How Smarter Document Management Eased IKEA’s Growing Pains

Do endless paper piles, backed up invoices and constant trips to the post office sound familiar?

Take IKEA Austria, for example. A highly-successful and rapidly-growing organization, IKEA struggled to efficiently process its formidable paperwork, including employee payroll, invoices, and credit notes.

In total, IKEA manages over 85,000 documents a year. Unsurprisingly, reliance on snail mail and manual indexing resulted in lost documents and time wasted. 

Tired of grappling with paper-based business processes, IKEA embraced an enterprise content solution built around a strategic, software-based approach to document and workflow management. IKEA’s goals included:

• Creating electronic file transfers linking central and remote offices
• Integrating new, electronic processes with existing financial systems
• Completely eliminating paper filing
• Increasing profitability, efficiency and productivity  

Achieving Effective Collaboration 

IKEA’s strategy centered on removing barriers affecting document management by creating electronic, automated data and workflow.

Invoices received, for example, are now authorized at store locations, scanned and uploaded to the central office several times per day, where they’re booked directly into the accounting system and organized by key parameters. Barcodes facilitate rapid identification and automatic filing by the home office’s CODA Financials accounting system.

Accountants at the home office work with a streamlined, intuitive interface and quickly identify document version and employee interaction when needed.

Outgoing invoice communications are similarly improved. The use of spool files enables space-efficient information dissemination, merging a document’s key information with printing files only when the recipient views it.

Auto indexing and recognition software made paper correspondence redundant and greatly reduced document loss risk. Additionally, legacy data has migrated to the new document management system, preserving critical information and preventing unexpected contingencies. 

Efficiency Pays Off

The tangible improvements IKEA made didn’t just eliminate employee headaches. Intelligent content management moved the organization forward by:

1. Driving profitability: Fewer lost invoices and the elimination of manual mailing reduced unnecessary organization expenses and positively impacted the bottom line. After restructuring its document management, IKEA achieved a 90 percent reduction in all filing expenses.

2. Increasing transparency: Because accounting is able to locate any document’s revision and touch point history, IKEA achieved full transparency and gained better insight into invoice processing and collaboration. Greater insight helps IKEA fine-tune its tactics and improve operations, as well as provide customers, partners and vendors accurate, up-to-date information quickly and easily.

3. Improving efficiency: Operational efficiency increased as automatic filing reduced daily filing time by several hours. A paperless office also frees space previously reserved for large, cumbersome files, making locations more space-efficient.

“Filing our documents electronically made it possible to reduce the costs for our archive by more than 90 percent,” says Mag. Rudolf Bubich, Director of Accounting, IKEA Austria. “The easy operation and the constant access to all invoices save us immense amounts of time and money. The fast acceptance by employees in various departments such as sales, human resources and accounting proves that our decision was right.”

The Takeaways

If document management inefficiencies slow you down and cost you money, consider that an organization of IKEA’s size, scope and complexity found a way to turn ineffective processes around and recapture lost productivity and profitability.

Don’t wait to make necessary collaboration changes: put your new document strategy in place today.