Reference Story
Adam Hall: An Agile Industry Giant that Relies on easy
About Adam Hall
Adam Hall was founded in 1975 by the British musician of the same name in Southend-on-Sea near London. In 1980, the company, which was managed for many years by British musician David Kirby, relocated to Germany. Over the years, the manufacturer of high-quality and robust flight case fittings for music equipment has become one of the leading industry giants for event technology. Adam Hall has made a name for itself worldwide as both a manufacturer and a global B2B distributor and service provider. The Adam Hall Group is headquartered in Neu-Anspach in the Hessian Taunus. The group currently employs approximately 400 people and generates an annual turnover of 175 million euros.
It started with easy archive
The business relationship between Adam Hall GmbH and easy software goes back to 2006. Even then, Adam Hall had begun to digitalize internal processes. That’s why the decision-makers decided to install easy archive on the company’s own servers at the same time as the conversion of the ERP system to Microsoft Navision.
The project was implemented with an external IT service provider who had established contact with easy software. For Adam Hall, the project was about integrating an audit-proof archive into the internal workflows in order to be able to present all the necessary documents in a legally secure manner during audits. This laid the foundation for a long partnership.
Since its founding, the Adam Hall Group has experienced rapid development. This is certainly related to the company’s roots. After all, the first bosses were musicians who specialized in improving their industry with innovative products. For this reason, Adam Hall has remained an agile company to this day, built on initiative, creativity, and inventiveness.
This is also evident in the way it handles IT: as early as 1998, Adam Hall was one of the first companies in its industry to go online with its B2B shop, which it continues to develop in-house to this day. In 2019, Adam Hall launched a comprehensive digitalization strategy to further improve internal business processes. During this time, Alexander Sonndag also joined Adam Hall. After four years as project manager, he has been responsible for the digital transformation within the company for the past two years as Director IT.
Pain point: incoming invoices
2019 was also the year in which the business relationship between Adam Hall and easy software was further intensified. One of the first projects addressed a major pain point for the company: incoming invoice processing.
As easy archive had already been running smoothly on the company servers for years, easy invoice was quickly shortlisted when it came to finding a suitable provider:
“It was an obvious choice for us to approach easy about digitizing our incoming invoice processing, since we already had the easy archive. Since we liked the product and the offer was right, we quickly decided on easy,”
says Alexander Sonndag.
The idea of initially focusing on incoming invoices came directly from the accounts payable department. As in many other companies, the employees there have also found that manual invoice processing nowadays actually only has disadvantages, as Alexander Sonndag explains:
“The process was much slower. When an invoice reached us by email, it first had to be printed out. Then it was stamped, signed and forwarded to our internal mail system. It usually took at least three working days for an invoice to be manually released and sent to the accounting department. If someone was sick or on vacation, the invoice would sit on their desk for days. This was a huge risk because the invoice had not yet been assigned to an account. This meant that the accounting department had no idea that the invoice was even in the building.”
Discounts & Co: Digitization Pays Off in Many Ways
Manual invoice processing not only causes stress in the accounting department, it also inevitably leads to reminders for unpaid invoices being sent to a company from time to time.
For Adam Hall, the fact that they have agreed discounts with many business partners, for which a certain payment term must be adhered to in the invoice process, also played a major role. The situation has been completely reversed by the switch to digital incoming invoice processing.
Today, when an invoice reaches Adam Hall by email, it is immediately recognized by easy invoice and the accounting department knows immediately that it exists. This also simplifies the handling of discounts:
“Even if an employee is sick or otherwise unavailable and the invoice may not have been assigned to an account, we now have the option in financial accounting to claim a discount. We do this, for example, with service providers or business partners with whom we have been working together for a long time in a trusting relationship and where the accounting department knows that these invoices are usually paid anyway.”
By digitizing its incoming invoice process, Adam Hall has achieved real financial benefits. In this context, however, Alexander Sonndag feels it is important to add another point to this list:
Adam Hall sees itself as a modern and progressive company in which sustainability plays a major role and is lived as a holistic concept throughout the entire corporate culture. For example, the company has installed a 10,000-square-meter photovoltaic system on the roof of the logistics building at its headquarters, which generates a large proportion of the energy consumed.
With easy invoice, incoming invoice processing also contributes to this corporate goal. By digitizing this process, the company saves tens of thousands of pages of paper and other resources each year that were previously wasted printing invoices.
Better workflows and happier employees
Digitizing incoming invoices also had another side effect in terms of organization, which Alexander Sonndag also finds very important:
“Previously, a lot of people were allowed to assign invoices to accounts in our company. In theory, anyone could write anything on an invoice. With the introduction of easy invoice, we have developed very specific workflows that are also supported by the program. Now the release of invoices is limited to a specific group of people. And we have set up targeted escalation routines in the program for when invoices get stuck in the workflow. If an invoice exceeds a certain amount, additional people, for example from management, are automatically involved in the release process and the four-eyes principle is activated.”
Alexander Sonndag and his team needed just under nine months for the entire project, i.e. from the initial planning to the kick-off with easy software and the handover of the finished solution to support.
As experienced IT specialists, they took on the project management themselves, while easy software was responsible for technical support. For example, the easy software technicians installed the software on the company servers and provided support for program updates.
The feedback Alexander Sonndag received from the accounting department was immediately very positive. Since all employees who work with easy invoice were trained in using the program, they quickly knew what to do and found both the new, much clearer workflows and the reduced workload when processing incoming invoices to be a great relief.
Easier contract management
After positive experiences with easy archive and easy invoice, Adam Hall has recently launched another project with the addition of easy contract. Alexander Sonndag sees the digitalization of contract management as another important step in the modernization of internal business processes:
“We frequemtly search for contracts around here because each department stores its contracts differently. Sometimes they are stored in a folder, sometimes in an e-mail or a SharePoint. There is no clear structure.”
easy contract is currently changing this: it stores all contracts in one place across the company, where they can be indexed and are fully searchable.
The program is currently being rolled out step by step throughout the company, starting with financial accounting. In the second step, the option for digital signatures will be added with easy eSignature.
In general, I would always make sure that the IT department is involved in digitalization projects at an early stage. This way, many errors that would otherwise go unnoticed can be eliminated right from the start. This is because IT has a different view of the associated processes than the specialist department. It is important to be clear about the target processes: What is my current situation and where do I want to go?
Alexander Sonndag,
Director IT, Adam Hall