Automated contract management process and digital archive
Automated contract management process and digital archive
DIGITAL CONTRACT MANAGEMENT PROCESS AND DIGITAL ARCHIVE FOR BILLA
BILLA is the first international retail chain in Bulgaria, offering a wide range of foods and consumer goods. The chain is on the Bulgarian market for more than 21 years now and continues to successfully develop its sales network and upgrade offers to its customers. It is well positioned and currently has over 145 stores in 45 cities in the country.
BILLA has been designated as one of the favourite shopping brands in Bulgaria for several consecutive years. It is well known on the market as a socially responsible company that supports significant local and national causes and initiatives, helping various social groups in society and environmental protection.
Ivan Mindilikov
Head of IT, Billa Bulgaria
“Thanks to our partnership with Konica Minolta and the M-Files platform they successfully implemented, we manage our contracts with more efficiency, save time and space, and have instant access to all of our documentation in a digital archive. The platform significantly optimises the workflow at every stage of the contract life cycle – from drawing up the first draft, through coordination with different departments, to archiving.”
Challenges
Contracts lay the foundation of every business. They affect every level of the organisation and many of the day-to-day operations of every company. The problem is that their management costs large organisations an enormous resource of time and efforts. Contracts are often archived only as hard copies. Moreover, the contracting parties are often in multiple departments – legal, sales, marketing, accounting, etc., who often keep and store their own copies of a contract, resulting in problems with having different versions of these contracts. Keeping track of terms and conditions in contracts is also a big challenge, which can lead to errors and lost benefits.
Such challenges are the reason why the team of BILLA Bulgaria sought a solution for automating and digitising the contract management process in the organisation. The company’s employees often face the following difficulties:
- Manual processing of a significant volume of documents, resulting in the consumption of a huge amount of paper.
- Lack of automation – leads to time-consuming tracking of the latest version of contracts and hindered process tracking and control.
- A huge volume of contracts on paper, which can lead to delays in the contracts coordination processes between separate parties.
Solution
BILLA Bulgaria turned to Konica Minolta to implement a solution that will allow more efficient contract management and development of a digital archive. The digital process is based on the
M-Files platform. One of the most important and quickly obtained results of the platform implementation is the elimination of the manual processing and minimisation of paper documents storage space. Process digitising led to easier and faster management of the entire life cycle of each contract – from drafting, through coordination, approval, execution, activation, and finally to its archiving.
A digital archive was introduced in order to optimise the process of documents data storing and extracting, which allowed quick and easy access to all contracts and documents that are now stored in a single centralised database. The challenge of slow and difficult coordination upon the manual signing was overcome with the integration of M-Files and electronic signing by Evrotrust.
Benefits
- Easy and quick finding and sharing of information on the various contracts
- Automation of the contracts coordination process – shorter approval terms at the different levels
- Easily tracking of any changes and always working with the latest version of documents
- Email notifications of any approaching contract deadlines
- Development of a secure digital archive
- Electronic signature option, etc.
BILLA Bulgaria and Konica Minolta continue their successful partnership with the upgrade of the work process digitisation project, as the next steps are expected to be aimed at orders and ownership documents management processes automation at various retail stores.