Case study: Clicks Group

* Difficulty complying with regulations
* Integrate with SAP merchandise management system
* Paper documents expensive and easily misplaced

* Increases compliance in departments across the company
* Doubles retrieval rates to more than 99%
* Reduces paper and storage costs

“Information from SAP automatically indexes documents without human interaction... Staff access more than 99% of invoices electronically, almost doubling the retrieval rate,” said Paul Niemantinga, Director of Accounts Payable (AP)

“OnBase is scalable and easy to work with. We are very happy with the money we spent.”

Clicks Group is a specialist retail group with more than 500 stores across South Africa. Market-leading retail brands Clicks (South Africa's largest pharmaceutical retailer), The Body Shop and Musica all fall under the group.

Paper documents were making it difficult to maintain compliance, especially in the accounts payable (AP) and human resources (HR) departments. In AP, they had trouble maintaining tax invoices for the required five years. In HR, staff couldn't divide documents by security level so that only the right employees were viewing sensitive personnel documents. Additionally, managing paper documents was proving expensive and time-consuming.

Niemantinga first learned about OnBase enterprise content management (ECM) from OnBase Solution Provider MCS Computer Services. Soon after, he attended an OnBase conference in South Africa. He quickly realised that ECM isn't just for storing documents.

“It opened up our eyes to see the new processes that we could implement with OnBase,” says Niemantinga. After researching a few other ECM solutions, Clicks Group chose OnBase for its cost structure and flexibility.

With OnBase, Clicks Group has eliminated the high cost of storing paper and finding documents. The group has stronger security and tracking, improving compliance with multiple regulations in departments across the whole company.

According to South African law, tax invoices must be saved for five years. However, the group only had the physical space to keep a year's worth onsite. They had to send the rest to an offsite storage facility.

A team of people was dedicated just to “archive diving” for AP documents, and even then they only found the needed invoice about 50% of the time. AP would have to call the vendor and ask for a new copy, and sometimes even they couldn't find it. That meant the company wasn't always keeping invoices for the required five years and struggled to stay in compliance.

AP also had trouble knowing if they were looking at the most recent version of an invoice, further complicating compliance. Now, Clicks Group scans all invoices into OnBase. “Bar codes with information from the SAP merchandise management system (MMS) automatically index documents without human interaction so it's faster, cheaper and more accurate. Staff access more than 99% of invoices electronically, almost doubling the retrieval rate,” says Niemantinga. They don't even need to leave SAP to find them; they just click in SAP and the related OnBase documents pop up.”

According to regulations, employee files must be stored in a secure environment so people couldn't access confidential employee information if they weren't allowed.

Before OnBase, the Clicks Group kept every file in a storeroom, so HR couldn't segment the documents to differentiate between higher and lower clearance levels. If a staff member had access to the storeroom, they could access any file. With OnBase, HR can set specific security controls and staff can only open files that they have rights to see.

OnBase also pushes documents to payroll. Previously, if an employee went on leave or quit, the paper documents that had stated the last date of pay could get lost and couldn't be tracked through processes. The group might continue to have them on the payroll and they wouldn't find out until a monthly reconciliation. Now, those documents are all in OnBase where they're secure and tracked.

“Once we could show OnBase in one area, we could get others very excited. We chose a phased approach, encouraging end-user adoption,” says Niemantinga. Clicks Group has since expanded OnBase to include advertising files, legal contracts and other compliance documents. “OnBase is scalable and easy to work with,” says Niemantinga. “We are very happy with the money we spent.”

With OnBase, Clicks Group establishes a strategy that meets the needs of individual departments and the company as a whole. It reduces IT resources, makes training simple and creates a single, central repository for all documents. Departments share information better and the company realises a strong return on investment.

* Increases compliance in departments across the company
* Doubles retrieval rates to greater than 99%
* Reduces costs associated with paper and offsite storage

Time to make a difference.

Get more information out of existing business applications. Reduce, even eliminate, wasteful, redundant tasks. Now you can spend your time on the things that really matter. That's effective document and process management. That's the OnBase difference. Learn more at OnBase.co.uk.