The company

Torshov Bilrekvisita is a Norwegan retail chain dealing in equipment and accesories for cars. The company has 12 stores and a wide range of products ranging from paint and carcare products to tools for car stereos and child safety support systems.

The application

The challenge

Torshov Bilrekvisita has more than 300,000 product codes. The wide range of products has a downside – a complete list of the goods would fill 3,000 pages if printed on paper. The Torshov eployee responsible for getting MultiArchive, Marvin Castle, calculated that the operation of each branch required a full pallet of paper every year.  It was, of course, not only the lists of goods that caused the large amount of paper.

As with many other companies in several similiar branches, Torshov Bilrekvisita sent large amounts of paper vouchers between the 12 stores and the head office. Manual handling of the vouchers often resulted in delays, reminders, and default interest – not to mention the annoyance at misallocations and wasted time when searching for this or that voucher.

"We were drowning in paper – and spent an absurd amount of time on  retrieving information," Marvin Castle recalls.

The solution

Marvin Castle went hunting for a solution and became convinced that this solution should be based on MultiArchive when he saw the efficient integration possibilities to Thorshov Bilrekvisita’s other applications – first and foremost the ERP application Løsning 1 – and that MultiArchive could contribute to improve  efficiency in many other areas than just voucher management.

In addition to report filing, Torshov Bilrekvisita uses the solution for scanning incoming vouchers and workflow and the subsequent approval. The strength of the integration to Løsning 1 becomes apparent in a set-up with which Multi-Support Norway assisted Torshov Bilrekvisita. In this set-up the user is automatically presented with relevant account recommendations based on the supplier of each separate voucher – with a significant decrease in misallocations in Løsning 1 as the result. And at the same time the integrated set-up always ensures the right connection between e.g. a received invoice and the branch which is to be charged.

The benefit

"We have obtained a dramatic reduction in time usage as a consequence of the voucher management and at the same time we have gained full control of our expenses," explains Marvin Castle. He cannot, however, put exact numbers on the savings compared to the investment, but he has no doubt that the calculation is positive. "And at the same time we have achieved the delegation of functionality and responsibility to the individual branches," he emphasizes.

In addition, he observes that they now have considerably more space in the local archive where 60 meters of shelves have disappeared parallel with the electronic filing of both outgoing and incoming papers.

"We can even achieve more savings by exploiting MultiArchive better yet," predicts Marvin Castle who is already full of new ideas. "Among others we are planning to start interpretation of the scanned vouchers, use the web as user interface, and exchange electronic information with our suppliers ... and we have still more ideas."

Contact

Marvin Castle, Torshov Bilrekvisita 

Øivind Sverdrup, Multi-Support Norway