DataStore at Work in Distribution

UniPart Group

Responsibility for providing IT services to the entire Unipart Group, the UK’s leading supplier of parts to the automobile industry, falls upon Unipart Information Technology. This group runs an extensive mainframe based computer operation.

Paper producing applications include domestic invoicing to over 3,500 sites, payroll documentation for the groups 4,000 employees, and a large number of internal reports. The internal reports alone include eight weekly and seven monthly runs which are distributed to nearly 300 internal staff. The alone represent 14,000 pages a month. There is a mandatory requirement to maintain invoices and other company documents for a minimum of six years. Because of this, the sheer quantity of paper accumulated is massive.

After years of struggling to reduce the amounts of paper, including the use of microfiche for invoices, Unipart IT found the answer to solving it’s paper mountain: C O L D ( Computer Output to Laser Disk) technology. Essentially, this technology provides on-line management and access of data that has been transferred from the Host mainframe system. The data is indexed, using customer defined criteria, compressed (to maximize the use of storage space) and stored on either magnetic, CD-ROM, or WORM (Write Once Read Many Times) media. The archived data is accessed in much the same way as a database, but in a fraction of the time normally taken to search the traditional microfiche or paper based information.

"The paper mountain was becoming a real problem," says Unipart Information Technology Project Manager Richard Rose. "Not just in storing the sheer volume of paper files, but in being able to access historical information - some of it going back several years, quickly and easily"

"This was having an effect not just on how quickly or slowly people were able to get there hands on information they needed, but also on the business "culture". People tended to "hoard" paper, maintaining their own subset of files and resulting in piles of paper on desks and unnecessary photocopying."

"In fact we had moved to microfiche storage for invoices which we are issuing at the rate of around a million a year. We kept paper hardcopy of invoices for a year and then committed them to microfiche for a further five years to meet legal requirements. But this was only part of the problem. In fact, just our own internal reports were producing around 4,000 sheets of paper each week," says Rose. Even though the company has an extensive networked computer systems- with around 1500 PC s spread over a number of sites, including the headquarters in Cowley, near Oxford, and four other sites in Oxford and the Midlands, reliance on paper remained consistently high.

In the end, the company decided that something had to be done to cut the paper flow and after examination of some of the options, decided to go for COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk) technology. "We looked around the market and initially selected seven prospective suppliers who offered a variety of solutions," says Rose. "Eventually, this was reduced to a shortlist of three by using a scoring system against individual competitive offerings."

Finally, the company selected HiTec (Laboratories) DataStore for Windows, COLD solution. Key factors in the selection of DataStore included ease of use and the fact that HiTec could demonstrate the system effectively at existing user sites. "They gave us a list of users and let us pick out the ones we wanted to see in operation," said Rose.

After running in production for just six months, the system has already produced substantial savings. "Total savings so far in paper and microfiche alone are running at the rate of œ 58,000 per year," says Rose. "But that’s just the beginning. Since we implemented the system and proved to ourselves how much we could cut out traditional paper-based procedures in the most obvious areas, a whole host of other opportunities to reduce costs have come to the surface. For example, we have identified a likely saving of over œ 40,000 a year by using DataStore to capture and make accessable our replenishment analysts reports. These represent a variety of reports, from daily parts schedules, stock situation lists, parts in progress, back order movements and all sorts of others. As a result of the success of the initial business areas covered by the new technology, we are migrating the replenishment reports to DataStore within the next few months."

Additional business areas in which DataStore is now being seriously considered include the company’s Jaguar parts division, it’s European parts operations and warehouse distribution facilities in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, as well as the domestic invoicing operations of Unipart’s Truck and Trailer Parts Division.

Material cost savings are just part of the picture. In addition to actually reducing paper, printing and microfiche expenses, the system provides a variety of positive benefits, for example, daily audit trail report archiving, allows any transaction, however historical, to be accessed immediately. Another general benefit to all departmental users is the ability to easily extract and import data from reports stored with DataStore into other PC applications, such as spreadsheets, word processors and popular databases. Now that administrative staff can now be assured that they can get at vital information quickly, there is no need to "hoard" paper on desks and have to rummage endlessly through old files and documents.

The company is now looking at Hitec’s OLE2, advanced application programming interface (API) which allows users to write custom applications around the DataStore system, or interface it directly from proprietary systems.

Additional Distribution Customers include:

BACK