Category 5 Imaging

When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, many companies were forced to have employees work from home, Category 5 Imaging was no exception. This change in workplace revealed an interesting situation within the company that had a modern digital workflow; they still had a reliance on paper documents for their approval and invoicing process. This reliance on paper required sales, customer service and accounting personnel to make visits to the office in order to complete internal invoicing process.

These Innovation Meetings have provided our employees with a forum to participate in identifying opportunities to improve our process.”
– Ben Richardson Manager, Category 5 Imaging

Ben Richardson, Category 5’s Operations Manager, saw this as an opportunity to further Category 5’s process automation and eliminate the remaining unnecessary touchpoints in their workflow. Ben’s solution to this situation was to hold a meeting with representatives from the affected departments. These meetings proved successful in identifying solutions to the remaining paper trail, allowing Category 5 to eliminate additional costly touchpoints in their operation.

Due to the success of the initial meetings, Category 5 continued the program by holding monthly Innovation Meetings as a regular. These meetings have fostered an internal culture of continuous improvement. During one of these meetings, their accountant brought forward an interesting case for consideration.

Category 5 Imaging uses EFI Pace as its ERP and uses the accounting module. This software module allows for the batch processing of invoices, a handy feature considering the volume of transactions printers handle. The problem was that many customers require a separate invoice file for each job, and there may be 15-20 jobs per day for an active customer. In its present configuration, a staff member has to manually separate the batch PDF files into individual invoice files. This process could take up to 1-hour per day for a single active account. This arduous task made them wonder: Could there be a better way?

Significans Automation programmers created a script to process the batch PDF files into individual PDF files. This project took about 4-hours to implement, test and train. Today, this script is saving 5-hours a week of tedious manual labour for the accounting department.

Category 5 approached Adobe and EFI for help; neither could provide a faster solution to the problem. Ben then shared this experience with Significans Automation’s James Robinson who was overseeing in an integration project with Category 5. James contacted one of Significans programmers and together, they created a script to process the batch PDF files into individual PDF files. This project took about 4-hours to implement, test and train. Today, this script is saving 5-hours a week of tedious manual labour for the accounting department.

Our employees are more accepting of change now that they are directly involved in the process.”
– Ben Richardson Manager, Category 5 Imaging

“These Innovation Meetings have provided our employees with a forum to participate in identifying opportunities to improve our process”, Ben Richardson proudly reported. He then added, “Our employees are more accepting of change now that they are directly involved in the process.”

That small investment returned a rapid ROI of less than three months, created a very happy accountant and continues to foster a culture of innovation

Innovation Meetings provided Category 5 Imaging with three big wins from one small investment. That small investment returned a rapid ROI of less than three months, created a very happy accountant and continues to foster a culture of innovation and improvement for the Burlington, Ontario printer.