ABB and Crown: The Issue - Program Coordination

ABB, headquartered in Switzerland, is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs around 105,000 people. Their offices in India were experiencing challenges with records management and called on Crown for assistance.

The Challenges

Being a manufacturing company, ABB had more than enough factory space to store their records but they were facing major obstacles when dealing with managing their documents internally. Important documents could not be located in an efficient manner and there was no one available at ABB to take ownership of records management. Crown India understood ABB’s situation and offered their services.

The Solution

Teamwork

ABB hired Crown as their exclusive RMS (Records Management Services) vendor to manage 4,500 cartons. This amount is expected to increase to 13,500 cartons, which equals approximately 81,000 files. Crown employees team with ABB employees at the facilities, packing their documents into cartons and tracking the inventory with scanners.

Crown provides Document Storage Services in three of ABB's facilities: Vadodara - 2,500 cartons managed, with an increase expectancy to 6,000; Nashik - 1,000 cartons managed, with an increase expectancy to 2,500; and Mumbai - 1,000 cartons managed, with an increase expectancy to 5,000.

Mr. K.N. Patil, Vice President, Shared Services at ABB, has been pleased with the working relationship. “The roll out of this new service has been very smooth and Crown has integrated well into ABB,” said Mr. Patil. “It was important for the ABB staff to be on board immediately with this project so it would be successful. Now we have Crown providing us with good account and project management.”

People

Crown stations three people in each facility, a Supervisor and two Packers. They offer expertise and advice on how to optimize the racking, and utilize ABB’s space, in order to maximize storage capacity. They also guide ABB employees in selecting the proper place in their factory to suit storage requirements, provide guidelines on what security precautions to take, and what type of security systems should be installed.

Technology

Employees from ABB and Crown partnered to create an area for PC and Internet connection. This is where the Barcode Tracking Software (O’Neil Software – RS~SQL, a barcode driven audit and tracking system) and barcode scanners are connected. All new inventory and records of retrievals are tracked with these scanners. The data is then automatically uploaded into Internet-based web software, which gives everyone -- ABB and Crown employees, on-site and off-site -- shared, real-time access. This process facilitates efficient collection, archiving, storage, retrieval and destruction of documents.

Crown also supplies ABB with periodic efficiency reports. These reports ensure that no data has been lost, office space is being optimized, document distribution is controlled and monitored, and the areas are safe with secured smoke detectors and fire extinguishers.

The Result

"I am pleased with the progress and teamwork of ABB and Crown," said Mr. K. Rajagopal, CFO ABB India. "I'd like to see all of our locations in Crown India to follow suit." In fact, plans are underway for Crown to manage file storage in two more of ABB's facilities. This would bring the total files up from 81,000 to 100,000 files."