OEM&Lieferant Ausgabe 2/2020

93 IT and Automotive Central Tool for Administration By Mechthilde Gruber, Freelance specialist journalist in Munich The All Service Group for Facility Management offers comprehensive services in the field of facility management, handling administrative tasks like finance and accounting for the All Service Group, which operates throughout Germany. In order to be able to work quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively, the company makes targeted use of digital technologies like cloud based document management. In the past, the invoicing process was weighed down with an enormous amount of paper and administrative work. Every month, the 800 or so work slips for services signed by the customer were collected and sent by the branch offices to the financial accounting department in Bad Homburg – box by box. There, the invoices were then created and printed out in their Sage ERP system. Work certificates were sorted, manually stuffed into envelopes and sent. A lot of time – and many documents – were lost in the mail. It could take up to 30 days before a service was invoiced. At the same time, the flood of paper was immense, with 30 binders filled every month. By introducing a Link DMS with a central archive, the com- pany wanted to automate work processes in order to handle invoicing more quickly and be able to better understand how their processes flowed. After a presentation by an Authorized DocuWare Partner (ADP), their decision was quickly made. The per- formance and flexibility of the system and a coherent workflow concept spoke in favor of DocuWare. Plus, excellent communication channels with the ADP and their key con- tacts ensured a good relationship. Integrated Accounting System Link Invoicing workflows h ave com- pletely changed since they introduced Link DocuWare Cloud. Today, the signed work slips are barcoded in the branch offices, scanned, stored in the digital document pool and enhanced with additional information (such as cost center and posting period) before being forwarded for invoicing. Doc- uments then appear in the task lists of the processing department in Bad Homburg and can be invoiced right in th e Link integrated Sage ERP system f or the corresponding accounting month. Each document contains all important information and text can also be copied from the work statement into the invoice for further explanation. As soon as the invoices are sent out, they are archived centrally. Once a day, the invoices with the corresponding work slips are downloaded as PDF files and sent by email to an external service provider, who in turn sends them to the customers by post or email. A total of seven employees now work regularly with the solution. DMS Ensures Time Savings & Transparency The company benefits greatly from the time saved during the entire invoicing process. Instead of spending hours collecting, stuff- ing, mailing, unpacking and sorting hundreds of documents, employees can now use their working time for more meaningful tasks. For example, it now only takes a few minutes for invoices to be sent together with the work slips. The central document pool and easy doc- ument access also brings many advantages. The convenient full-text search function, for example, means that a desired document can be found in seconds when a customer has a question. Employees can thus email a missing invoice to the customer again with just a few mouse clicks. At the same time, the document flow has become more secure and transpar- ent. It can be checked at any time, to see who has processed what and where a document is currently located – a tremendous advantage for traceability. Jörg Brehm, Billing and Accounts Receivable Manager, emphasizes out: “Especially during the Corona virus crisis, the ability for our employees to access DocuWare from their home offices without any problems and keep invoices rolling as usual proved to be a huge advantage. This would never have been pos- sible without digitizing our processes. But it also showed us that we have to keep pushing for this in other areas as well.” Image: © All Service Unternehmensgruppe für Gebäudemanagement GmbH DocuWare Customer Case Studies https://t1p.de/s9pv Website Jörg Brehm, Billing and Accounts Receivable Manager S H A R E Image: © alphaspirit/iStock