Angel Springs

“The e-docs system does everything that we require. I have found e-docs to be efficient, professional and helpful, something that is of course very important to us! Their customer service is excellent for any requirements that we have and their response is always very fast”.

The Organisation
Angel Springs Holdings Limited are a national company which provides pure English water and watercooler services to the home and workplace via dedicated regional centres throughout the UK. The business was formed in December 2003 after the purchase of three long-established watercooler companies - SPA Spring Water based in Halifax, Angel Springs based in Wolverhampton and Chiltern Hills based in Hertfordshire.

Each of these companies had developed individual reputations over the years for delivering high-quality products and local service, but when they were brought together a brand new organisation was created. This company still offered the same excellent level of local service and support, but was now also able to offer national coverage as well. All backed up by a highly-skilled team of management and staff with a wealth of proven experience in the industry. Angel Springs are committed to giving their customers the best local service available in the marketplace and their business is structured to ensure that their levels of customer satisfaction are consistently high. This philosophy and culture – and the level of focus on customer service, has very quickly made Angel Springs the fastest growing watercooler company in the UK today.

Since the acquisition Angel Springs have invested heavily in new integrated systems, a new fleet of vehicles and many new staff members, to ensure that the business can provide the best service to be found anywhere in the marketplace. They promote them selves as offering high quality local customer service teams, local distribution depots who know all of their customers and their individual needs, regular deliveries which are on time every time and also, very importantly, precise and accurate invoicing – making sure they get it right first time.

The Challenge
Meeting these commitments was always going to be a challenge and many factors had to be taken into account to ensure that customers really did receive the level of service which Angel Springs said they could offer. A key part of this was the decision to create a business from three existing companies which were spread throughout the UK, rather than just setting up one single office.

Angel Springs looked at their two main competitors, who operate on this basis, and decided that there was no way these companies could offer the level of service that their customers were asking for. A regional office base was necessary, but these offices needed to be able to manage information accurately and efficiently whilst also transferring it between sites where necessary. Something that is relatively straightforward to do with electronic information, but somewhat more difficult to accomplish with hard copy documentation such as delivery notes.

Two key elements of their customer service commitment were accurate deliveries and accurate invoicing. Both of these factors, if not carried out impeccably, could lead to unhappy customers who then move to competitive suppliers. Not something which Angel Springs was planning to let happen! The management team needed to look at the systems and procedures which the existing businesses had in place and choose the best of breed in each case, or bring in new systems where required.

The Decision
It was very apparent that Angel Springs needed some form of document management system. John Murphy, Southern Regional Director for the business (with national responsibility for IT) explains further:

“We have around 30,000 customers and that figure is increasing all the time. Based on the need to visit each customer once a month to supply new water bottles and cups, that means we are making 10,000 deliveries per month from each of the three offices. That’s somewhere in the region of 500 delivery notes per day. Managing those pieces of paper effectively is vital for us. Not only for our own procedures to ensure that deliveries have been made correctly and that accurate invoices can be generated, but also to enable us to deal efficiently with any customer queries which do occur.

When looking at the requirement for management of information, both electronic and hard copy, we quickly identified that the Wolverhampton and Hertfordshire offices had no systems in place at all. However, the Halifax office, who were previously SPA Spring Water, were already using a software package which allowed scanning and indexing of all hard copy documentation, as well as management of electronic information. This was the e-docs document management system.

The Solution
We looked closely at what e-docs offered and we also spoke with the users at the Halifax office, who were very complimentary about the system. However, to ensure that we chose the right document management software to take the new business forward, we also looked at a number of other product offerings in the marketplace. Having done that we came to the conclusion that the e-docs system provided everything that we required and that we should maximise the existing investment and roll the product out across all of our branches”.

Angel Springs carried out this activity within a few months of the company forming and also back-scanned three month’s worth of past delivery notes. They have now been running e-docs across all three site for more than a year and are using the system to scan and index all of their 30,000 a month delivery notes, as well as all of their new customer contracts and other hard copy documentation. At the Halifax office, which has of course been working with e-docs for that much longer, they have also moved all of their Human Resources function over to e-docs as well, meaning that staff contracts and other forms of documentation which require hard copies can now also be scanned and indexed effectively. This function will also be rolled out across the other two regional offices as the business develops.

Each of the three identical e-docs implementations functions as a stand-alone system, but with all scanned documents being stored on a single terminal server. This means that all three sites can access information which has been scanned and indexed at any of the offices, not just their own. This is ideal for situations where Angel Springs have national clients and these are serviced from two or three of the regional offices. A single ‘Customer File’ is created on the central server and all information and documentation pertaining to that customer can be stored in one location for easy retrieval by any staff member, regardless of their location. This has been especially useful for situations where customer ‘ownership’ has moved from one office to another, as was the case with the Halifax office, who took on responsibility for a number of customers in the North West who had previously been managed by the Wolverhampton branch.

As the offices become more integrated, the e-docs system also allows documentation to be scanned in one location and then indexed at another. This has proved extremely useful as they have a number of customers who are ‘owned’ by the Wolverhampton office but then supplied by the Halifax office. It is therefore Halifax’s responsibility to scan in the delivery notes but these are then indexed by the Wolverhampton office, providing a very flexible means of working which precisely meets the company’s needs.

The Future
As the requirement for flexible and remote working increases, Angel Springs are talking with e-docs about the possibility of implementing e-port™, the web-enabled version of e-docs, which will allow them to scan, index and retrieve documentation anywhere in the country via a traditional web browser, using any compatible device. This will give maximum flexibility for Angel Springs - and because e-port™ can also be viewed via a PDA, this means that the ability for field-based delivery staff to accessed stored information would also become a possibility. John Murphy concludes:

“e-docs does everything that we require and we believe that it will continue to meet our needs well into the future. After looking at the existing system which our Halifax office were using, we could quickly see that it did the job and that the service levels which they were receiving were good. We have also been able to purchase scanners for each site from e-docs as well, meaning that all of our support issues for both software and hardware can be handled by the one supplier with no compatibility issues.

As the company’s main interface with e-docs I have found them to be efficient, professional and helpful, something that is of course very important to us! Their customer service is excellent for any requirements that we have and their response is always very fast”.