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Coping with car transport paperwork US style

19th October 1973
Page 48
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Page 48, 19th October 1973 — Coping with car transport paperwork US style
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

George E. Toles explains how microfilming and automated display on lines familiar to the motor trade in Britain — are saving a large transport operator time and money

SOME 5000 to 6000 new cars and trucks delivered to dealers daily create a bumper crop of paperwork for Commercial Carriers Inc., of Romulus, Michigan, USA.

The vehicles go out by truck within 500 miles of Detroit or otherwise are shipped by rail to 18 Commercial Carrier locations for traftsfer by truck to dealers in 20 Western, Midwestern and Southern states.

For each vehicle, two important documents — a delivery receipt and inspection report — must be filed for a minimum of three years. This means a volume of 10,000 to 12,000 receipts and reports daily or 8m to 9m over three years.

Helping to turn a potential snarl of forms into a paper tiger is a centralized cartridge microfilm system with automated readerprinter. It replaces hand filing of the receipts and reports in numerical order for each terminal.

"Hand filing." says John Platten, claims director for Commercial Carriers, "created problems in space, document retrieval time and file integrity.

"Documents often were lost or misfiled. In addition, our office alone maintained 40 large files to house current receipts."

The filing system is important, according to Platten, because about 100 inquiries regarding new-car shipment information are received daily. "Before using microfilm, we had to contact terminal offices in other states for copies of receipts when an inquiry was received.

"The signed receipt is proof of delivery," states Platten. "If we get a damage claim it usually is accompanied by a copy of our delivery receipt.

"We now can go to the microfilm file to compare the inquiry copy and our receipt to make sure they are identical. At the same time, we locate the microfilmed rail inspection receipt to determine whether damage occurred in rail shipment to one of. our terminals."

The microfilm system has eliminated:—

(a) Hand files spread among the 18 field locations and headquarters in Romulus, a Detroit suburb.

(b) The danger of misfiling or mislaying information removed from the hard copy file.

(c) Copious hand searching for information and refiling that are tedious and time-consuming jobs.

The Commercial Carriers system consists of a 3M Model 3400 cartridge microfilm camera and a Model 500CT Page Search reader-printer.

"We can put 2,350 page six documents on film that occupies an area of only 4 sq in. by 14 in. thick," Platten says. "Also, the filmed documents are permanently locked in sequence and cannot be misfiled. Our file integrity and security are ensured.

"Efficiency also has been improved greatly as we can find a document and make a copy in seconds rather than spending 10 minutes to an hour looking for a hand-filed document and maybe never finding it. Filming the document is push-button simple, and we shoot about 8,000 documents in an eight-hour day."

Delivery receipts and rail inspection documents are sent to the home office from each terminal. They are separated into three groups — delivery, rail and miscellaneous — without regard to any numerical order. The randomly filed delivery tickets and inspection reports are counted in groups of 100 each and banded together with a control sheet.

Since the Commercial Carriers people always film exactly 2,350 documents on each cartridge of film, they continue to batch in groups of 100 until they have 23 packages of 100 each and one package of 50. This batching is for document control, to make sure all the documents have been filmed and indexed.

Instant microfilm After the 2,350 documents have been assembled, they are filmed on the Model 3400 camera. A film cartridge is snapped into the camera and a button pressed to thread the film automatically. Documents are fed into the camera and instantly microfilmed.

The cartridge can be removed at any time by pushing a button to rewind the film. The odometer reading is noted where filming stopped. To continue filming, the cartridge is snapped back into the camera and advanced to the previous odometer reading.

After each group of 100 documents is filmed, the papers are rebanded and placed into a box. When all 2,350 have been filmed, the box is given a number (this becomes the cartridge number), and it is sent to data processing, batched in the order in which it was filmed.

In the data processing department, the documents are key punched as they were before, except that now only the terminal number, the freight bill number and the cartridge number are coded.

After the key punching, the document batch is counted again to, ensure that all documents have been indexed. Because the document number is left off the data processing card, the information necessary to index three delivery tickets can be key-punched into one data processing card.

An important key to this sytem is the data processing routine. With the processed key punch information, the computer is instructed to add an accession number to each document automatically, starting with I and ending with 2,350. Since the data processing cards are processed in the same order that the documents are filmed a sequential number index has been created without actually stamping a number of a document.

This computer index is prepared for each week's work, and is used as an index to locate documents. Every three weeks the index is updated. A recap is printed every six months.

If information is requested for a certain bill or inspection report, a quick check is made of the index, giving the proper cartridge and document number. The cartridge is placed on the 500 CT Page Search, the last four digits are punched in and the document in question appears on the screen in seconds. A paper copy of the information can be obtained in six seconds after the "print" button has been depressed.

Tags

Organisations: US Federal Reserve
Locations: Romulus, Detroit

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