Merlin Car Auctions

**Document Management** Retail

Case Study | Merlin Car Auctions

Merlin Car Auctions, one of Ireland's leading auction houses, was struggling to control paperwork needed for buying and selling vehicles. With a simple Ricoh document management solution, it has improved accuracy and made the process faster, less time-consuming and more cost effective.

Executive Summary

Name	Merlin Car Auctions
Location	Naas, Kildare, Ireland
Size	30 staff
Activity	Retail

Challenges

Vehicle purchase and sale paperwork
difficult to control
Hours, even days to find documents
Naming and cataloguing errors increasing

Solution

Ricoh Document Management

Benefits

Improves efficiency, accuracy
and professionalism
Provides instant access to documents
and information
Eliminates costly, inconvenient
Saturday paperwork shifts
Saves time, money and increases productivity
Removes the need to store
document hardcopies
Helps meet auditing and money
laundering regulations

Case Study | Merlin Car Auctions

Challenges

Everyone knows what it is like having to find an important letter or tax demand; searching through piles of papers and files wondering when
and where you put the document.

It is not dissimilar to the problem that Merlin Car Auctions faced when it had to find paperwork related to vehicle purchase or sale. The company is one Ireland’s leading vehicle auction businesses. Via two face-to-face and online auctions a week at its site in Naas, County Kildare, the family-owned business sells around 10,000 vehicles a year, mainly to the trade as well as individuals. Its catalogue of vehicles comprises family cars, small cars, SUVs and commercial vehicles sourced from main dealer trade ins, ex-finance, ex-lease and private entries.

Every time a vehicle is bought or sold by Merlin, several documents have to be submitted for formal identification and money laundering regulations. These documents include handwritten entry forms, letters of engagement, two forms of ID and proof of address. Documents could include driver’s licence, passport and utility bill or official letter showing address. Regular traders only need to register these documents once. The documents were scanned, electronically filed on a server and hardcopies put in a filing cabinet.

Case Study | Merlin Car Auctions

Historically, each Saturday, Merlin would recruit additional part-time staff to go through each file and rename it with customer’s name. If the business needed to review a document or search for information, staff could spend hours trying to find the relevant item. For example, to retrieve documents related to vehicle sale, staff had to find out when it was sold, then search the month to find the customer’s name.

Merlin handles around 100 documents for businesses or people selling vehicles, but thousands for buyers which had to be searched. The problem was exacerbated by the manual and slow file re-naming process that meant there were often mistakes like typing a surname incorrectly.

Merlin was already using Ricoh Multifunction Products (MFPs) for scanning and printing. Ricoh makes the effort to stay in contact with customers and has regular progress meetings even for small businesses like Merlin. It was at one such meeting that O’Reilly mentioned the problems the company had with document control. Ricoh suggested it could provide a simple but effective solution.

Case Study | Merlin Car Auctions

Not only was the process slow and tedious, it was often not done properly which led to problems and errors. We could have customers with the same, common name like Smith or Jones. The other tricky bit was if one of our Saturday workers spelt a name incorrectly by mistake. These issues made it hard to find documents once filed.

Patrick O’Reilly
Director, Merlin Car Auctions

Case Study | Merlin Car Auctions

Solution

Merlin has enhanced its existing Ricoh office print service to include
a Ricoh document management feature.

The Ricoh MFPs have been upgraded to include Ricoh Smart Operation Panel Technology and Kofax AutoStore for intelligent document cataloguing and storage. When staff scan original ID and proof of address documents on a Ricoh MFP, drop-down fields appear where they can type in vehicle number plate and select document type.

The Ricoh solution integrates with Merlin’s Kingfisher Auction Manager application that creates folders for each vehicle bought or sold, identified by numberplate registration. Each document scanned is time-and-date stamped and stored automatically using the relevant numberplate in a pre-set folder. Changing from using someone’s name to a numberplate is an improvement because it is often shorter and easier to type than some complex surnames.

The two Ricoh MFPs also scan to email or a users’ own folder and are used to print auction catalogues and other business documents such as invoices.

Since installing the Ricoh document management solution we spend no time at all organising our paperwork and finding documents is much faster and easier. But not just that, document naming and cataloguing is virtually error free which further improves efficiency and is more professional.

Patrick O’Reilly
Director, Merlin Car Auctions

The Ricoh solution has been a no-brainer for Merlin because it saves us time, money, increases productivity and makes document retrieval more accurate. It is an integral part of our document management capability, making it fast and seamless. We don’t have to worry about it anymore because there are no issues, it just works effectively all the time.

Patrick O’Reilly
Director, Merlin Car Auctions

Case Study | Merlin Car Auctions

Benefits

Being able to search for and find customer information is critical because by law Merlin must comply with auditing and money laundering regulations. Auditors can come into the business at any time, unannounced and do spot checks.

Merlin no longer has the cost or inconvenience of opening on a Saturday morning for the now-redundant file re-naming process. Instead of hours or even days sifting through folders and files, documents can now be found and searched in seconds. While improving paperwork control and management, the new solution does not change how staff operate. It also ensures they deliver good customer service by maintaining face-to-face contact with buyers and sellers.

Merlin uses Kingfisher to manage its auction operations and now all the relevant paperwork – ID and proof of address etc – is linked to

customer, sale or purchase record in Kingfisher. Because documents are now much easier to scan, catalogue, find and store, Merlin no longer needs to hold any hardcopies of documents such as handwritten entry forms and letters of engagement.

Ricoh Solution/Products

Ricoh Smart Operation Panel Technology

Ricoh Multifunction Products

Kofax AutoStore

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