The paperless office at LEMKEN GmbH & Co KG

In a mountain of paper, the greatest challenge often starts with the search for suitable information. Minutes turn into hours, hours into days – although seconds would be enough with the right digital system. An efficient digital archive almost completely eliminates the problem of endless searching: specific keywords and key figures are recorded automatically during the scanning. The subsequent sorting according to these criteria ensures that the digital archive is both clear and orderly. Where filing work was previously part of daily work at LEMKEN, the staff can now use their valuable time more effectively.

Where there is no paper, there is no longer any need to send invoices by internal mail. Delivery notes, outgoing documents – in the old days, all of these documents had to be passed around and checked by several different people. With all this manual work, those who missed the daily dispatch times of the in-house mail service caused unintentional delays.

Paper-based processes of this kind invariably result in long idle times. The clerks have the invoices on their desk and have to check the ERP system first to see whether the invoice and the order match before the processes can continue. With digital document management, at LEMKEN, these processes run on a completely automatic basis for specific company codes.

As a general rule, most of the invoices correspond to their orders. They therefore require no further processing and are filed accordingly – without any human workload. In the event of discrepancies in the automatic matching process, the document management system (DMS) forwards the respective invoice directly to the responsible person for verification. During its work, the system differentiates between cost centers or different approved amounts per clerk, for example. LEMKEN can, among others, flexibly set the amount of money above which the system forwards a document to superiors for approval.

Thanks to intelligent automatic processes, avoidable idle times are almost completely a thing of the past. Processes that once took several days are now managed by LEMKEN in just half an hour. With more than 1,600 employees, this adds up to a huge time saving, every single day.

The workflows and DMS that LEMKEN uses to achieve this advancement have been provided by EASY SOFTWARE since 2007. It was then that the project was launched, with the archiving of all the paper-based documents first. After this important first step, the first workflows were then added. After only a short time, LEMKEN was able to manage and find all its documents far more easily.

LEMKEN now uses several different workflows. Many of these are outsourced to other systems – the EASY DMS which is used allows for flexibility of this kind with external solutions.

The most sophisticated workflow manages a complex assignment of incoming invoices: here, the system firstly differentiates between scanned invoices and completely digital invoices that have arrived by email, for example. Secondly, the system distinguishes between two different company codes, according to the criteria of which it checks the invoice.

Incoming digital invoices are created by the system from the mailboxes before being saved in appropriate folders. Related documents are then extracted by a seamless connection to an external tool for managing the incoming invoices, where they are processed by invoice verification specialists. On their journey back to the DMS, the invoices are sent to the appropriate workflow, according to the company code.

Both the international invoices and invoices from certain subsidiaries are stored in this DMS. More than 760 users use the DMS at LEMKEN. The access and authorizations can be customized freely for each person. The employees in Germany, for example, have access to the DMS and workflows, but employees abroad can only access the archive.

Since the introduction of the digital archive and the DMS including the workflow, LEMKEN has been working on a more agile and effective basis. The clear structures reduce superfluous tasks and losses of time to the minimum. This results in greater clarity and less stress. This not only increases the productivity; it also reduces the likelihood of errors in manual processes.

Digitalized document management has been a fixture at the company for more than 13 years, and LEMKEN remains exceptionally satisfied with EASY. The duration of their partnership alone is an indicator of the success of the project.