For Portsmouth, N.H.-based Be Productive Systems, necessity really was the mother of invention. Its sister company, Recordsforce, a document scanning service bureau, has been in operation since late 2001, providing outsourced content management services. Necessity launched the company into software development, with the result being a cloud-based production management solution designed for service bureaus and in-house scanning operations.
“We started with the idea of being a ‘just-in-time’ document scanning service provider focusing more on traditional documents,” says Bill Becker, CEO and president of the company. “As the company grew we didn’t really have a good way to maintain control over our operation in a way that was compliant with our transactional clients’ desires for transparency, speedy delivery, and really high accuracy.”
Specifically, Recordsforce had one client that was a very large, FDA-regulated company, with quality requirements much higher than those a typical small business would have in place. “As a result of those regulations and the type of work we were doing for them, they held us to a very high standard,” Becker says. “We decided that we needed to step up our game around compliance and quality.”
It was that need that led to the next step.
“We needed to make changes to our business that aligned with the types of work we wanted to do—high-touch, high-quality, fast turnaround document imaging and data extraction services,” states Becker. “In order to manage that we had to create a type of software that did not exist.” And create they did—researching, developing, and finally building what Becker says is “the only document scanning production management system on Earth. No one really had anything like what we had made–or if they did, they weren’t out telling anybody about it.”
“We know there are image and data capture systems out there,” clarifies chief marketing officer Michael Dailey, “but there wasn’t anything that was helping to capture as well as manage the people and processes around that.”
Systems like SAP and Oracle, while effective ERP systems weren’t granular enough for Becker. “None of those systems reached down to the individual worker to help guide that worker in how long it takes them to do their work, where the profit is, how a job is being delivered,” he adds.
The Production Manager job tracking management system, which is the result of those years of development, does all those things. “We developed an area of expertise around getting documents that come in today back out today or tomorrow for our clients,” explains Becker. “It’s a living, breathing data environment.”
With the development of Production Manger came Be Productive Systems (BPS), a spinoff of Recordsforce that sells and markets the Production Manager system. “We decided we should spin off a new company whose focus is selling this system to in-house document imaging departments and document imaging service companies,” says Becker.
Two words Becker uses a lot when discussing the Production Manager software are compliance and accountability, specifically when dealing with vertical markets where documentation is critical. “There is a difference between doing a good job and having documented evidence that you do a good job,” he says. “You can do your best, but you have to be able to show a customer or an auditor evidence of all the steps you went through to ensure the work was done correctly.”
An example of Production Manager’s documentation capabilities is the way the changes are made to work instructions. Traditionally, companies have a three-ring binder of printed instructions somewhere in the production facility. If someone has a question they can go find the binder, flip through it to find the customer and read the work instructions. But that, says Becker, isn’t good enough. “It doesn’t answer the question, ‘how do I know the person doing my work is using the most recent version of the instructions?’” In Production Manager, an operator performing a task with updated task instructions must acknowledge that change and certify they understand it. That certification is then stored as a training event in the system.
“If you had any trepidation (about whether) anyone in my operation is working from the most recent instructions, I could take you into the system and show you exactly what day and at what moment they finished that training and were ready to go forward,” states Becker. “That level of compliance to change control is very rare in our industry.”
“We’ve had discussions with in-house people managing copy centers in large office buildings, and compliance has been a really big deal for them,” adds Dailey. “Usually it’s the organizations that are big enough to have the software and a department – usually a larger public company that’s under state or federal scrutiny, compliance has been a key factor.”
It’s that type of company that BPS would like to do more business with as well. The company has its own direct sales force, but is also looking for channel partners with access to in-house document management centers. “The industry really hides these in-house operations—not on purpose, but it happens,” said Becker.
“AIIM, for example, knows about the service bureaus but not the in-house operations,” Dailey reveals. “We need channel partners that already have hardware that’s installed in these locations so we can go in and help their customers be better at providing the internal service of converting documents and extracting data.”
The dealer relationship doesn’t need to be one-sided. Becker feels Production Manager software can help the traditional dealer be more successful as well. “We help folks that are primarily hardware-focused find a way to add a residual income stream into their client base. You may get some maintenance on a scanner, but if I can sell software-as-as-service to the in-house scanning operation, a copier sales company can turn that into a monthly recurring annuity stream that the copier or software system purchased outright wouldn’t provide.
“We’re not just the lowest-priced box,” Becker continues. “We’ve got a solution that manages your environment, along with the hardware that works in that environment.”
A software solution that can help move hardware as well seems like a winning invention. “You can go out and build a mousetrap and then go look for mice, but why?” Becker asks. “We had a problem, and we solved it.” And now BPS and Production Manager are solving problems for a lot of other companies as well.
