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Case Study: Manufacturing

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As soon as BMK USA books an invoice, management in Germany can digitally check the receipt in seconds. A cloud-based DMS links the worldwide activities of the German specialist in surface coating – and boosts all their global processes.

The BMK Group is a leading manufacturer of surface coatings and impregnations, which are used on laminate flooring and furniture. Founded in 1972, the headquarters of the family-owned company remains in Southwest Germany. But the group continues to expand its footprint internationally, including locations in the USA. A Cloud-based document management system (DMS) helps the company succeed with an extremely efficient accounting system.

For years, the company’s bookkeeping was outsourced to an external tax consultancy. After they acquired a company with its own accounting department, they began doing the accounting work for the entire group. This globally operating department often struggled with incoming A/P invoices, since they were received at various locations and ended up in the accounting department in different ways. Some were scanned and sent by email, others were taken along by employees on their business trips between locations, and many were sent by mail. As a result, documents were often lost or received late, so that they rarely could benefit from early payment discounts. As a result, the company was looking for a solution and found it in DocuWare. Since this company was in strong growth mode, the cloud capabilities of the system were a decisive point – in the long term, BMK wants to convert its entire office IT to "cloud only." Since DocuWare offers complete functionality in the Cloud, makes document access from anywhere and mobile devices possible, and offers various options for process optimization, the company chose this solution over other competitive products.

Country:
Germany
Industry:
Manufacturing
Department:
Finance |Management |IT Operations |Customer Support |HR |Accounting
Deployment:
Cloud
Integration:
QuickBooks (Finance) |Varial (Finance)

DocuWare is an important element of our Cloud strategy to improve our processes worldwide. Thanks to quick invoice processing, we are also able to benefit from early payment discounts.

Jan Martin Zizka
IT Director for BMK Group, Gaildorf-Broeckingen (Germany)

Work across multiple locations

The solution was implemented at BMK together with an Authorized DocuWare Partner. In advance, key workflows were crafted and the Varial financial system was integrated so that documents created by BMK could be stored directly in their central document pool. The implementation of DocuWare at the US site in Lexington, North Carolina was identical. Their decision to move into the Cloud proved to be a huge advantage because the US processes could be implemented right from Germany. Colleagues in Lexington were then trained in the new solution within two weeks. The accounting department in Lexington works with the financial software QuickBooks, which was also integrated into DocuWare. When receiving invoices, the Americans team adapted their process so that scanned invoices are posted immediately, which is slightly different from the German team’s approach. The next step on the way to the Cloud at BMK is the consolidation of the various ERP and accounting systems using the Microsoft Cloud solution "Dynamics 365 Business Central." This will enable all global employees to work more seamlessly in the Cloud.

Process optimization thanks to DMS

Targets for IT projects are clearly defined at BMK: Processes should be optimized and, if possible, automated, since process errors usually occur at points where too much manual input is involved. These objectives were also fully met in the DocuWare project. This is because the solution offers the BMK Group plenty of ways to automate, such as the automatic indexing of incoming A/P documents. This helps to avoid errors and significantly accelerate processes. The company was also able to record a high level of user acceptance shortly after DocuWare went live - not necessarily a matter of course when introducing a new system and simultaneously switching to the Cloud.

With DocuWare, we have improved our invoice receipt process enormously. The Cloud solution has digitized and streamlined what was once a bumpy process that caused headaches throughout the group.
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