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Case Study: Construction / Building Management

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Natural resources such as lime, stone and cement have been at the heart of Sebald Cement's business since 1860. Process digitization now ensures fast access to one of the company’s other most important resources: its business documents.

Sebald Cement employs around 100 people in the areas of raw material extraction, ballast preparation, cement production and fertilizer grinding and granulation. The high quality standard of the company‘s products is ensured not only through high-performance machinery but also a modern IT system.

Over the years, mountains of files piled up, especially in the Sebald’s administration, which threatened to blow their filing capacity. The search for a powerful and future-proof document management system began in order to successively digitize paper-based administrative processes. Besides reducing the volume of paper and digital storage in their central archive, the DMS would also improve the efficiency and transparency of administrative processes. Other requirements included integration options in various systems, such as the ERP system Microsoft Dynamics or the accounting program Varial Finanzwesen. In a selection process that lasted several weeks, DocuWare was able to prevail against well-known competitors. The high functionality of the solution as well as the competence and customer orientation of the local DocuWare Partner convinced them.

Country:
Germany
Industry:
Construction / Building Management
Department:
Finance |Controlling |Administration |Order Processing
Deployment:
On-Premises
Integration:
Varial Finanzwesen |Microsoft Dynamics

With the introduction of digital document management, we were not trying to save personnel by increasing efficiency. Instead, we wanted to give our highly qualified employees relief from trivial tasks, so that they could make better use of their time and skills. DocuWare exceeded the high expectations we had for the DMS project right from the start.

Florian Spieß
Head of Accounting, Sebald Cement, Pommelsbrunn (Germany)

Since Sebald Cement has a powerful IT infrastructure and server capacities, the company decided to implement an on-premises system. Together with their DocuWare Partner, they developed a solution concept that defined digital workflows and locations for a total of five document scanners. As part of the technical implementation, data exchange between DocuWare and Microsoft Dynamics was ensured via standard interfaces. At the same time, a DocuWare button was integrated into the accounting software Varial Financials, allowing quick and convenient access to the central document pool.

Completely digital document processing

The start of the project heralded the final change from an analogue, paper-based approach to completely digital document processing. Today, incoming invoices are collected centrally and stored together with email invoices in electronic trays after digitization. After approval by a division manager for each responsible department and additional verification by management, payment is issued by the Accounting department. In the past, paper-based processing was often tedious and documents were often lost. Today, the processing status can be transparently checked at any time at the push of a button and - if necessary - accelerated by reminder emails. In the same way, the staff today can display all documents of a project clearly on the screen instead of having to search for project documents in different folders. The number of documents stored monthly in the central document pool is estimated at 8,000 to 12,000, depending on the season. In addition to incoming invoices, large numbers of outgoing delivery slips acknowledged by the recipient are scanned and automatically indexed.

More time for the essentials

Today, all users from the 20 different company divisions are relieved of their search and filing tasks by the DMS. Now they can devote themselves entirely to their core administrative tasks. Even the introduction of the software never hindered ongoing business operations – which makes it an easy decision to expand the central document pool into other company departments. A project team is examining expanding the system to include digital HR/personnel files and are developing concrete proposals for practical implementation.

DocuWare makes project processing much easier for us and significantly improves our ability to answer customer inquiries. Easy access to documents means that we can make copies of lost documents in seconds."
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