Every day, dm opens its doors to more than two million customers in Germany. We also have an extensive retail footprint across Europe, offering health and beauty products through 4,000 stores across 14 countries.
At dm, employee wellbeing is part of our DNA. We’re always looking for new ways to empower each of our 89,100 employees to make dm an even better place to work. To put that philosophy into action, we give people in back-office teams a chance to experience customer-facing roles in our retail stores.
Some years ago, I took time out from my enterprise content management (ECM) duties to work at one of our stores. It was a brilliant opportunity to see first-hand how our teams use our digital systems to support their work.
Recognizing opportunities for innovation
My time working in-store gave me many valuable new ideas about how we could improve the employee experience and reduce manual workload for our colleagues, so they can spend more time on value-added customer service interactions.
For example, our in-store teams used to manually collate and send paper documents such as delivery receipts and supplier invoices from our stores in Germany back to our headquarters. Then, colleagues in our central back-office departments would manually re-key the information into our SAP systems to make sure key data was available for other business processes. It was time-consuming, repetitive work.
There were also challenges with document-driven processes in other parts of the organization. Previously, some teams relied on a mixture of shared folders, email inboxes, and phone calls to collaborate on tasks. This led to challenges in terms of transparency and insight into status information, making it difficult to respond to specific requests. Version control was also tricky, and it was hard to avoid duplication of effort.
In total, we store around 80 million documents across the business, and that number is growing steadily year-on-year. To take control of that data, we looked to consolidate and streamline document management across the business.
Taking a fresh approach to document management
Around the same time, we were embarking on another digital transformation project. One of the main goals of the project was to move our country-specific instances of SAP ERP to a single global SAP Retail solution. This transformation will pave the way for our migration to SAP S/4HANA. The driving motivation for all of this was the harmonization of processes and maintaining a future-proof technology platform. It was the perfect opportunity to modernize our approach to document management.
When we evaluated the capabilities of OpenText Content Management for SAP Solutions and OpenText Core Archive for SAP Solutions, we knew that they would be an excellent fit for our needs. Both solutions can be tightly integrated with SAP, including SAP Fiori mobile apps. And with OpenText Content Cloud, we can enhance our document management capabilities while reducing maintenance and management workload.
Harnessing cloud solutions and industry best practices
Working with OpenText Professional Services and a consulting partner allowed us to implement the new solutions very quickly and efficiently. By using tools and accelerators from OpenText FasTrak Migration and FasTrak Move & Modernize, we consolidated over 80 million existing documents on the new platform on time and within budget. That was a big achievement for such a large and complex migration project.
By leveraging the integration capabilities of our OpenText and SAP solutions, we’ve transformed the way we store, manage, and archive documents across our business. For example, our in-store employees now use an SAP Fiori app to take photos of delivery receipts and supplier invoices from their mobile devices. Using digital workflows, we can capture the relevant data and bring it into SAP Retail in real time. Not only are we eliminating manual, repetitive work, but we’re also making information available to the business faster than ever.
Replacing information silos with a central, secure document management solution is also making it much easier for other teams to collaborate. For example, our product and quality teams can now work together on shared documents in the cloud, facilitating full transparency and always up-to-date status information.
Planning for an AI-powered future
Looking ahead, we’re excited to build on what we’ve achieved. We plan to expand our OpenText solutions to our international business units, and to explore how we might use generative AI technology to automate more tasks and unlock productivity improvements.
To learn more about how we worked with OpenText to boost the efficiency of document-driven business processes, read our case study.
