Intelligent Enterprise

Cutting weeks of delay out of what was a slow, snail-mail-based purchasing process, New Jersey Transit has implemented an e-mail-forms-based requisition system that has reduced approval times to just days. And in yet another enhancement, the transit giant is now rolling out scan-enabled digital copiers so users can digitize supporting documents and attach them to the “e-requisitions.”

The third-largest transit system in the country, NJ Transit has more than 240 bus routes, 11 commuter rail lines and three light rail lines linking major points in New Jersey to New York and Philadelphia. Keeping this massive operation moving entails more than 8,000 purchases a year of everything from office supplies to bus and train parts to office space, yet the old, interoffice-mail-based approval process was a constant bottleneck.

“Between the paper handling and all the signatures required, approvals took an average of 42 days, but now we’ve got that down to an average of two days,” says Richard Price, director of materials management.

Deployed in mid 2004, the new system is built on electronic forms capabilities built into Microsoft Outlook. Templates were customized to look like NJ Transit’s usual requisition forms, and simple routing workflows were created in Outlook/Exchange. More than 1,000 employees quickly took to the system, but the one problem that remained was adding paper-based supporting documents, such as pictures, CAD drawings, specifications and proposals. Experiments with low-cost flat-bed scanners proved “far too slow,” says Price, and developers also rejected a network-based scanning system built on digital copiers that was “too difficult for IT to support.”

Ikon Office Solutions, which provided NJ Transit’s fleet of leased Ricoh copiers, recommended eCopy ScanStation OP, a package that integrates a touch-panel screen, keypad and dedicated PC to a digital copier for easy, high-speed scanning. An scan-enabled Ricoh copier was installed at NJ Transit’s headquarters in Newark, and it quickly proved a fit. Users log in at the device with their usual network passwords, and they can scan documents and rotate and manipulate images from the ScanStation OP display. Once they’re finished, users send the images to their personal folder on the system’s hard drive. Back at their desktops, users can attach images and other files to the E-Requisition forms from a tab within Outlook.

“The system is very simple, and even a novice can figure out how to use it in just a couple of minutes,” says Price of ScanStation OP. “It’s also easier for our IT people to manage and get up and running” because it’s essentially a shared drive on the network.

Immediate plans for the E-Requisition system call for six more eCopy-enabled copiers to be installed: five more at headquarters and one at an office in Maplewood where the IT and payroll groups are located. But Price says that other groups and departments are starting to take advantage of the scanning functionality. A document-archiving group, for example, is scanning engineering analyses and structural inspection reports so they have electronic copies that can be widely shared and backed up. And users in the public relations department who once sent copies of news clippings to various executives via interoffice mail are now scanning them and instantly distributing them over e-mail.

“It’s hard to tell where it’s going to end up because so many different groups are using it,” he says, “but I envision these devices may eventually be all over our offices.”