Running two very different and growing companies with far-flung offices and foreign locales can make electronic capture of daily business documents unwieldy. Ty Inc., Westmont, Ill., the maker of Beanie Babies® and an owner of upscale resort properties, was finding that the effectiveness and efficiency of its 10-year-old enterprise content management (ECM) system was showing its age.

Running two very different and growing companies with far-flung offices and foreign locales can make electronic capture of daily business documents unwieldy. Ty Inc., Westmont, Ill., the maker of Beanie Babies and an owner of upscale resort properties, was finding that the effectiveness and efficiency of its 10-year-old enterprise content management (ECM) system was showing its age.

Ty relied on an optical disk jukebox-based retrieval system with four document scanning machines to digest the company’s pack slips and invoices and scan them on to platters from which the company could pull information. With different architectural components, such as the content management application, optical disc servers, network file server and SQL server, as well as several other support programs, maintaining applications on numerous workstations was rather complex and subsequently, difficult to grow, not to mention costly in terms of licensing. In tech time, 10 years using the same set up is an eternity.

So Ty and its MIS Project Supervisor, Jim Gio, were at a crossroads. “The original imaging system, while it worked perfectly at the time, was becoming a burden,” says Gio. “We really had to simplify it.”

To read more, download the PDF: ty_cost_saas.pdf