Major Hotel Chain, with international corporate headquarters located in the Washington, DC area, is a lodging industry leader. This $20 billion corporation manages quality properties under several well-known names serving travelers and vacationers in resorts and major cities in nearly 60 countries. The company currently manages over 2100 properties and the corporate goal to be achieved by 2003 is to expand to 2500 lodging properties. Helping the company keep tabs on all these locations is what this Hanel success story is all about. The storage application for the Hanel Rotomats is in the Records Department for the Corporate Law Office. This department stores and manages real estate files, commonly called legal property files by the law department. The need for automated filing. The Records Department Manager joined the company over 14 years ago. He explained that at the time the department was using a few automated storage units and many, many 5-drawer filing cabinets.

His first major project when taking over the department was to automate this archaic system. He purchased 10 storage units and moved the operation to a special file room specifically designed to accommodate the automated filing systems.

The department also acquired a software package employing a simple charge out/charge in system. The software was an independent program not connected to the storage machines. However, it complimented the department's activities, eliminated a lot of keyboarding, provided helpful information in its database and offered report capabilities. In short, the efficiency of the Records Department was greatly improved.

Hanel enters the picture.

At this point the obvious question was what prompted the conversion from a competitor's machines to Hanel Rotomats. We asked the Records Manager and his answer was quite direct, "Bert Mussman, our rep from Remco Business Systems, told me to switch."

Remco felt that Hanel was a superior product and began handling the line during that period. Remco was also a valued supplier to the customer. According to the manager, "Our company had been dealing with Remco Business Systems for these type products and many others way before I joined the company 14 years ago. As far as I was concerned, service from Remco was honest and responsive and we felt very confident with following their recommendation to switch to Hanel." He adds, "Time has proven us correct. We have found the Rotomats to be better machines and have experienced no breakdowns whatsoever."

Current operations.

The Legal Records Department has recently purchased its fifth Hanel Office Rotomat System. The new unit will accommodate recent growth and help the department recover from a patchwork filing method temporarily used due to a lack of storage space.

Overall benefits of filing automation have been tremendous: better organization superior usability comfortable environment - just pull up a chair and work in front of a Hanel simply a better system of filing The Records Department has a staff of 5: the department manager; an operations manager; 2 responsible for incorporations; and one to deliver/return files and handle retention processing. The staff's activity on the automated filing systems is very high. The Law Department has 80 to 85 attorneys, paralegals and secretaries. They request files via internal e-mail and the files are delivered to them. Requests can vary from 10 to 200 per day. Document incorporation ranges from 6000 to 7000 per year, all of which must be inserted into the files. In total, 65,000 volumes are stored in the department's 15 units.

The next step? The Records Department is discussing a $3 - 5 million conversion to an imaging system. However, the need for Hanel Rotomats will continue to grow. The department will always serve as a "paper bank" storing legally binding original documents with original signatures.

Ask for the Hanel storage story on CD-ROM.

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