JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Just like folks abandoned their eight-track players for cassette tapes, Seaboard Credit Union has junked the jukebox and CDs for a storage and retrieval solution that combines lasers and Internet tools to save space, money and time. The CU's new system, provided by a local vendor, ImageStoreHouse, replaces an in-house CD jukebox system, “an older HP that was running out room, slow and giving us a lot of maintenance issues and errors,” says Ken Watson, IT director at $119 million Seaboard. The customized content solution centers on computer output to laser disk (COLD) storage, on-site scanning and life-cycle records management with online and physical access. ImageStoreHouse's comprehensive solution also replaced Seaboard's previous combination of microfilm, hard copies and an off-the-shelf document management product, Watson says. The new setup saves Seaboard CU time, space and money in several ways. “They store for us just about all our member information, such as loan documents, signature cards and reports and so on, so we save the space that way. And now we scan all our checks, instead of microfilming them, and that saves us about $2,000 a month,” Watson says. That alone paid for the system in its first year, he says. The staff would create daily microfilms of transaction activity and generate internal reports that were stored on a CD jukebox. Those CDs, as well as hard copies of signature cards and loan documents and other paperwork, were then stored onsite. “With the growth the credit union has experienced since opening up to new employers, the storage room was quickly filling up, the CD-jukebox system was reaching capacity and the overall system responsiveness was lagging,” says Rami Rawdah, president of ImageStoreHouse. Now, Seaboard no longer uses microfilm. The COLD system reads files from the CU's core system from USERS Inc., converts them to searchable files and sends them to storage on ImageStoreHouse's server, where they are available to the staff through their desktop PCs, Rawdah says. “Because the ImageStoreHouse viewing software uses Web-browser technology, there are no hardware or seat constraints which limit file access,” he says. Paper also is scanned throughout the day by Seaboard employees and sent via FTP to the ImageStoreHouse site, where a quality-control process checks them for readability, indexes them and makes them available to the CU staff. Seaboard CU also stores paper records at the ImageStoreHouse site, where physical access is controlled. Daily, weekly and monthly tape backups also are stored there. The system is user- and member-friendly, Watson says, enabling the staff to respond more quickly to requests and questions. Under the old system, a member would stop at a branch and ask, for example, for a copy of his or her statement, the request would submitted to the main office, someone there would find it on microfilm or CD, make a copy and send it to the branch or the member, a process that could take up to two days, Watson says. Now, the Seaboard IT manager says, “We use a password to long on with and then select if we want to look at the report writer or member documents, or whatever we need, and that's about it. ImageStoreHouse customized it to the way we wanted it.” -

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