On average, 15 to 20 trucks pull up to Monoflo's Winchester, Va., facility each day to pick up a shipment of containers. The company's accounting department requires a signed bill of lading from each driver. The bill of lading is a three-part form; one page goes to the driver, one to shipping and one to accounting. The problem for Monoflo was that bills of lading often got lost between shipping and accounting.
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Monoflo uses the EnterpriseIQ ERP system from IQMS, a developer of manufacturing ERP software for the repetitive, process and discrete manufacturing industries. Monoflo became an EnterpriseIQ user in 2007 and runs the latest release of the ERP system, Version 6.6089 SP1.
Tracking transactions across supply chain>
In the summer of 2008, Monoflo became a beta user of Signature Capture, an IQMS application that uses electronic tablets to store handwritten signatures in EnterpriseIQ so that companies can track transactions across the entire enterprise and supply chain. The application converts signatures for storage in the database as an attachment to the bill of lading documents. If the bill is reprinted or viewed at a later time, the signature is part of the document.
A Signature Capture tablet measures 8.5 x 14 inches. The user places on the tablet the paper form that needs to be signed. The pen attached to the tablet writes by ink as well as an electronic signal. The tablet captures the signal and records it to a field in the ERP database. "Whenever you pull the form up, you have that signature on file," said Juan Hernandez, IT manager for Monoflo.
Digital bills of lading stored in ERP system
Now, when a truck pulls up to the Monoflo loading dock, a Monoflo employee goes into EnterpriseIQ to find the bill of lading, then prints out the one copy the driver needs to sign. Monoflo has enlarged the box on the form so that a driver can enter not only his name but also the time, day and carrier. All that information is entered into the database. < p>"Once we hit 'save,' accounting can pull that bill of lading up," Hernandez said. "We've made it so that when shipping closes up their docks, everything that ships is printed on a report, and that report automatically goes to accounting. Accounting doesn't have to print out all bills of lading."
Before deploying the IQMS Signature Capture application, Monoflow evaluated a POS tablet from the same vendor that makes the tablets for IQMS. "We were going to get their programming interface and customize their solution," Hernandez said. "Then we found out IQMS was going to offer the same device."
The only issue Hernandez had with the Signature Capture application was the initial setup. "You have to get the right coordinates on the paper where the signature body was going to be," he said. "Getting that aligned right and changing the coordinates were the big challenges. We would have liked those settings to be global, because we have two tablets running on two machines, and every time we make a change, we have to change both machines."
Aside from that, usage of the tablets is easy. "All you need to know is what serial port you're on, and you're ready to go," Hernandez said. There's little maintenance, he adds. "All you have to do is keep track of the batteries and the ink in the pens."
A side benefit from deploying the Signature Capture system is that Monoflo has reduced its paper usage. "We haven't sat down and put our cost savings into numbers," he said. "But we can see that we're ordering less paper, and we've consolidated printers."