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Case Study: Service Provider

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Building management company gepe Peterhoff has structured and automated core business processes by introducing a DMS. For this company and its over 7,000 employees, this is an important step for working in a decentralized, ultra-efficient manner – securing the company’s future.

gepe Peterhoff, with headquarters and branches throughout Germany, can look back on more than 60 years of company history. The company generates a total of around 140 million euros with building management services, including cleaning, maintenance, security and catering.

"We are not the cheapest provider, but we always prove our worth with high quality and well though-out concepts," says Georg Hermann who is responsible for the company’s digital development. High profile corporations are among their longest-standing customers, some of which have special demands because of cleanrooms that form part of their production facilities. Comprehensive cleaning in hospitals and retirement homes is a further specialty of this family-owned business.

In 2019, Georg Hermann joined the company to fill a newly created staff position – with the clear objective of advancing their digitization efforts. Since they did not have a DMS at this point, many documents such as orders were archived and managed decentrally at twelve locations. Together with his project team, Georg Hermann started his quest for a DMS that would make daily work processes more transparent and much more efficient. They also sought out a solution partner who could understand their processes and not just about simply introducing a system, says Hermann. They chose DocuWare because it was a proven, mature system with a strong workflow engine and offered alongside the consulting expertise of an Authorized DocuWare Partner system house. All prerequisites for their on-site installation were in place on the hardware side along with a SQL server.

Country:
Germany
Industry:
Service Provider
Department:
Management |Administration |HR |Accounting
Deployment:
On-Premises
Integration:
Microsoft Business Central |BSS |NAPA3

Our invoice receipt workflow witnessed significant acceleration, especially for invoices that need to be checked by employees who are working all over. It has meant almost complete automation for processing invoices from our largest supplier. For our HR department, we’ve been able to quickly implement new requirements, such as those addressing a shifting Covid landscape.

Georg Hermann
Head of Digital Development forgepe Peterhoff, Dueren (Germany)

Paper invoices cut down to 10 percent

After launching DocuWare on June 1, 2020 – at around week ten of the project – a new electronic invoice processing system was introduced. Invoices received by post are given a QR code, then scanned and stored in a DocuWare tray. Incoming email invoices are also transferred to this tray via Connect to Outlook. Since all suppliers were contacted at the end of 2020 to send invoices by email only, only 10 percent now arrive at gepe on paper. If approval cannot be carried out in their central invoice control (which is possible when all relevant documents are already available in their central archive), invoices are then forwarded to the departments for further examination. This process has accelerated things enormously, particularly for invoices that need an extra look.

Fully automated invoice processing

Virtually complete automation has been achieved for processing invoices from one of their largest suppliers, that generates over 30 percent of their total invoice volume. Together with the system house, a special invoice design was developed in which the corresponding cost center is already listed in the accounting department at gepe for each item. In addition, the invoices are issued separately for each G/L account, so that the posting proposals only have to be collected and sorted in the accounting department.

Indispensable tool in personnel management

The range of applications of DocuWare is continuously being expanded. An important area is the HR file cabinet, which is used intensively by the 15-person HR department. DocuWare’s sophisticated authorization concept has impressed in this arena. For example, vaccination records are managed alongside personnel files in compliance with data protection regulations. This is especially important for cleaning staff who work in daycare centers and schools. "When 'springers' are used, we need to know whether they have the required measles vaccination. We can create control lists that show for each cost center whether vaccinations are missing," explains Georg Hermann. Sick leaves are also recorded via DocuWare. At the individual locations, these can be scanned decentrally via multifunction printers and are then available to HR managers. For a service company that has to manage widely fluctuating personnel, the DMS has become an indispensable tool for every day.

We automated the invoice processing of a large supplier, drastically cutting our through time, all thanks to a special invoice workflow developed with our system house.
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