SAN DIEGO — A functional document management system can reduce operational costs by 20% and improve employee productivity by 30%.

That was the message from Bluepoint Solutions President/CEO Hal Tilbury at Credit Union Times Best Practices Conference. He said document management is grossly mismanaged in most credit unions, and that by his count, there are 2,000 dysfunctional systems used in the industry. They also create a poor service environment for members and complicate audits.

Tilbury blasted core processing providers, saying they view document management solutions as a “strategy to lock you into their system forever.”

“Core processing vendors have not provided leadership in document management,” he said. “They have no expertise, they just see it as income.”

Assigning the project to information technology staff is usually a credit union's first mistake. Tilbury said most IT departments are already overworked and staff typically doesn't approach document management with an operational mindset.

Providing scanners at each work station so documents can be scanned immediately costs only 15 cents per hour per station, he said, which is much cheaper than leaving the work to the end of the day or dedicating employees to scanning.

Using paper documents, then sending them to be scanned in a centralized area is worthless, he said, because the document's useful life has expired.

Credit union employees often make their own copies before sending the original to a centralized scanning queue, he said, which defeats green goals.

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