BÜCHL
Effectively store and manage business-critical documents and files
In addition to 70 years of expertise in the waste management industry, the family-owned company BÜCHL knows how important it is to store and manage business-critical documents and files skillfully. As one of the largest waste management companies in the region, BÜCHL decided to optimize its administrative processes in the background with solutions from easy.
Digitalization in quality management
The first project with and easy was launched in the area of quality management, an area that calls for a host of detailed requirements extending deep into the managed processes. BÜCHL had a very precise idea of what was needed from the digital solution for automating quality management: complex tasks, such as managing certifications, had to be migrated from paper to the digital system without restrictions.
Despite the high complexity of the processes, the digital interface had to be simple enough for even occasional users. “Someone who only creates a single digital document per year should not require any prior training to operate the most recent software version,” explains Hans Gerngroß, Project Manager at BÜCHL.
BÜCHL has been using a system that meets all of these requirements in another area since 2009: the easy interface for Microsoft Navision (now Dynamics 365 Business Central) was originally implemented as a document store directly in the Microsoft application and has functioned reliably ever since with high employee acceptance. Hans Gerngroß has worked with plenty of DMS products over his career. He was therefore well aware that – considering BÜCHL’s ambitious goals – it would make good sense to expand the cooperation with easy from Navision to include other digitization solutions, all from the same provider.
While Quality Management previously produced documents by hand, digital solutions now automate the bulk of the work. The digital system guides the employees smoothly through the process. They are able to create digital documents for later use without any prior knowledge of the system.
EASY offers structured, flexible solutions that have brought about significant improvements in all areas. The technical implementation was highly responsive to our business requirements.
Hans Gerngroß,
Project Manager BÜCHL
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employees
tons waste per day
PROJEcT INFORMATION
The time savings and the associated efficiency gains are immense
After the successful digitalization of quality management, BÜCHL realized that the outgoing invoices process would also benefit from an upgrade. The problem: Although there was nothing special about the outgoing invoice processes, BÜCHL had never before found a suitable digital solution. Many of the licensing models for typical software products were impractical for the company’s situation, such as per-user licensing.
“Many users at BÜCHL only have to deal with five invoices per year. Paying a high, fixed price per user would not make sense,” notes Hans Gerngroß. “We got offered a licensing model with the easy solutions that allows for more flexible billing that is a better fit for our application. Plus, the invoicing system was seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Navision right out of the box.”
The incoming invoices, however, posed a larger challenge than the outgoing ones. BÜCHL had very specific requirements here as well. Since Purchase2Pay processes are part of easy’s more than 30 years of digitization expertise, it did not pose a problem to adapt the existing easy invoice solution to meet BÜCHL’s needs.
The project team created interfaces, determined where to source the master data from, designed example invoices and then got started straight away with testing. New ideas regularly cropped up over the course of the project and were immediately implemented by the team.
“It was important to recreate our complicated and carefully organized authorization structure within the digital solution. We also had to make sure that these authorizations could be modified quickly without outside help, such to cover vacation-related absences. It actually happened once that a case had to be escalated because no substitute was properly defined. This prompted us to make certain that our managers could modify these authorization structures themselves and that the process was as simple as possible,” says Hans Gerngroß.
The user-friendly software allowed BÜCHL’s employees to quickly become adept at configuring the easy solutions on their own. “Thanks to the clear and visually expressive design, the software is very self-explanatory, and we rarely have to consult with the experts at easy,” says Hans Gerngroß. “Even without these advantages, the process automation would still save us a tremendous amount of time. Just imagine: we used to have to carry paper back and forth between two buildings. Digitizing all our documents and processes cut the workload by 60 percent!”
The most recent challenge was a particular issue for BÜCHL as a disposal company, but other logistics operations will certainly be familiar with it as well: complaints. Hans Gerngroß explains the problem: “Let’s say a driver can’t enter a customer’s driveway because the gate is closed. When this happens, our drivers track the time they have to wait until the gate opens. The collected data eventually lands on the desks of the processors.” BÜCHL now uses digital tools to accelerate this tracking and complaint process as well.
“The drivers now track the time digitally in the CleverWaste system. During the seconds while the gate is opening, the software is already creating a digital incident file in easy: Who was driving? How long was the wait? A form letter to the customer is also included automatically. The complaint file appears immediately on the screen of the responsible processor, who only needs to check the documents and send them. In the ideal case, the customer has already received the complaint even before the driver who reported the incident has left the scene,” says Hans Gerngroß.
The time savings and associated efficiency improvements are immense. The drivers used to submit the paperwork for such complaints in the evening. The process only began the next morning and required several trips around the office. “When the customers were contacted days later, they often no longer recalled exactly when the gate was closed or why. With CleverWaste, we can even add smartphone photos of the situation with a timestamp directly to the digital easy file.”
BÜCHL handles 70 such complaints each week. Since the digitization, the processing time has decreased by up to 50 percent. Unnecessary delays are a thing of the past, and the entire communication between the driver, office staff and customer is more transparent. easy worked closely with BÜCHL to integrate the digital complaint file into easy DMS and make it compatible with automated processes.
Not only the digital complaint file, but all easy solutions introduced at BÜCHL were fully operational within a few months. Until then, the project team conducted several test runs to ensure that everything ran smoothly. Overall, BÜCHL are completely satisfied with the digital processes.
the right data in the right hands