Daniel Louque knows a good thing when he sees it. He found it in a tool that not only helps manage his firms’ internal documents, but also works to provide him with a key marketplace differentiator – the ability to let customers search, store and view their own parts/repair documents online.

As president of Quality Machine Works, a petrochemical equipment repair firm, and Quality Machine Manufacturing, a petrochemical parts maker, Louque knew his companies needed a more efficient way to store and search complicated repair and parts documents.

"About half the calls we get are from customers who either don&singlequot;t know their part number or our drawing number,” Louque explained. “They&singlequot;d describe what it looked like and we&singlequot;d scroll through a spreadsheet and guess which was the right one. Usually, we&singlequot;d end up sending three or four people to dig through our files for 20 minutes or longer to find what we thought they were referring to, and then we&singlequot;d get on the phone with the customerto see if we&singlequot;d guessed right," Louque explained.  "We needed a better way.”

The Quality Machine companies are small, employing less than 100 workers combined. So the tool needed to be simple, requiring minimal technical support, and it had to run on the Windows servers the company already had in place at its two sites in Louisiana.

After six months of searching for a tool that fit the bill, and his budget, Louque finally hit on ColumbiaSoft’s Document Locator Professional with Web Tools. The Windows-based software allowed him to index the company’s thousands of AutoCAD drawings for full-text search and then output them as PDF files. From there, using the Web Tools portion of the product, it’s a simple drag and drop exercise to post them to the Web.

ColumbiaSoft says the software imports between 3,000 and 4,000 documents an hour, a rate that brought Quality Machine’s entire document store online quickly.

“Now, customers check the Web site first, and if they can&singlequot;t find the item on the Web themselves, it takes one person just seconds while on the phone to plug in a search term and find the item we need to discuss,"  Louque says.

The new system resulted in an additional benefit as well – a market differentiator for the Quality Machine companies. Because all documentation is posted to the Web, it provides a document storage and retrieval service for Quality Machine customers who don’t have a system of their own.

"We now have a 24x7 quality department, so that when customers misplace the documentation that went with their order or someone else in that company needs to access it, they can simply go to our Website and it&singlequot;s there for them any time they want it, whether they&singlequot;re in their office or out on-site with a wireless laptop," Louque explained. "Most of our customers can&singlequot;t store their documents as well as we can, so we&singlequot;re providing them a valuable service."