Boise Cascade Turns Customer Data Into A Valuable AssetBoise Cascade Turns Customer Data Into A Valuable Asset

Boise can rely on original documents because it deals with hundreds, not thousands, of customers a day, with the transactions based on standard forms. It's able to extract the basic information about the value of those customer orders, the products involved, and the timing from its documents, McNabb says.

Commercial Alternatives
Alfresco isn't the answer for all companies that have a document-centric process of dealing with customers and storing customer data. "There's a gap between what the open source systems can offer and commercial systems," McNabb says. Commercial systems have more options for retrieving information in documents and putting those assets to use in business processes, such as invoicing or accounts payable, he says.

Boise's need to cobble together links between Alfresco and MySQL is one reason some parties turn to commercial document management systems, says Lubor Ptacek, director of product marketing for EMC's Documentum software group.

Documentum, in addition to selling its own systems, is the document repository for SAP applications and Siebel Systems CRM applications. It ties original documents to the relational databases that underlie SAP and Siebel software. Structured and unstructured data that can be linked together is what many companies are moving toward, Ptacek says. "It's still early in the process. A lot of companies don't keep documents at all, or if they do, they keep paper documents in a warehouse somewhere. That's how it's been done for hundreds of years."

But retrieving documents stored on paper or tape can be slow and painful, involving IT staffers hunting off-site. Such an approach falls far short of being able to present all pertinent customer information to a call center rep when the customer is on the line.

And getting started with a Documentum document management system associated with SAP or Siebel applications is a $200,000 to $300,000 proposition, Ptacek says.

Boise wanted to avoid such up-front expenses. By adopting the Alfresco open source document management system, Boise can run Linux servers working with a storage area network. Blaine estimates the cost of storage to be one-tenth the cost of using the older mainframe DB2/CICS system. "We needed to make the system as cost effective as possible," he says.

McNabb isn't certain that document management will become a commoditized market occupied mainly by open source systems. The commercial systems still offer many integration advantages. The long-range impact of open source content management may be to move the commercial suppliers to subscription licenses with no up-front purchase price.

Whether open source or commercial systems, however, he believes storing customer information in the form of original documents is here to stay. The practice "gives a company an undisputable record of what they're talking about," McNabb says. "Original documents are highly valuable in dispute resolution."