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Case Study: Retail / Wholesale

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Rapid growth can overwhelm individual departments. At retail giant B&M, the Human Resources department could hardly keep up with new hires. Today, a digital document management system controls the entire onboarding process for the company.

B&M Retail is a fast-growing retail chain in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1978, it now operates more than 600 stores with approximately 28,000 employees. Many of their processes could not keep up with the company’s dynamic expansion course of the last years, particularly in the area of Human Resources. B&M now relies on a digital document management system (DMS) to control all onboarding processes. This saves their HR team many, many hours of manual work.

In the past, new employees had to fill out and sign various paper documents in each branch during the hiring process. These were then sent to the head office, where the data was manually transferred to their personnel and accounting system. Since each new employee could only start work after this registration, B&M was very interested in reducing processing times. Especially in months with many new hires, the negative consequences of the lengthy paper-based processes were felt considerably. The HR team was also looking for a simple to use solution that would comply with the latest legal regulations. A digital solution needed to be able to handle approval processes dynamically and provide greater transparency for filing and workflows. Several years earlier, B&M had upgraded its printing and copying equipment with the help of a large technology company and document management specialists. After intensive analysis of the situation, DocuWare was recommended as the right solution for the processes in the HR department.

Country:
United Kingdom
Industry:
Retail / Wholesale
Department:
Human Resources
Deployment:
On-Premises

What were once manual tasks are now handled by fully automated workflows thanks to the DMS. New employees can now be onboarded within a few hours – instead of weeks. Without process automation, we would not be able to meet the new legal requirements for onboarding.

David Grady
IT Director, B&M Retail, Liverpool (UK)

DMS reduces processing times to a few hours

Since time is a hot commodity during rapid expansion, a simple but efficient workflow was initially set up: Registration documents filled out by new employees were scanned in the individual stores, transferred to DocuWare file cabinets and then processed electronically by the head office. Even this initial solution enabled the company to hire new staff within a few hours instead of waiting up to several weeks for paper documents from the HR department as was previously the case. Subsequently, the processes were further digitized, step by step. The DocuWare team continually consulted with managers and users, helping to fine-tune the technological framework for digitizing onboarding and meet the customer’s needs. Today, for example, individual stores use web forms for registration, which are filled out and signed on a tablet by the newcomers. Transfer to the DMS is therefore no longer necessary, because the documents are immediately archived in the document pool after being filled out with all the important index fields. DocuWare then informs the HR department at headquarters in real time about the availability of new personnel files – employees are now instantly set up in the system.

Hundreds of new hires per week? No problem!

Digitizing their onboarding process brought the company a number of benefits. With digital workflows, nothing stands in the way of the retail chain's strong growth. When larger stores are opened, several hundred new employees can now be easily hired within a week. DocuWare guarantees productive and agile workflows even at peak times. Since files are only exchanged electronically, the personnel team can now concentrate fully on processing requests. The DMS also securely logs all processes and documents in the digital file cabinet, so employees, working from anywhere, can transparently track the status of their own personnel file and documents.

The company is already planning to expand the use of DocuWare to include other processes, such as purchasing, approval of incoming A/P invoices and logistics, in order to take advantage of the full potential of DocuWare.

DocuWare first listened to our requirements and then created thoughtful solution recommendations. After that, a robust system was created, which is now providing our company with the greatest possible benefit.
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