DocLink Saves Company Headquarters After a Decimating Category-3 Tornado

This property management company’s story is unique and unlikely, but you may still identify with and appreciate their paper issues!

Aspen Square Management (ASM), a leader in the multi-family housing industry, handles finance and legal operations out of their corporate headquarters in West Springfield, Massachusetts. On June 1, 2011, a violent Category-3 tornado struck without warning, the worst storm the area had ever recorded.

Fortunately, ASM’s Accounting Department already had a document management solution, DocLink, in place. The Legal Department did not. Accounting had been scanning documents to DocLink for years and didn’t have to worry about lost papers or smashed filing cabinets after the disaster. The Legal Department, however, “had to use a hacksaw to get to their paper files” (a rock had come through a window and slammed against a legal file cabinet, holding it shut). Needless to say, the organization’s two departments experienced drastically different recoveries in the storm’s aftermath. “Watching how . . . disruptive events have affected two different departments within our company has been a real eye-opener to the benefi­ts of document management,” said Diane Beauregard, Accounts Payable Manager.

It won’t take a natural disaster to make you happy to have invested in an integrated document management system. The advantages that ASM’s Accounting Department has over its Legal Department are apparent even in the absence of a destructive tornado. Paperless departments witness benefits daily, as digital documents save money and time and expedite business processes. Plus, should you ever withstand a misfortune, be it large or small, know that you will not have to spend time searching for lost files, recreating documents or experiencing delays: your company’s critical data will already be backed up, available for access and use.

To read the full case study and how else Aspen Square Management handled the storm’s aftermath, click here.