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Case Study: Air Freight / Cargo

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Airnautic AG is an air freight and logistics service provider that works together with numerous leading airlines. By implementing DocuWare in February 2020, this Swiss company was able to continue doing business safely even during the lockdown.

Airnautic's Managing Director Ernst Thoma could hardly foresee the outbreak of a pandemic when he began planning to introduce DocuWare in April 2019. The original goal of the DMS project was to set up an electronic file cabinet for the ever-increasing flood of documents created while handling orders and invoices.

The company – which operates decentrally at airports in Basel, Geneva and Zurich along with another Basel office to house administration and accounting – wanted to make its processes less paper-dependent. On February 1, 2020, Airnautic launched its DocuWare system. Fortunately, this meant their employees were ready for digital collaboration from their home offices just in time for the lockdown.

Airnautic works with numerous airlines in the cargo sector. All play an important role in global logistics, including Saudia Cargo, China Southern, Ethiopian Airlines, DHL Aviation, ANA Cargo All Nippon Airlines and Pegasus. For the airlines, Airnautic takes over the complete organizational handling of orders they receive from forwarders. These are almost exclusively industrial goods from a wide range of sectors such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, mechanical engineering or watchmaking. A dossier is created for each order, containing transport documents such as air waybills, freight manifests/loading lists, CMR waybills for truck transports, along with loading lists and export declarations for customs. In addition, all their outgoing and incoming invoices must be archived. To store this considerable volume of documents, they even needed to rent extra office space in the past.

Country:
Switzerland
Industry:
Air Freight / Cargo
Department:
Finance |Management |Sales
Deployment:
On-Premises
Integration:
Outlook

Originally, we just wanted an electronic archive that would mirror our paper one. But shortly after we launched, COVID 19 hit and “forced” us to make even better use of the system and digitize our processes. This crisis actually helped the company make a big leap forward in automating its processes and going paperless within a very short time.

Ernst Thoma
Managing Director, Airnautic AG, Kloten (Switzerland)

Leaner, faster processes

DocuWare puts an end to paper archiving, so no additional file cabinet space is needed and old file cabinets can be gradually discarded. But more importantly, the DMS makes it easier to work together in a decentralized organization, for example when checking incoming invoices, which often arrive by email. With DocuWare, incoming invoices are routed to specific staff members, who verify and stamp with an "ok to pay" stamp. For larger sums - in accordance with their dual control principle – another check takes place, after which the invoice is moved to an incoming tray in the accounting department for payment. There it is indexed and stored after account assignment and payment. This makes for a clearly structured, transparent and secure process.

A big benefit for this decentralized company is that all locations can now access the documents from a central document pool at any time. Search times have been significantly reduced. The frequent sending of documents by fax or email between locations has been eliminated – making all processes much faster and easier. Their accountant also approves of the audit-proof, tamper-free archiving of the documents. All 12 employees* have quickly familiarized themselves with the DMS due to its high level of user-friendliness.

Great leap forward through Corona

DocuWare has enabled this Swiss company to operate smoothly even during the lockdown. Initially, they only wanted an electronic file cabinet that was analogous to their physical one. But the Corona crisis, which began shortly after the DMS was introduced, helped the company make a big leap forward. Thanks to the tremendous support of their DocuWare Partner, they were able to automate their processes and switch to paperless work, all within a short period of time…and all at exactly the right time!

All locations can now access the documents stored centrally in the document pool, at any time. Search times have been significantly reduced and the frequent sending of documents by fax or email between locations has become unnecessary.
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