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Case Study: Software Industry

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In the world of warehouse management and logistics, EPG is synonymous with excellent supply chain management. Large corporations as well as medium-sized companies rely on the know-how of software experts. Across their network SAP is used as ERP software, while DocuWare is the tool for process and document management.

The Ehrhardt + Partner Group (EPG) is headquartered in Germany and has 23 locations worldwide – from Europe and the USA to Japan and Australia. 1,600 companies use software from the owner-managed group, which has now grown to over 900 employees. At the heart of the product portfolio is their "Warehouse Management System."

With many offices in different locations, invoice verification had become very time-consuming, especially since there were still some analog components to their processes, Florian Hieronimus, head of the company’s IT department, explains when they began hunting for a DMS while the DocuWare implementation was originally driven by the Accounting Department, the IT Department – which was tasked with implementing an invoice receipt workflow quickly recognized the universality and wide range of potential applications they could avail of with this digitization tool.

DocuWare Cloud went live on May 1, 2022 with am automated workflow for incoming invoices: Invoices are sent directly from the supplier by email to an email address specifically set up for this. Mailed invoices are scanned. They are then sent to a DocuWare tray, where the relevant data fields are retrieved using automatic indexing. Pre-approved and select employees in Administration then check whether the index fields are filled in correctly and approve the content of an invoice.

Country:
Germany
Industry:
Software Industry
Department:
Company-wide
Deployment:
Cloud
Integration:
SAP S4/HANA

DocuWare was originally used in the accounting department, to digitize and manage incoming invoices. After we implemented it, we could immediately see how it could be used as a toolbox for designing processes for all sorts of departments, and do this uniformly, throughout the Group. It has had great additional benefits.

Florian Hieronimus, Head of Application and IT Service Management
Ehrhardt + Partner, Germany

High quality of index data

After being checked in a department, invoices below a threshold of 1000 euros are sent directly to the Accounting Department. For higher amounts, the invoice verification through Controlling. Once Accounting has finally approved the invoice, the posting data is sent to the SAP system. Fields in SAP are pre-filled with help from DocuWare indexing. While the workflow was designed in-house, the interface to the SAP system was developed by DocuWare Partners. The bridge to SAP ensures that DocuWare's index fields are perfectly "mapped" in SAP Accounting.

In the past an invoice could take two weeks from receipt to approval, today it is usually only two days. For holidays/vacations, a set of substitute rules comes into play. In relation to their suppliers, this has meant a significant improvement in service, since information can be provided at any time if an invoice has not yet been paid. For Accounts Payable employees, the invoice workflow means that they no longer have paper documents. When posting in SAP, they click on an attachment that is a link to DocuWare. On the left monitor they see the DMS and can check the information; on the right monitor, in the SAP system, they are able to complete the posting.

Many DMS projects in the pipeline

In the future, purchases will be digitally recorded, checked, and approved in DocuWare and then submitted to the SAP system as purchase order proposals. A way to fulfill the legal requirement for enabling anonymous "whistleblowing" will addressed using a DocuWare forms. In addition to a contract database, DMS projects are emerging as potential customer projects and product development, such as a dashboard for capturing product evaluations.

By integrating SAP into DocuWare, the issue of 'incoming invoices' was neatly mapped – from my point of view, it was truly 'state-of-the-art' in 2023.
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