Facts and Figures

With d.3, Aug. Winkhaus GmbH achieves tamper-proof archiving in the areas of accounting, contract documentation and for all SAP documents.

• Incoming invoices are automatically detected with the d.velop invoice reader.
• The digital check and approval of invoices takes place with a freely-configurable SAP business workflow solution.
• Department-specific access to all of the company‘s contracts.

The Project Goals

While Winkhaus replaced the existing JD Edwards ERP solution with SAP R/3, documents were stored temporarily on the SAP Content Server. After the successful changeover to SAP, the document filing system was to be expanded in such a way that would ensure the automatic entry and forwarding of incoming invoices, the archiving of SAP documents and the establishment of a company-wide contract management system.

Efficiency

“With electronically running approvals, we can now monitor the course and status of all incoming invoices that are circulating around the company considerably better than before,” says Mike Riddermann, the financial accountant at Winkhaus responsible for the DMS project. Invoicing was not transparent before; now everyone involved in the invoicing approval process can find information quickly about the status of an invoice. “The connection to SAP was solved efficiently and expertly by d.velop technicians,” adds Josef Brösterhaus, CEO of Winkhaus Data. “Occasional users access it through the web portal or Outlook, but those who approve invoices daily work with the SAP Frontend.”

Why d.3?

Josef Brösterhaus: “The features supplied by d.3 definitely met the diverse requirements at Winkhaus. In addition to high functionality, ease of use and low customization cost were deciding factors in our choice to go with d.3. The expertise of the d.velop employees in the SAP solution area was another convincing reason. It was really a tough decision. But, what clinched it was the fact that the cost for customizing was much higher with other manufacturers compared to d.3. What sets d.velop apart is a balanced cost-benefit ratio.”

Course of the Project

Before making their decision to use the product, Winkhaus Data first identified the precise objectives of a DMS introduction with help from the consulting firm Zöller & Partner. The request for proposal was based on these objectives. According to these objectives, the future system had to first automatically enter invoices and be able to integrate them into the SAP approval workflow. In addition, contracts and emails, as well as SAP documents and tables, were to be archived and managed electronically.

     Mike Riddermann       Josef Brösterhaus

The Winkhaus Data SAP databases have continued to grow considerably in recent years. The volume of these databases was to be reduced to a size that ensured sufficient performance and manageability by removing data via the SAP ArchiveLink. In July 2008, d.velop AG presented its solution to the client and received the order to start implementation in September. “We figured it would take less than three months to start live operation of all three scenarios,” says Mike Riddermann, “and several colleagues smirked – they said we‘d never finish that quick.” But it worked: An invoice was run through the system before Christmas, and three months later there were already more than 10,000 invoices in the system.

All scanned invoices in the accounting department now go through the invoice reader. This extracts the information in the invoice header, validates it against the SAP master data and forwards the XML data records together with the invoice (which is scanned in TIF format) automatically to SAP. After any necessary corrections to an incorrectly scanned image, the core of the solution starts up: the maxflow approval workflow, based on SAP Business Workflow and implemented by d.velop. Winkhaus receives approximately 250 invoices daily, of which about two – thirds are order – related MM invoices. A good 80 non – order invoices remain that pass completely through the SAP workflow. Order-related invoices are only manually processed if they are provided in a different format.

The topic of contract management lies under the domain of the in – house lawyer, General Counsel Torben Schmeink, who creates and manages all Winkhaus contractual documents. In addition to daily business, he has been digitizing and setting attributes to all of the company‘s contracts since the beginning of 2009 and stores supplier contracts, framework agreements, sponsorship agreements and management contracts in the d.3 archive. “The first goal was to centralize the contract archive using the DMS,” explains Mike Riddermann. “Now we are gradually setting up authorizations for various in – house departments, so that staff members can view only the contracts that they are authorized to see.”

An example: The members of the “Management” group are authorized to view all management related contracts. Those in the sub-group “Management/IT” only have access to all of the management-related contractual documents that contain references to IT. This also functions across locations to all German subsidiaries of the Winkhaus Group. The IT department works with an LDAP connection for central user management. From there, Mike Riddermann can set up users and different tiered groups whose authorizations are then automatically carried over into d.3.

When a LDAP user logs in, his authorization data is immediately transferred to the contract management system – extremely convenient user administration for Winkhaus. The SAP documents – bills of delivery, invoices, etc. – are processed by the Covus output management system at Winkhaus and are forwarded to the d.3 archive by ArchiveLink. Previously they were not stored in tamper-proof format on the SAP Content Server.

Outlook

After the first three sub-projects have been successfully implemented, Winkhaus Data next wants to tackle the outsourcing of SAP data via ArchivLink. In addition, the access rights in the contract management area will be even more refined, and over the long term the regional companies in Poland and England will also be integrated into the d.3 infrastructure.