Standard Oil of Connecticut, with more than 38,000 customers throughout the state, has embraced a paperless data storage system that makes customer relations and deliveries so efficient, the company could move onto a Web-storage system that was introduced in the past year.
Westbrook Technologies, headquartered in Branford, introduced its Fortis system to Standard Oil back in 2006 to rid the family-owned company of a paper storage system that encompassed two large warehouses. Standard Oil’s three divisions – Standard Petroleum, Standard Security and Standard Insurance – all use Fortis to scan in paper documents such as bills, service receipts and customer complaints.
“With Fortis, everything is readily available,” said John Mahony, vice president of Bridgeport-based Standard Oil. “Every time a customer calls, we use Fortis to bring up everything.”
Standard Oil invested more than $100,000 in the system, but the expenditure had been worthwhile, Mahony said. In the four years since Fortis was introduced, the company has filed away nearly 9 million documents.
For a company that handles 30 customer billing discrepancies per day and makes 170,000 annual deliveries, Fortis can call up the proper documents in a matter of minutes, as opposed to the old system that took days, Mahony said. This offers a competitive advantage in the volatile energy market.
“We had two warehouses full of paper; now they are full of tires and spare parts,” Mahony said. “We won’t have a paperless office, but we get rid of the paper pretty quickly.”
Fortis debuted on the market in 2000, but Westbrook Technologies came out with a new version in the past 12 months called Fortis Blue. The advantage of the new document management system is it is all Web-based, so a company’s physical on-site storage is minimal.
“People use it in a lot of different ways,” said Jon Langdon, Westbrook director of professional services. “We are helping business be more efficient.”
