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Total Military Management
Logistics company that serves the U.S. military improves customer service with Hyland’s OnBase and Managed Services.
Customer service and efficiency are everything for Total Military Management (TMM).
The logistics company, founded in 2003, maintains a network of trusted transportation companies to service shipments for military families. According to TMM, the company coordinates more moves for the U.S. Department of Defense “than any other single entity.”
The challenge
When Eileen Calhoun started working at TMM, there was a heavy reliance on paper, to put it mildly. The stacks “were sometimes as tall as I was,” she said.
Calhoun had the pile down to a science. But she also knew it was time for a technology upgrade.
The paperwork wasn’t easily searchable, and the document entry process was prone to human error. That could lead to missing information and delayed payments.
“Our primary responsibility when we sign that contract with our vendors is to be responsible for all of those things,” Calhoun said. “How do we make it better?”
TMM wanted a scalable content services platform that would provide visibility of its documents and automate the indexing and retrieving of keywords. The company also needed a platform to assist in the processing of invoices.
Early struggles with product replacements highlighted the need for a quality partner and quality solution. A TMM manager who had experience working with Hyland recommended the company.
“We knew we needed something to store a lot of documents and be able to easily retrieve it,” Calhoun said. “Not only that, but we need to have full-time access to those documents.”
The solution
OnBase, a Hyland content services platform, was the “most well-rounded” of the solutions TMM considered, Calhoun said.
Now, all items that enter TMM’s database are placed in workflows with some level of pre-indexing, validation and exception processing. Invoices have multiple touchpoints, which provide timely updates to customers.
TMM also selected Hyland Managed Services, which helps organizations enhance, develop and optimize key solutions. The move has helped the company “reap the full benefits” of its technology investment, Calhoun said.
With Hyland Managed Services, TMM ensures that its systems are routinely serviced, fine-tuned and up to date.
Managed Services is “very patient with me and my questions,” Calhoun said. The much-needed help has allowed her to focus on other work, such as building workflows.
“I’m learning, rather than just sitting there listening to the support person breathe while they tool around on my environment and I try to follow along,” she said.
This has helped us raise our (customer service) scores, which keeps us in that first tier, which allows us to get those first picks, which allows us to get better contracts, better rates and so on down the line.
—Eileen Calhoun, Business Systems Analyst, TMM
The difference
Centralized, convenient document storage: Too often, workflows were conducted in Outlook, which isn’t an effective way for TMM to audit documents, Calhoun said. As the company gains buy-in and introduces OnBase to more departments, employees will no longer have to toggle back and forth between multiple systems.
Having everything in OnBase significantly reduces the missing and delayed requests that negatively impact customers and cause extra work for employees.
Improved workflows: “We’ve definitely gone from, ‘Oh no, we need three bodies to manually check this flag or manually grab this report that could have been sent to them,’ to ‘Hey, maybe we have a new workflow that we can build.’ It’s exciting that’s one of the first ideas now!” Calhoun said.
The improvements have cut down duplicate requests for paperwork, which, in turn, leads to productivity and efficiency gains. Also important: TMM bills its customers on time and receives discounts for paying invoices early.
Enhanced customer experiences: Organizations that work with the military receive customer service scores. A higher score means a higher tier. And a higher tier means a better contract.
The gains have helped TMM become a leader in the market. More importantly, the improvements have produced positive results for military families who are being relocated.
Timely communication: The military requires companies to submit paperwork, enter shipment dates and weights, and communicate with its members within a three-day span.
“That was impossible to complete with the paper (processes),” Calhoun said.
It’s possible now, and employees scrambling to meet deadlines and working really long hours isn’t “so much of a thing anymore,” she said.
Best practices
If you’re planning a major technology upgrade, Calhoun has some advice.
- Train your administrator BEFORE you get the solution. She adds that “your OnBase admin and your workflow admin should not necessarily be the same people.”
- This isn’t a single-person initiative. “Get a team. Fight for a team,” Calhoun said.
- As an implementation strategy, “trust the people that do the day-to-day tasks more than the people that supervise those tasks,” she said.