Birchwood Auto: Document Retrieval From Days to Seconds

Birchwood Automotive Group, Manitoba's largest automotive retail network, needed one secure location to store and access service centre work orders generated across its dealerships, each of which has to be retained for up to seven years. After Nimble's Winnipeg team digitized the work orders and centralized them in SmartCloud, the time required to access a specific work order dropped from days to seconds, while each dealership's records stayed private.

The client

Birchwood Automotive Group is the largest network of automotive retailers in Winnipeg and Manitoba. The group operates a set of dealerships (14 at the time of this project) that share centralized account management through its Central Services team. That structure gives Birchwood consistency across the group, but it also means a very high volume of documents flows in from every dealership and has to be controlled centrally.

The challenge: a growing mountain of service centre work orders for each dealership that need to be stored with the ability to access quickly

Every service engagement results in a service work order and a set of supporting documents, and each of those needs to be retained for up to seven years. Across a group of dealerships, that volume grows constantly and never stops.

Birchwood needed to centralize and better control that volume, and give each dealership a way to quickly and securely retrieve a specific item when they needed it. The requirement had a second layer: Central Services needed visibility across all of the documents, but individual dealerships should only see their own. One dealership's work orders had to stay private from the others, even inside a shared system.

What Nimble did

Nimble's Winnipeg team created the solution, drawing on the same document scanning and conversion services it provides to organizations across Manitoba. The service work orders and supporting documents were captured electronically and centralized in SmartCloud, Nimble's Canadian-hosted document platform.

The setup was built around Birchwood's structure:

Centralized control for Central Services: the Central Services team was given access to all documents and their associated metadata, so the whole group could be managed from one place.
Private, dealership-level access: each dealership could easily access the documents relating to its own organization, while other dealerships' documents stayed private.
Tracked from creation to disposal: every item is tracked across its full lifecycle, so work orders can be accounted for from the moment they are created through to secure disposal at the end of their retention period.
Canadian-hosted: the documents are held in Canada, keeping sensitive customer and financial information within Canadian jurisdiction.

The outcome: retrieval from days to seconds

The single biggest change was speed. Finding an existing service work order went from days to seconds, because staff can now search for a specific item instead of physically hunting for a file.

The other results followed from centralizing and digitizing the records:

Lower risk of lost work orders. Because every item is tracked from creation to disposal, work orders no longer go missing between filing and retrieval.
Less physical storage. Moving the large volume of documents to electronic storage reduced Birchwood's need for physical storage space, and the cost that comes with it.
Costs that flex with the business. A transactional pricing model lets Birchwood pass document costs through the dealerships to the purchaser of the vehicle, and add users or dealerships at no additional cost.

Instead of work orders sitting in filing cabinets across separate buildings, Birchwood's records are now digital, searchable, tracked, and held securely in Canada, with the right people able to reach the right documents in seconds.

Frequently asked questions

How can a multi-location dealership group manage service work order retention? The practical approach is to digitize the work orders and centralize them in one secure, permissioned system rather than leaving them in filing cabinets at each location. For Birchwood Automotive Group, Nimble captured the service work orders electronically and centralized them in SmartCloud, so records from every dealership are controlled in one place and kept for their full retention period.

How much faster is digital document retrieval than paper filing? For Birchwood, retrieving a specific work order dropped from days to seconds once the documents were digitized and searchable. Rather than contacting a dealership and waiting for someone to locate a physical file, staff can search for the exact item they need.

Can individual locations keep their documents private in a shared system? Yes. In Birchwood's setup, the central team can see all documents and metadata across the group, while each dealership can only access its own records. Permissioned access keeps one location's work orders private from the others inside a single shared platform.

Where are the documents stored? Birchwood's documents are held in SmartCloud, Nimble's Canadian-hosted document platform, keeping sensitive customer and financial records within Canadian jurisdiction.

Centralize and digitize your agreements

If your organization is managing a growing volume of agreements that have to be kept for years, spread across multiple locations, the same approach applies: digitize the documents, centralize them with permissioned access, and track every item through to secure disposal. Explore Nimble's document scanning and conversion services in Winnipeg, serving Manitoba and Western Canada, or talk to us about a secure, Canadian-hosted document platform.