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Case Study: Tourism

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Beachcomber Tours South Africa arranges a high-volume of package holidays to Mauritius each year and has been relying on digital document processing from early on. After attempting to work with several providers previously, they recently settled on the DocuWare Cloud.

Beachcomber Tours is the South African subsidiary of Beachcomber Resorts & Hotels, based in Mauritius. The award-winning tour operator has been booking package holidays to Mauritius for over 30 years, and consistently boasts the largest market share for sales among tour operators to the Indian Ocean island republic. Over the years, the company has grown to a staff complement of almost 60. Due to the nature of the company’s work it is imperative that functions within the various departments are supported by a reliable and flexible cloud-based document management system.

As is customary with travel-based businesses, Beachcomber creates one file for every booking made – but the days of paper records are long gone. Beachcomber identified the movement towards going paperless ahead of many other Southern African travel companies and invested accordingly. The first system, however, did not keep up with Beachcomber’s rapid growth. Especially where email archiving and shared document access was concerned, the existing solution had reached its operational capacity. Switching to a file sharing platform integrated into the Office suite did not yield any improvement. Although Beachcomber Tours tried to adapt the platform to its own needs, even after several weeks it was unable to find a satisfactory solution for email archiving.

Country:
South Africa
Industry:
Tourism
Department:
Administration
Deployment:
Cloud

We had worked with various ECM solutions previously, but, in each instance, our specific requirements weren’t catered to adequately. In DocuWare we finally found the complete solution that our company needed. The DocuWare Cloud functionality was configured to suit our company’s preferences and needs. It scores points in all areas – especially for all our company’s functional requirements.”

Sandra Matthee
System Manager, Beachcomber Tours, Somerset West, South Africa

The Beachcomber System Team then started searching again and learned of the DocuWare Cloud through an IT-consultant contact. They see DocuWare as a progressive, forward thinking company with an excellent portfolio of products. This cloud-based solution finally met the requirements: DocuWare scored both in speed and functionality, especially for the critical task of email archiving. The Cloud was also more cost-effective than traditional servers and licenses. In just a few weeks, the DocuWare Professional Service Team adapted their Cloud solution according to the individual processes of Beachcomber Tours’ Administration, Reservations and Group & Incentive departments. The complete legacy data in the file cabinet, including metadata, was also transferred to DocuWare – over 400,000 emails – then all other PDF and Office documents followed.

Access to All Customer Correspondence

Today, DocuWare automatically archives all email from the general Outlook mailbox. This amounts to over 460,000 messages per year, often with attachments. Important information such as the sender’s details, the subject and the date are automatically scanned and transferred to index fields. The email is then transferred to the task list of the recipient – this is where individual messages are distributed to various departments within a workflow.

For inquiries about existing reservations, employees can also link the mails with a reservation number from the B.R.A.I.N.S. booking system. In this case, the messages can later be retrieved by using the DocuWare search engine for all correspondence that is linked to that B.R.A.I.N.S. number, so they appear together with all other information under the respective booking. If a customer contacts a consultant telephonically, any of the users can assist the caller. Thanks to full access to the email correspondence, all consultants can assist quickly and competently. At the same time, the DocuWare Cloud fulfills all requirements for long-term storage and automatic deletion in accordance with the applicable data storage laws in South Africa.

Sophisticated Rights System = More Security

Fast access to all reservation documents that the reservations team needs at the click of a mouse is probably the greatest benefit of the DocuWare Cloud. Documents are retrieved quickly and accurately via the powerful DocuWare search. An integrated security system also allows a precise breakdown of access rights. For example, credit card or payment information can only be viewed by two authorised users. This function is also an essential facet of a complete document management system.

DocuWare is perfectly suited for workflows. For example, we can add stamped notes to documents in instances when colleagues need to be informed about a development on a booking. Mandatory fields ensure all employees are kept up to date with what tasks need completing.
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