expert SE
Expert Warenvertrieb GmbH acts as a purchasing cooperation for around 200 independent companies with over 400 locations. To this end, the company offers its shareholders support in business and IT-related matters. This also applies to the digitalization of their invoicing processes.
"We process around 220,000 receipts per month, that's several thousand invoices per week, all of which previously had to be stamped, copied, scanned and filed individually," reports Michael Reinhardt, Head of the expert shareholder IT department. "It causes a lot of – what I like to call – paper shuffling." So much paperwork that expert had to set up a separate client accounting department within the finance department.
The receipts were sent and received by post, but this didn't prove to be a satisfactory solution. Faxing also wasn't a viable alternative.
The company therefore started looking for a software-based option and opted for the enaio® document management solution by OPTIMAL SYSTEMS.
400+
locations
2.2 billion
Euros in sales
60
years of company tradition
Project implementation
In the course of a lengthy selection process, several aspects spoke in favor of OPTIMAL SYSTEMS:
expert was looking for a partner who promised reliability and was established on the market. It was also important that the individual requirements were understood and taken into account, that the collaboration was based on mutual trust and took place on an equal footing. And finally, the technology factor was also highly relevant.
The choice fell on enaio® by OPTIMAL SYSTEMS. This means: over thirty years of industry expertise and state-of-the-art software standards, personal advice and a nationwide presence thanks to seventeen locations and branches as well as a high degree of agility with regard to specific customer requirements. enaio® scored particularly well in terms of its high level of integration capability with the accounting and ERP software introduced by Microsoft. In addition, there was a powerful long-term archive – and a cleverly devised implementation plan of "small steps".
That meant in detail: A handful of shareholders initially tested the new digital solution in a pilot phase. The solution was then scaled up step by step as demand from other locations increased. "We got off to a good start with enaio® and have continued to develop the service package in parallel," says Reinhardt.
This was not only a commercially attractive model for expert, but also ensured the necessary acceptance among users: They themselves requested to participate in the software implementation project after they were convinced of its benefits. They even gave the solution its own name. From then on, the new document management system was called "O.S.C.AR" (OPTIMAL SYSTEMS Content ARchive). "That's where we got creative," notes Reinhardt.
After the goal of scanning incoming invoices on paper and recording them as a data record in the ERP system was quickly implemented, there was still the problem of returning original invoices to the individual companies. "We have a powerful ECM application, and then we send the documents back by post or fax? We really wanted to find a different solution," reports the head of the shareholder IT department at expert. The decisive factor was that the provision of receipts in digital form is accepted under commercial and tax law. To this end, the process and long-term archiving were scrutinized by renowned auditors.
"Today, you can look directly into every detail – for example when creating a BWA or cost/income statement. Example travel expenses: You see that there was a hotel booking, click on it and immediately see the receipt. The same applies to enterprise resource planning." Michael Reinhardt almost goes into raptures when he calculates how much time and effort digitization saves employees month after month: "Sometimes I can't even believe how many documents we process, because everything runs completely silently in the background, with high performance and stability."
With the enaio® ECM, the entire document flow in accounting has been significantly simplified for all integrated systems. In addition, an audit-proof archive was implemented, which made manual filing of individual documents unnecessary from then on. All documents are now automatically archived as part of the invoice approval process. With the help of the digital long-term archive and the integrated full-text search, every document can now be found in the shortest possible time – this still ensures transparency and efficiency throughout expert's own invoice management.
"enaio® is an integral part of our shareholders' IT solutions, i.e., in our enterprise resource planning system and also in our collaboration with shareholders in central client accounting."
Michael Reinhardt, Head of the expert shareholder IT department
expert SE uses the electronic archiving of enaio®. This ensures audit-proof and secure long-term archiving.
Automatically read, index, forward and check data: The invoice receipt workflow ensures transparency, flexibility and shorter processes.
Secure and automated e-mail archiving will increase the efficiency and functionality of e-mail management at expert SE.
Project result
The project of expert Warenvertrieb GmbH with enaio® led to a comprehensive digitalization of the document flow, which reduced paper consumption by at least 80 percent. The introduction of the digital archive "O.S.C.AR" has considerably accelerated access to documents – and the time savings in document processing have also been shown to increase in measurable terms:
If you take a study by the University of Leipzig as a basis, according to which the manual processing of a single document takes around three minutes from receipt to filing, the time saving for everyone involved is obvious: With around 10.5 million documents that have been archived since the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution was implemented, the time saved would correspond to the enormous amount of around 65,000 working days, according to the study.
Integration into the ERP system also enabled efficient access to archived documents. The digitalization of the payment approval process and the introduction of automated e-mail archiving also helped to increase efficiency and process transparency.
Last but not least, the project achieved audit-proof archiving and improved collaboration with the shareholders.
Today, expert operates one of the largest and most complex enaio® installations with over 300 enaio® clients in the markets and five enaio® servers in a multi-server landscape.
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