11 March 2022
Secure hold in communication thanks to compliance
by Thomas Seibold
As part of our Success Story Short series, we present exciting customer projects based on yuuvis® solutions at irregular intervals. Today, we are talking about how the Swiss Sika AG was able to ensure company-wide compliance with an “Enterprise Document Management System” for 25,000 employees using DTI Schweiz AG and yuuvis® RAD.
Compliance-compliant document management
The Swiss Sika AG is active in the field of specialty chemicals. The company develops and manufactures systems as well as products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing and protecting worldwide. These are used primarily in the construction sector and in the automotive industry. However, the company motto “Building Trust” not only applies to the product portfolio, but also in document-based communication with partners, dealers or customers. Peter Simon, Team Head Web & Digital Solutions Sika AG, describes the special situation regarding the topic of document management: “Due to the strong regulations in the construction chemicals industry, we have to fulfill a multitude of compliance rules and laws – worldwide in every country where our products are manufactured and sold. The IT effort we put in at this point is therefore very high.”
Wanted: a compliant one-stop store for all documents
As a globally active company with around 25,000 employees and hundreds of different teams, a wide variety of processes exist at Sika. On top of that, there is a multitude of IT tools to collect, organize and share the different types of documents within the global organization as well as with partners, dealers or customers. To simplify all processes, in the future it should be possible to centrally find up-to-date information about a product as well as a technology developed by Sika within the framework of a one-stop store – and all this covered by compliance. This affected both internal and external communications.
After an extensive market research, the Sika project team was finally able to reduce the number of possible candidates to two finalists. In addition to the basic technical ability to build a standardized enterprise architecture, the customization options in terms of a highly customizable, user-friendly interface represented another important key factor. In both points, yuuvis® RAD by OPTIMAL SYSTEMS was able to clearly differentiate itself from the competition and was therefore awarded the contract. The implementation of the DMS was to be carried out by DTI Schweiz AG. With the specialist for digital transformation, Sika had (according to Peter Simon) “already had an excellent and successful relationship since 2017”.
Project implementation with a strong partner
Trust in the implementation partner played a major role in this context. DTI had already implemented complex technical projects for Sika in the past, such as the implementation and subsequent continuous improvement of the Sika Search platform. This powerful enterprise search system is available to all employees. It makes diverse databases as well as sources from different systems available to the end user via one search tool. The new “Enterprise Document Management System” was given the task of central document management. The task was to integrate versioning of technical documents and instructions, complex configurable workflows, structured user rights and permissions, a seamless user experience, and advanced search and tagging functions.
The project kicked off in December 2019, and the solution went live in the first countries as early as May 2020. The implementation went smoothly, as Peter Simon confirms: “Several factors complemented each other ideally in this project. On the one hand, DTI already knew our IT and information handling philosophy inside out. On the other hand, yuuvis® had exactly the technical features to implement them in the new application.” With the new platform, all Sika employees now have access to all product-related technical documents necessary for their daily work. In doing so, they benefit from two of the most important advantages: The user interface offers them powerful search functions (Search Driven, “Google like”) as well as an individually customizable user interface that is intuitive to use and also enables mobile access (responsive design) to documents.
Always up-to-date documents thanks to the four-eyes principle
These core elements of the platform have since enabled end users to work time-efficiently and minimize the effort required to search for information. Thanks to the new DMS, it is now less tedious and time-consuming to find the latest released version of a document. The use of standard workflows for releases, such as Sika’s standard “four-eyes principle”, ensures that all stored documents are always valid and reflect the latest changes to a particular product. Says Peter Simon, “Standardization of workflows and increased transparency to all process steps as well as changes in a document have increased both document quality and confidence in the system to the highest level across all users.”
Last but not least, Sika’s project team has found the relationship with DTI to be very professional, dynamic, flexible and ultimately completely transparent. Peter Simon is pleased with the successful implementation: “The DTI team is a great asset to our Swiss partner network of implementation agencies. Although we do not have a direct relationship with OPTIMAL SYSTEMS, but only through DTI, the responsiveness and support from both parties were highly appreciated. Both had a great impact on making our joint project so successful.”
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OPTIMAL SYSTEMS is a
Group company of
Kyocera Document Solutions.