Claranet is a large multinational company providing high quality IT services to 10,000 companies through 24 regional offices in Europe, USA and Brazil, with service management, professional services and training in “integrated hosting”, a Cloud platform, cyber security, networking and communications solutions, all with 24×7 support.
From public administration to the financial sector, from healthcare to industry, it has developed strong and lasting relationships built on trust, combining expertise, pioneering spirit, experience and technology to drive its customers’ business forward.
Its new, more advanced, flexible and cost-effective Claranet Cloud Platform, allowing it to tailor its customers’ technology infrastructure and increasing their efficiency, has strongly driven its growth.
It is in this context that Claranet proposed to Filedoc Software the Project “Dematerialization of Claranet processes” starting with the challenge of managing some of its business processes in a dematerialized and more efficient way.
In the joint analysis carried out were identified the processes of Supplier Contract Management and Invoice Management with suppliers.
Supplier Contract Management
In the management of supplier contracts, it was intended to streamline the signing process, both by internal employees and by suppliers or external entities through the use of a tool.
The process of dematerialization of Supplier Contracts begins in Filedoc with the completion of a form where a set of fields are filled in.
After the identification of the contract template to be used, the contract record is created, assigned a number and a set of fields are automatically filled in, generating a “draft” version so that it can be reviewed and approved.
It is thus ensured the standardization of the procedure through the introduction of rules in filling out the information by some departments of Claranet that are involved.
The use of a workflow allows managing the process of review and validation of the contract by the various stakeholders, as well as ensuring the digital signature both internal and external to the supplier, ensuring compliance with the defined rules.
The process of signing the contract by the supplier is done by Filedoc sending an e-mail with a link so that he can sign the contract with a digital certificate using Filedoc Portal, thus optimizing the process versus the traditional paper method.
Finally, it ensures the correct digital archiving of signed contracts as well as access control to the information.
This new approach has ensured the integrity, traceability and auditability of the documents involved in the process.
Supplier Invoices
In dematerializing this process, Claranet intended to reduce the manual effort of entering supplier invoices in the ERP and the amount of human error.
It was also introduced the possibility of the invoice entire approval to be made in a dematerialized way, in accordance with a set of rules and approvals, streamlining the validation process.
Once received, the invoices are scanned and indexed using OCR (Optical Character Reading) technology. This technology allows the automatic capture of the necessary information for the automatic entry of invoices in the ERP, including the supplier, invoice number, codes and characterization of the article line by line, amounts, PO code and dates.
After creating the record with the indexing information of the invoice, a set of information validations are performed, namely the cross-checking with the information available in the purchase order recorded in the ERP. If there are no errors, the invoice is automatically posted without operator interaction, freeing the operator for other tasks. If there is not a total correspondence, the validation errors detected are presented to the operator with the possibility of correction and modification. In any case it is possible to quickly access the order form data recorded in the ERP.
The invoice, once posted, can also be accessed from the ERP quickly and immediately.
Main gains
The Project “Dematerialization of Claranet processes ” was considered a success with full achievement of its objectives, having obtained the following gains:
- Reduction of errors resulting from manual input
- Reduction of document printing and paper circulation
- Automation of the process, using the information extracted in the documents for integration in ERP
- Quick and agile fully dematerialized approval process
- Real-time information
- Optimization of employee time through automatic workflow validations
- Guarantee of integrity, traceability and auditability of documents.