Hanor works leaner With DocStar

The Hanor Family of Companies, the tenth largest pork producer in the U.S., went live in March 2017 with the DocStar Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with advanced workflow, reporting, and intelligent data capture.

Established by the Kronseder family of Germany, the company is part of a worldwide agricultural organization. Today, Hanor employs 650 individuals at 780 facilities located in 7 states.

These operations and the organization’s ongoing growth have been predominantly based on the continual investment in strategic alliances and constant upgrade of feed, transport, management information, processing, and genetics programs.

The company selected DocStar after more than 2 years of evaluation and comparison, primarily for its ability to improve productivity through enhanced interdepartmental collaboration, as well as eliminate time-consuming manual processes.

DocStar enables this by storing documents from virtually any input device in a centralized location that’s accessible from nearly anywhere. It also integrates with existing software applications to automatically capture, save, and index records for easy retrieval or tracking across multiple versions.

“Prior to DocStar, we did everything manually,” said Joe Bradford, corporate IT manager, The Hanor Company.  Bradford. “Invoices from our regional facilities were either faxed or emailed to our main headquarters for processing and approval. It was incredibly cumbersome and time consuming to track several thousand invoices through the approval and payment process. In addition, documents sometimes disappeared somewhere along the way, making it incredibly hard to backtrack and find stragglers. Sometimes, we weren’t even aware that something was lost until we heard from the vendor.”

DocStar eliminated these challenges by enabling Hanor to quickly and easily receive either paper or electronic records to then be routed to locations across the country or approved digitally. The solution also provided the ability to instantaneously search and track the status of invoices via numerous criteria—such as vendor name and check number.

This was achieved by centralizing the receipt of each invoice into one console linked to the company’s general ledger.

According to Bradford, another advantage is that the DocStar solution is 50% faster than its previous system. In the past, the electronic receipt of 80-page fax documents would clog the delivery of other paperwork. Now, the use of multiple servers has enabled the company to receive separate documents simultaneously—reducing bottlenecks.