Reference Story
Mess-Profis:
document management with easy archive is a competitive advantage in the industry
about Mess-
Profis
The Mess-Profis group is a specialized energy service provider and partner to the real estate industry active since 1996. Its core business is heating cost accounting as well as providing and maintaining the necessary recording devices.
Based in Bielefeld, the company uses software developed in-house and generally focuses on issues such as digitization, networking and sustainability in its business processes. Over 100 people are employed at the company’s nine locations in Germany.
the future of heating cost accounting is digital
It’s a familiar routine to tenants and landlords: All heating meters have to be read out, sent and settled once a year. This often involves a personal meter reading appointment on site, recorded with pen and paper. As metering experts, the Mess-Profis group offers a much simpler, more transparent and more sustainable way to organize and implement this process: The company specializes in digitizing the billing of energy costs for properties and provides its customers with the necessary equipment and services.
And the company is just as dedicated to digitization when it comes to its internal business processes.
This is due in part to the high level of IT expertise at the company: Not only is its service based on the internally developed software platform SOCS (Self Operating Calculation System), the group also uses solutions programmed in-house for numerous internal IT processes, as explained by system administrator Malte Pawisa.
set on easy from the start
In the area of document management and archiving, the group has been relying on solutions from easy for years: The collaboration dates back to 2010, when the energy service provider began a step-by-step process to completely digitize the flood of documents with the help of easy archive.
Malte Pawisa uses an example to illustrate just how important the digitization of document management is for Mess-Profis:
“In 2024, we got rid of our last archived paper files, which we had to keep in the company due to the statutory ten-year retention period.
Of course, we still have departments that have to work with paper – for contracts in Sales, for example. As a general rule, though, all our processes are now paperless.”
The range of documents that have been digitized in the various business processes at Mess-Profis extends from invoices and contracts to personnel files and the numerous business-critical documents that arise in the core business of energy cost accounting. This includes documents as diverse as
“incoming invoices, contracts, statements, metering logs, tenant lists that we receive from property managers and owners, and so on.
There are also manual meter readings from tenants and all correspondence with customers.”
easy archive is integrated into all relevant business processes
As a technology-driven company with a self-sufficient IT infrastructure that is hosted on-premises on its own servers, the Mess-Profis group decided to independently integrate easy archive into its internal processes by writing its own code using interfaces provided by easy.
It has proven to be an advantage that easy archive can be integrated very flexibly into a wide range of IT environments via easy’s own EBIS interface (Easy Business Interface Services). EBIS functions as middleware that enables powerful data exchange functionality between the easy application and third-party software.
In practice, this means that all relevant documents arriving at the company by email are now automatically transferred to the digital archive. Paper documents, such as invoices or customer correspondence, that reach the head office by post are scanned and digitized with the help of easy Capture, which converts them into searchable PDF documents. These documents can then also be archived in an audit-proof manner. Malte Pawisa estimates that around 70,000 digital documents enter the archive each year via these various channels.
This figure shows the importance of easy archive for the internal processes of the Mess-Profis group. Malte Pawisa:
“Without a digital archive, we would no longer be able to maintain our processes. For the simple reason that there is so much data being processed these days and so many regulations that need to be observed.”
a digital archive brings competitive advantages
Finally, he also considers it a major advantage that the digital archive enormously simplifies work with the documents because access via the search functions is much faster, simpler and clearer:
“In these fast-moving times, a company can no longer afford to search through piles of paper and run to filing cabinets to find information.
Far too much time is wasted in the process.”
Malte Pawisa is certain that, in conjunction with its business strategy, the digitization of document management with easy archive will ultimately give the Mess-Profis group a competitive advantage:
“We are currently experiencing strong growth within our industry because there are competitors who have lost touch with digitalization and are therefore no longer able to keep pace.”
employees no longer want to do without easy archive
Malte Pawisa offers an anecdote to illustrate how natural working with a digital archive has become at
the company:
“Last year, we bought a smaller company where everything was still processed purely on paper. There was no digital archive, no document management software, nothing. As a result, our employees who were entrusted with the takeover of this company quickly became annoyed because they had to search through all the receipts in paper form. They quickly decided to scan and digitize the documents right away.”
The effort was worth it: “Suddenly our colleagues had direct access to all documents again. Instead of having to search through ten folders for each process because something was filed in the wrong place, it could be found in easy archive in seconds.” The switch ultimately led to another happy ending: The new employees who came on board with the company were immediately enthusiastic about this new solution.
when i’m asked for my opinion on easy archive, i always say jokingly: let me do some marketing for a moment. because i can’t put it any more clearly: easy simply makes things easy for us.
Malte Pawisa,
system administrator at Mess-Profis