Loacker digitizes document-based processes with d.velop and Microsoft 365

Summary

Over the past 90 years, Loacker developed from a small regional confectioner to a globally known brand with products that delight people in more than 100 countries. With more than 1,000 employees producing more than 957 million sweet items per year, the company focuses on offering pure and wholesome natural goodness to their consumers.

Loacker worked with d.velop to create a document management system (DMS) integrated with SAP and based on Office 365 and SharePoint. With the help of d.velop solutions and adapters, the system enables users to display digital files and digital processes. This saves costs, increases transparency, and significantly reduces processing time.

The system meets not only the legal requirements, but also the company’s philosophy of “Share & Work Together”.

Challenge

With information coming in from different channels, such as SAP ERP, e-mails, and paper documents, Loacker could not centrally manage it. In addition, the company stored information in different systems, so that the employees had to spend a lot of time to get a complete overview.

Important processes were still analogue and involved a lot of manual effort. As a result, the company wanted to digitize these processes, including Accounts Payable processes (like invoice processing) that had to comply with the special legal requirements in Italy.

There was already a proprietary DMS, but it was not widely used. Loacker wanted to establish a suitable DMS in their internationally oriented and dynamically growing company. They needed the DMS to seamlessly integrate into the leading SAP ERP. They also wanted to include the complete, legally compliant and transparent digitization of all documents in the form of customer files, supplier files, order files, technical documents, etc. On this basis, Loacker wanted to comprehensively design digital business processes, provide documents for customers, and optimize internal collaboration.

According to Loacker’s ideas, the new DMS should further promote the internal “Share & Work Together” idea. In addition, the topic of the compliant filing according to the requirements of the respective countries was of importance in the project.

Strategy

To digitize the internal administration of Loacker and to successfully complete the project, d.velop and the company drew up a strategy before the start of the project.

Office 365 and especially SharePoint are strategically used for communication at Loacker. Therefore, they decided to build Loacker’s intranet and document management on this platform.

These services were to be made available to the users as a central and modern system to enable joint document processing and consistent digital business processes.

The project started with the migration of the existing ECM system to SharePoint/O365; subsequently the team carried out the integration of SharePoint/O365 into SAP ERP to display the respective files in the context of an SAP process.

Outgoing documents from SAP are automatically stored in SharePoint with the corresponding metadata. Incoming paper documents, such as invoices, are scanned and also stored in SharePoint. E-mails can be filed quickly via drag & drop using the d.velop sidebar.

With d.velop for Microsoft 365, information in the SharePoint is consolidated in context. For example, the system generates a customer file, supplier file, or material file and enables access to all relevant customer information.

Thanks to the close integration with SAP, users can navigate from SAP to the corresponding documents or files in SharePoint at any time.

Furthermore, the team realized the Accounts Payable process. It enables invoices to be stored and found centrally in SharePoint. The workflow component manages the review and approval process and ensures that associated metadata can be seamlessly exchanged with the SAP system.

Last but not least the team established Office 365, SharePoint, and d.velop for Microsoft 365 as a platform for audit-proof archiving.

Results

After the successful implementation of the project, the team determined that not only had they optimized business processes, but also that there had been a significant reduction in isolated solutions. A further advantage is that Loacker achieved a company-wide and holistic use of the strategically placed Office 365. Key users and employees benefit directly from the project. They have access to hundreds of thousands of documents at any time and from everywhere, resulting in an immediate ability to provide information and a significant reduction in search times for supplier and customer documents.

The digital verification and approval of incoming invoices with the deep SAP-integrated solution of d.velop enables the legally compliant filing according to the respective country regulations and special features in the area of digital invoices (FatturaB2B). Furthermore, the consistently digital process ensures a transparent receipt of invoices until payment and considerably reduces the processing times in invoice verification.

Read full case study