Case Study – Boise Cascade
Alfresco For Scalable Invoice Management and Retention
Boise Cascade is a privately held US manufacturer of paper and wood that is also a major distributor of building materials. It is a leader in areas such as:
- Specialty and Premium Paper Products
- Engineered Wood Products, Plywood, Lumber and Particleboard
- Packaging and Newsprint
- Wholesale Building Materials
The company has over 10,000 employees in the United States, Canada and the UK with revenues in excess of $5bn. Business units include Boise Building Materials Distribution, Boise Packaging and Newsprint, Boise Paper and Boise Wood Products.
The company had a major requirement to update its invoice management system. It wanted to use modern standards and formats. Boise Cascade also wanted to have more control and better management over the distribution and retention of invoices.
“Alfresco offered the functionality of other Enterprise Content Management systems at a fraction of the cost”
Integrating Alfresco with DB2 for List Management
The project had a number of major technical goals. The first was to provide an easy-to-use system for document management for orders, bills of lading and invoices using standards such as PDF. This has to integrate with existing systems and business systems being developed to accept meta-data and work with distribution lists. The distribution lists could be for email, fax or print. Metadata and list information is stored in DB2. The second goal is to retire a number of legacy records management systems.
Alfresco – Simple to Use with Scale-out Over Multiple Machines
Alfresco is able to create a system that is as simple to use as a shared drive, hiding the underlying sophistication of the system. Simple to configure rules govern the lifecycle management of documents. These documents are associated with external meta-data and distribution data that is accessed from DB2. Information is sent out either via email, through RightFax, which can send faxes via email with MIME attached PDF documents or to a printer queue. In the latter case a postfix server is used that will strip out MIME attached PDF documents from an email and place them in a LPR print queue.
The Benefits of Using Alfresco
- Simple Installation
- Ease-of-Use
- Full Document Lifecycle Management – Auditing, Version Control and Document Lifecycle Management
- Significantly Reduced Cost
- Able to Retire Legacy Systems
- No Proprietary Tie-In
“Alfresco‘s ability to scale-out over a number of machines further reduces the Total Cost of Ownership.”
Why Boise Cascade Chose Alfresco
Boise Cascade chose Alfresco as it offered similar functionality and robustness to other enterprise systems but at a significantly lower cost. The ability to “scale-out” by simply adding new low-cost machines was also seen as a key technical and cost differentiator. The use of standards was also seen as important to prevent proprietary tie-in and allow longevity of document access – critical for long-term retention. Another key factor was the experience of the team behind Alfresco that came through in the evaluation process.