SAPERION in the RDW Treuhand AG - Modern document management at a trustee company
RDW was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 2004 as a classical trustee firm. Today this family-run business employs six people, giving the approximately 300 clients consistent, long-term contacts. RDW Treuhand AG develops for its clients creative, customized, and highly practical solutions for sustainable benefits.
Not all trustee companies use digital versions of client documents for filing, administration, and editing purposes. Many of them still use traditional filing systems, sometimes augmented by their own electronic solutions.
This was the situation at Switzerland-based trustee company RDW Treuhand AG. A paper-based archive in folders and archive cabinets was augmented with systematic filing of electronic documents in their own folder structure. This system tightly controlled how to systematically establish a file name, the folder in which a new document should be saved, and the systematic names of those folders. The system worked effectively for as long as the number of documents remained manageable. But as volume increased, searching for individual documents became more and more time-consuming, despite the internal conventions for electronic filing. It became increasingly difficult to find all documents in an efficient manner. By this time, the company was already scanning in all new document from all sources.
In mid-2007, RDW Treuhand decided to begin administering its approximately 20,000 documents with a documentmanagement system (DMS). To make the right selection, they extensively evaluated available programs upon the basis of a list of requirements.
At the end of their evaluation, the ECM solution from SAPERION came out on top. This German provider has a subsidiary in Zurich and many specialized partners throughout Switzerland.
From June 2007 to April 2008, RDW developed the structure that defines how documents are adopted into the ECM system. At the same time, the existing 20,000 electronic documents were provided with keywords that would enable them to be found later. This step is extremely important. If a keyword/search term is forgotten, it would have to be later re-assigned to all of the documents that were already integrated. Adapting the structure and complexity of the capture forms (and thereby the scope of meta data) to each employee’s responsibilities was equally important. At RDW, these procedures are individually adapted for each employee. A compromise was needed between a rigid structure (for finding processes quickly) and the freedom to give every employee individualized flexibility. From the very beginning, the ability to flexibly adapt the programs to RDW’s procedures was a major advantage of the SAPERION solution. Also by the end of August, fully functional Web-based access will be released for all clients This will enable the currently 300 clients to place documents directly into their area of the archive. These documents are marked as "external" and can be handled immediately by RDW. Printing and sending through the regular mail is no longer necessary. This saves time and money both for RDW and its clients.