Document and data management for manufacturing

500 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide every year. The Swiss company Jura specialises in providing high-end, fully automatic coffee machines for this market. They are sold in 49 countries for everything from private homes to restaurants. Since 2000, Jura has had a presence in the UK and now has over 38,000 customers there.

Jura not only places a great emphasis on creating machines that provide high quality coffee, but also set the bar in innovative Swiss engineering and design.

“When someone buys a Jura machine, then they are making an investment that lasts for many years, quite possibly for someone’s whole life. If something needs repair, then the machine is serviced by our specialists,” explains Anton Dreyer, Digital Operations Manager for the company’s British affiliate. Every year, more than 5,000 machines are serviced. The volume of documentation related to every coffee machine service job is substantial.

Before using DocuWare, their documents were spread out in different locations within the company – some in paper binders, some in electronic files on a server. Every week, an average of 600 additional, often multi-page, documents were added that a team of 40 employees needed to access daily in order to do their work.

A service order at Jura can quickly generate five to eight documents and files. Next to the initial order of documents, every Jura machine comes with a comprehensive analysis report that is generated as an electronic text document. This provides information such as the number and type of drinks produced by the machine, the amount of water used, and the steam’s temperature settings. This all helps their technicians quickly diagnose any issue that a machine might be encountering.

“The biggest challenge for us was being able to quickly retrieve important documents. Our employees often didn’t know where to look or needed a lot of time to search for the information they needed. Plus, we’d occasionally lose documents along the way. Obviously, this was a situation that we wanted to change quickly,” confirms Dreyer.

The company launched their DMS in March 2016 in the company’s Accounting Department and was then rolled out to all other parts of the company. Today, half of the company’s employees are working on a daily basis with their new electronic document pool – and the number keeps growing.

Before the roll-out, the DocuWare Partner conducted an analysis of their current workflow processes. “Transitioning from paper to electronic document management was extremely simple in large part because we didn’t have to change existing processes – with the only difference being that we now only manage these documents in a digital form,” confirms Dreyer.

Incoming A/P invoices are scanned at receipt and placed in the digital basket of the Accounting Department. From here, they are booked in Microsoft Dynamics Navision and then using this booking data are automatically indexed and stored in the central document pool. “Our employees don’t have to sort the invoices after the booking, never have to search around for a binder or folder. Archiving these invoices is all just a matter of clicking a button,” adds Anton Dreyer with enthusiasm.

For outgoing A/R invoices the process is even faster, since any invoices generated are archived out of Navision and straight into the DMS. The extra bonus: the system is able to independently recognise when a new document is stored, then retrieves the customer’s e-mail address and automatically sends it directly to the customer. “It is truly unbelievable how quickly our invoices are sent out today. Practically while printing, it’s already being read by the customer – without any manual work on the part of our employees. Not only are we able to cut postage and printing costs, we are saving a huge amount of time,” according to Dreyer. Another area which has clearly profited from electronic document management is their Customer Service. All their service orders analysis reports for their machines are now digitally retained.

Without ever having to leave their familiar interface, employees can now access their digitally stored documents right from their Navision ERP system. A button integrated in Navision immediately serves up any service records like an initial order request or final invoice. This quick document access has been a big bonus for their customer service. “Our modest team of 5 customer service employees are now able to handle all requests from throughout the UK. This is really only possible because of efficient workflow methods. Thanks to our DMS, we can now respond to customer enquiries even quicker,” states Dreyer.

He also emphasises the solution’s low overall operational cost: “After our DocuWare Partner provided some basic training, I was able manage many of the configurations and staff training myself. The simplicity of the system meant that our employees immediately accepted it – and helped significantly reduce the overall cost of the project.”

Jura plans on testing the use of the DMS as a mobile application in the near future. For example, technicians who are repairing a machine in a restaurant will then be able to use a tablet or smartphone to access all previous support requests and reports. Relevant information, such as previous analysis data, is thereby quickly accessible from anywhere and will help their team analyse and respond to service request even faster.