Food Servicer Saves Space and Time with GlobalSearch and GlobalCapture

Meet Kuna Food Service

Kuna Food Service started in 1918 as a small, family-owned butcher shop in St. Louis. Nearly 100 years later, the company had grown into one of the largest independent, privately-owned food service companies in the Midwest, distributing wholesale to restaurants, institutional facilities, and retail locations regionally and through national partners.

Challenge

10 years ago, according to Kuna Food’s IT Director, Tim Boyle, with the company’s immense growth came a surge in records and paperwork. Business-critical documents took up countless file cabinets that quickly confiscated their office space. These documents also became increasingly difficult to locate and retrieve, leading to wasted time and missed productivity.

“Now that we’re such a large company, we have many more invoices, purchase orders, and bills of lading that come through the office daily, ” said Boyle. “We were constantly searching through file cabinets, trying to locate the right documents.”

Although unaware of how their upcoming investment in a digital transformation would affect this at the time, Kuna also scanned 50-100 invoices daily, and the service department filed about 200 paper copies. In short, Kuna needed a better way to store, organize, and retrieve their documents and had an underlying need for more efficient invoice processing as well.

Solution: GlobalSearch® and GlobalCapture®

After a reseller recommendation, Kuna evaluated a few products before deciding on Square 9’s ECM solution, GlobalSearch. This reseller offered local support for GlobalSearch, which appealed to Kuna because of their limited capacity to staff and support a system full time.

“At first, we were just interested in the document management features, and that was straightforward,” said Boyle. “We then started looking for additional solutions to automate other processes.”

It didn’t take long for Kuna to realize the potential Square 9’s document capture solution, GlobalCapture, had for their invoice processing. Shortly after that, Kuna decided to implement GlobalCapture to automate the flow of both invoices and checks into their system.

Benefit

After a seamless adoption by Kuna Food’s accounts payable department, other parts of the company quickly began to see the new system’s benefits. Kuna eliminated over 25 file cabinets and saved 15 hours a week using automated workflows. An additional 20 hours a week were also saved filing invoices, leading to a 20% increase in productivity. Kuna wasn’t shy to capitalize on the additional functionality of their purchase either. For example, GlobalCapture spotted accounting errors almost instantly, bringing users directly to the error for correction. The company also used GlobalCapture to validate captured information by moving PDFs directly into a GlobalSearch hot folder from their ERP system.

Results

To Kuna Foods, GlobalSearch and GlobalCapture proved to be invaluable tools. So much so that the company later implemented two additional digital transformation solutions from Square 9. GlobalForms, Square 9’s web forms management system, saved Kuna $5,500 annually on paper-based employment applications, marketing forms, and requests. Technicians also use GlobalForms to report service calls from their mobile devices while in the field. In addition, Square 9’s workflow automation system, GlobalAction, improved the productivity of Kuna’s invoice approval process by 50% and allowed them to take full advantage of early payment discounts. When Boyle was asked if he would recommend Square 9, he confidently responded, “Absolutely. I am a firm believer in the product.”