FDD), a complete imaging, document management, COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk), and workflow solution.

"I wanted someone who was going to listen to me and then come up with a solution that would work for me. I needed to develop custom applications, and insisted on working with a compnay which could develop specific APIs," explained Bobby Jefferson, head of Corporate Development for Hillco. After searching several leading imaging vendors, Hillco selected Feith and has enjoyed a successful relationship thus far. "Feith's competition was too limited. We looked at another company, but when we talked with Feith and told them, 'we want to go here,' they helped us do it."

Success Story: The Solution

Before Feith, Hillco limited its imaging installation to only certain areas of the business, testing the system's capabilities and exploring how the company might extend its use for the greatest benefit. Since then, they have been making "wholesale changes," according to Jefferson, including a migration from UNIX to Windows NT. It currently requires two to three man-hours to run maintenance and other routine tasks, compared with eight to nine on the UNIX platform.

"Since we migrated to NT, the ease of management is considerably easier, the cost of ownership is lower, user understanding of the system is better, and the performance has increased," Jefferson said.

On a typical day, Hillco creates 50,000kb of images. One of the most valuable features of the Feith Document Database is its web interface, WebFDD, which brings images into a PDF format for easy manipulation. Hillco staffers are comfortable with this system and can do searches by employee or content. FDD generates all of the associated pages and sends them right to the user's desktop, where he or she can print it out or work with it in any way. "The man-hours we're saving from not having to search manually for paper documents is incredible," said Jefferson.

Also using WebFDD, Jefferson provides Hillco's auditors with a log-on ID that grants them access to the company's records. This spares Hillco staff from having to take the time to collect this information, which previously drew considerable resources away from other important work.

In the accounts receivable and payroll departments, Hillco is in the process of connecting its 54 Britthaven nursing homes, located in North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky, to corporate headquarters via WebFDD. Currently, the company has to send reports from these departments to the accountants at its various sites by overnight delivery. Each report is composed of 500 double-sided pages. With the ease and convenience of FDD, these same reports will be shared electronically, saving Hillco the steep shipping charges associated with this task and allowing personnel quicker access to needed information. Moreover, to prevent unauthorized personnel from viewing sensitive payroll data, WebFDD has a redaction feature that lets the sender hide parts of a document.

In the accounts payable department, Hillco uses Lawson's web portal interface to grab the needed fields and build a URL to Feith's WebFDD. This process is enabled by inserting a button on Hillco's AP Invoice screen. Hillco can then open the document (invoice) in another window when needed. The process works very well for Hillco and the integration between the three systems was very easy to implement.

The scalability of FDD has also made it easy for Hillco to move from its original small installation to the more extensive system in place today. "Feith's support engineering team has been very responsive and helpful, and they got everything done on site and on time," Jefferson commented. "For example, there was a great deal of work involved in the migration to NT because we were also migrating from an Informix database to Oracle, but the Feith people took the time and attention to get it all done right." That was especially important, given the scalability issues that Jefferson needed to address. "When we started, we had a 1GB magnetic partition, a 20-disk jukebox, and a 1.2GB optical disk drive. Now, we've expanded far beyond that. We moved to a cluster of 4 Windows NT servers, along with two 5.2GB 80-disk cabinets," he said. "We installed FDD and loved it. When we added the jukebox, it worked, just like it's supposed to."

The Payoff: Continuing Success

Based on the success and improved efficiencies Hillco has already realized with Feith, the company is now considering adding another component to its Feith installation that utilizes voice response technology. This will be used by Hillco to fax benefits information to employees via a completely automated voice recognition system.

Hillco has earned a well-deserved reputation by taking care of people. Feith is earning its stripes by taking care of the documents which help Hillco provide better continuing service.