What does it take to successfully manage change in an organization to implement new technology solutions? Our client, Ozinga, has found that the real key to their success boils down to one word: care. That care comes through in everything they do from how they treat each other to how they interact with others outside of the company. As Keith Onchuck, CIO of Ozinga, said, “Caring is a reflection of leadership. If the leadership cares about the people, then the people care about not only their jobs, but then they also care about the people they interact with.” This shows up whether they’re interacting with another Ozinga coworker or someone else. Keith observes the same culture of care at Initium Softworks (ISW) and sees it reflected in the ISW team members they work with.  

The partnership between Ozinga and ISW started when another consultant Ozinga was working with recommended Initium SoftWorks as the right organization for their intelligent data capture project with ABBYY technology. Ozinga wanted to change from a manual process to an automated one for their inbound inventory Bill of Lading (BOL) process. They typically start with small sample projects when working with new vendors. If the relationship works well, that snowballs quickly into their backlog of projects. That’s exactly what happened with ISW.  

The first order of business was to get data capture set up for inbound BOL material tickets and invoices. The intelligent data capture (IDC) uses a combination of technologies including optical character recognition (OCR) and data extraction techniques to take data quickly and accurately from the BOL including shipment details, quantities, and item descriptions. It can then be automatically matched to information in the Purchase Orders (PO). Any discrepancies are flagged for review and resolution. The IDC technology achieved an accuracy rate of over 98%, reducing manual data entry errors and significantly reducing manual processing time. 

Since that original project, Ozinga has also worked with ISW for support of their Hyland OnBase platform (a content services or ECM technology), integrating Salesforce with OnBase via ISW’s Integration Gateway solution, and are now implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate other processes. By automating and optimizing processes, Ozinga has been able to fully streamline their inbound inventory process to save time and gain efficiencies. It would take a person at least 8 hours longer each week to do all these tasks manually.  

Each one of these projects solves real business challenges for Ozinga. The solutions Collins and Owen, their ISW consultants, recommend are always in the interest of improving business operations. Timothy Paulin, Director of IT Project Management of Ozinga, observed that what he appreciates about working with Collins is how he solves things in unique ways. The ISW team believes in observing, asking questions, and getting to know the client’s challenges and roles well enough to make valuable recommendations that are right for each client.  

In the words of Brian Bleakley, Business Process Analyst of Ozinga, “The relationship with ISW is probably the best part. It’s even better than the product itself.”