How smart document management helped IKEA deal with growth challenges

Mountains of paper, endless backup of invoices and mailing lists familiar?

If you feel same way, you are not alone. Business daily suffers from inefficient document flow, including large ones. Take, for example, IKEA Austria, a very successful and fast growing organization that has struggled to process its heavy paperwork efficiently, including employee payrolls, invoices and credit notes.

In total, IKEA processes more than 85,000 documents per year. Not surprisingly, reliance on slow postage and manual indexing has led to lost documents and wasted time.

Tired of paper business processes, IKEA chose an enterprise content solution based on a strategic software approach to document and workflow management.

IKEA's goals include:

Ensuring effective collaboration

IKEA's strategic goal is to remove barriers to document management by creating electronic automated data and workflows.

For example, incoming invoices are authorized, scanned and uploaded several times a day from storage location to central office, where they are uploaded directly to accounting system and systematized by key parameters. Barcodes facilitate quick identification and automatic registration in CODA financial accounting system.

Accountants at main office work with a simplified, intuitive interface and, when necessary, quickly determine versions of documents and actions of employees.

Invoice transfer has also been improved. Space efficiency for dissemination of information is achieved through use of spool files, which combine key information of document with file being printed only when recipient views document.

The software's automatic indexing and recognition capabilities make paper correspondence unnecessary and greatly reduce risk of lost documents. In addition, outdated data has been migrated to a new document management system to preserve important information and prevent surprises.

Efficiency pays off

Ikea has gone to great lengths to do more than just eliminate employee headaches. Intelligent content management drives company growth by:

1. Increasing profitability. Reducing number of lost invoices and eliminating manual postage reduces unnecessary costs and positively impacts bottom line. After restructuring of documentsOrota IKEA has reduced all application fees by 90%.

2. Increased transparency. By allowing accountants to find history of changes and touchpoints for any document, IKEA has gained complete transparency and better control over invoice processing and collaboration. A deeper understanding helps IKEA fine-tune its strategy and improve operations, and provide customers, partners and suppliers with accurate and up-to-date information quickly and easily.

3. Increased efficiency. Operational efficiency has been improved as automatic document feeding reduces daily filing times by several hours. A paperless office also frees up space previously reserved for large, bulky documents, making business more efficient.

“Filing our documents electronically reduces filing costs by more than 90%,” says Ms. Rudolf Bubich, Director of Accounting at IKEA Austria. "The ease of use and access to all accounts at any time saved us a lot of time and money. Our decision was also justified by rapid acceptance by our employees of various departments, including sales, human resources and accounting.

Highlights

If document management inefficiencies are slowing you down and costing you money, imagine a company as large and complex as IKEA finds a way to change inefficient processes to restore productivity and profitability.