Adobe`s regional leadership was in SA recently to engage with local partners and customers in the wake of the company`s transformation from a channel company into an enterprise business.
"Adobe has transformed its internal processes to address enterprise needs and is now ready to extend global operations and make investments," said delegation head Pierre Van Beneden, Adobe VP for the EMEA region.
As former regional head for several other multinational companies, Van Beneden said SA was an attractive marketing and investment location for Adobe because it combined a "solid national economy" with a willingness to adopt new technology ahead of other markets.
In particular, Adobe is hoping to find a local market for its relatively new enterprise solutions that aim to bring document-based business processes within the digital realm to improve service and reduce risk through increased visibility, transparency and security.
"Bridging the paper-to-digital divide takes cost and complexity out of running a business," said Van Beneden. He claimed an organisation could save 15% of operational cost by establishing a full digital document chain from the central ERP system to the external business ecosystem.
In addition to strategic partnerships with ERP vendors like SAP, Adobe plans to capitalise on the security and client functionality built into its Acrobat reader, which it claims is to be found already installed on 97% of the world`s PCs.
Adobe says the value of a fully digital document chain lies in the fact that processes can be automated, there is zero degradation of data, and tighter control on document availability outside the organisation is possible by combining the power of PDF and XML.
Citing the example of a digital document solution developed for UK farmers for claiming European Union (EU) subsidies, Van Beneden said service delivery in SA could benefit from similar implementations.
In the UK project, processing time for subsidy applications was reduced from 12 months to three or four months by introducing online application forms already containing static information that could be filled in and submitted securely directly to the EU.
Share