Think global: ECM strategy with Doxis at FEV

Digitalization poses diverse challenges for international technology firms like the FEV Group. Global communication and collaboration across corporate hierarchies and departments need to run without a hitch — even with an ever increasing amount of information. FEV pursues a global ECM strategy. In choosing Doxis, it implements a uniform and company-wide ECM software, BPM system and collaboration platform on which the company can digitally manage new strategic challenges and fulfill a wide range of technical requirements.

FEV has several technical departments with increasingly complex requirements regarding the digitalization of their business processes. What's more, FEV is a growing international automotive engineering company, which means that its volume of documents and data is also growing and must be securely and easily accessible from every location. For all of these reasons, FEV decided to go with Doxis, which offers the company a broad range of options for international process management, document management and collaboration. Within a short period of time, the company was able to successfully implement the first ECM and BPM solutions and has since continued to expand on them.

In 2016, FEV launched automated inbound invoice processing and archiving for both paper and email invoices. To ensure that vendor invoices are processed immediately, workflow-supported invoice verification and interfaces to SAP and IFS were introduced. Five FEV subsidiaries already utilize the solution to process 55,000 invoices annually. This ensures profitable cash management, something from which other subsidiaries can benefit as well in the future.

Paper-free work is only the first step of digitalization. Large volumes of information also need to be effectively harnessed. FEV knows that when data is spread out across subsidiaries and rendered inaccessible to others, this slows down processes. Information can only be useful when it's available throughout the company in its business context. In light of this, it was an easy decision to launch digital records. In 2017, the HR department started using digital personnel records with interfaces to SAP HCM. The legacy records were digitized and securely archived in Doxis. The HR department now has all information about any given employee directly at hand, no matter where they work.

The technical departments of FEV have extremely diverse requirements that are constantly changing due to an agile business environment. For this reason, FEV felt it was crucial to have a smooth transition from short-term implementation solution packages to flexible ECM and BPM solutions. The Doxis ECM platform allows FEV to implement interdisciplinary contract management out-of-the-box, which makes processes and their documents available across the company. FEV's employees, who work every day with teams from around the world, benefit from the department-specific customization options and the multilingual interfaces of Doxis.

FEV also knows just how important it is that users not only widely accept the applications, but also use them. Consequently, all FEV employees are supposed to learn about the advantages of the Doxis iECM suite as quickly as possible. This covers everything from global management applications such as digital corporate records to process management in the legal department, to a cross-departmental archive, DMS software and BPM: FEV is planning a comprehensive roll-out. Based on the standard software Doxis, all departments receive solutions customized to their needs.