WHY MACFARLANES CHOSE THE TOKOPEN PRINT ROOM SOLUTION

- Document management for Legal documents in a Print room environment

Macfarlanes, a leading City law firm, works closely with clients, helping them to achieve their objectives both in the UK and internationally. While not one of the largest law firms in the City, its lawyers consistently rank amongst the leaders in their field in each of the areas of their practice: corporate, property, litigation & dispute resolution and private client. The firm's clients include leading participants in many industrial and commercial sectors as well as high net worth individuals. Much of the firm's work is international and the firm works with many of the finest independent law firms throughout the world.

As part of its day-to-day operations, Macfarlanes prints, distributes and archives a vast range of documents. The firm's print room processes literally hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation a month. Now the firm has implemented Tokairo's TokOpen document management solution.

Benefits include resolution of multi-format document problems, faster document processing and distribution, more effective and secure archiving and provision of faster access to documents with more sophisticated and comprehensive search functionality. TokOpen complements and enhances Macfarlanes' existing investment in a variety of legacy imaging and document processing systems and provides a resilient and secure platform for improved productivity.

A key issue was the ability of Tokairo's TokOpen system to provide an effective and elegant solution to a challenging 'roll your sleeves up' print room solution that would support previous systems investment.

"We came to the decision that we needed a solution that could take anything we threw at it and was future-proof. We wanted something that was resilient and cost-effective. Cost was a significant issue as was the increasing trend for clients to send us information in electronic format instead of traditional paper files. These include PhotoShop, Pagemaker, AutoCAD and Xerox DigiPath and Acrobat as well as many others. This emphasised the need to cope with electronic formats more intelligently".

"We had a number of copiers from Toshiba. They had a relationship with Tokairo, and they suggested we contact them, which we did. Initially, Tokairo tried to interest us in an invoicing application, but it was the global power of the system that impressed us and convinced us that their product was right for our archiving need".

"Initial demonstrations from Tokairo took place in 2001 during which time we resolved a number of hardware issues and finally established that the solution would provide full universality - basically, the ability to print and archive anything. We found that TokOpen could handle files from our Xerox, Toshiba and Ricoh print-engines. This enabled us to maximise our existing copier investment," says Turner.

One of the problems that had to be faced in the print room environment was the fact that Xerox DocuPath jobs actually consist of multiple files - all treated as a single document. This is not the way in which TokOpen normally manages documents. To address this, Tokairo employed their DigiTok application tool which presents a collection of DigiPath files to TokOpen as a single document to be managed. Another key issue that was satisfactorily resolved by Tokairo was that of the migration of Index DocuTech Extended Storage files (IDES) to TokOpen. This has yet to be implemented.

Combining this with TokOpen's Check-In/Check-Out functionality provided a convenient way of managing the archive and update control of the print jobs. Tokairo also undertook the conversion of the existing DigiPath archives, writing an import routine to extract the existing documents with their index information. As well as importing from the existing DigiPath archives, the import was modified to absorb all the existing documents scattered around the various network drives in the print room. All imported documents were then OCR processed in background mode and a full text index was created to allow searching for content.

Many of the existing documents were not adequately indexed, which is where the TokOpen Full Text Indexer played a vital role. This means that documents can be located through defined content criteria. For example, the command: find all documents containing a particular keyword. This makes it much easier to locate previously lost documents.

As well as for the DigiPath documents, TokOpen is also used to manage other document types including PDF files, Word documents, spreadsheets, CAD drawings and many others. New, emerging formats can also be accommodated as they appear.

Document indexes can be established as mandatory to force users to enter index information when entering new documents. Saved searches can be used to list recently created documents with missing index fields. The Check-In/Out feature is used to ensure only one user can make changes at any one time, and TokOpen's New Version feature can be used to make changes based on existing documents.

Benefits? "We are now moving into a print room environment in which we can handle virtually any document format; where we can archive and swiftly access material by convenient and easy criteria; where all users can actually get at information they need - quickly and reliably. And we don't lose anything. The bottom line is this: we can provider a better a more professional service," says Turner.

"We can now handle monthly or weekly sweeps to check anything that an operator has failed to archive. Things used to get lost. Now, they don't. Searching is lightening fast by a very wide range of search criteria, and each user can easily establish their own search titles," says Turner. "Ultimately, we will save on storage space because we can compress graphics and restore them without loss of quality. The TokOpen solution gives us very comprehensive legacy document OCR search capability. This means we can go back years to recover information that previously would have been difficult if not impossible to find - and print out in any desired format".

"As we migrate to colour, the TokOpen system means that there are no problems and no service provision problems for users. In day-to-day operations, we can now get reprints much more quickly and easily. For example, some old files that might have taken up to two days to finally get hold of can now be recovered in just half an hour. A typical example is a search I launched recently. This would formally have taken anything up to an hour. It was achieved in 30 seconds."

"Essentially, the TokOpen solution for our print room means saving time and cost - and getting at archived information faster and more easily. We now have one consolidated database instead of many - and there is no degradation of data

"Underlying these benefits is increased resilience and security - and a safe platform for future applications. An important factor is the role that Tokairo has assumed in being proactive, taking pains to understand our business issues and providing support".