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Archive management in the construction industry across Europe
IT infrastructure is the vital nerve – the aorta of every company, especially in an international construction group like the BAUHOLDING STRABAG Group which is one of the ten largest European construction groups. STRABAG – the brand under which BAUHOLDING operates, is active in all sectors in the construction industry and it is an important European construction company on the world stage. Approximately 33,000 employees at over 500 locations have rendered 2003 construction services worth about € 5.6 billion. Highly specialised competence, future-oriented know-how and an outstanding IT infrastructure allow STRABAG to meet the requirements of even the most demanding customers – safely, profitably, quickly and flexibly.
A central element of the group's IT infrastructure is SER's DOXiS iECM archive solution which has been integrated seamlessly into the commercial core application, which was developed by the construction company itself. The main area of application is the archiving of the printout files (spool files) from the commercial administration software and archiving images of incoming invoices, cash journals, records for physical devices and contracts. Since 1994 approximately 34 million documents have been archived. Now at last, the bulky, cost-intensive and time-consuming paper archive is history.
The SER solution: the ideal addition to the commercial system
STRABAG's comprehensive construction equipment and machine park is managed by its own service company, BMTI – Baumaschinen Technik International GmbH. Due to the necessity for regional distribution, the management of device records also forms part of archive management. All relevant documents for capital goods are recorded in the device records. The person responsible at BMTI uses the inventory number, which has already been recorded in asset accounting, to scan the necessary documents for this record. This includes the request for the device, the documents relating to the procurement and various contracts. “A construction machine has no fixed location. Nowadays it will be on a construction site in Innsbruck one day; next month it will be in Salzburg and the month after you'll see it in Vienna,” says Alfred Altersberger, CEO at INFOSYS. If a repair is needed, you can now look at the documents for the relevant device record irrespective of the location. All recorded data such as warranty claims, repair intervals, distinctive features (e.g. frequency of recurrent repairs), etc. can be found immediately. A further area of application is the processing of loss events in the insurance business: “Here the paper is no longer kept in files; instead it is scanned for each loss event.”
Seamless integration into the STRABAG application makes it possible to call up the original document from the host environment in which the authorisation check is also carried out. The DOXiS iECM Archive client is activated at the touch of a button. The administrators can call up the archived original documents quickly and accurately at any time. “The unproductive searching and requests for documents from head office are now a thing of the past. Productivity and profitability of the editing and checking processes have undergone a massive improvement. Furthermore, the storage or archiving of our volume of documents in a paper archive would take up an enormous amount of space as well as entailing horrendous costs. Basically, it is the perfect addition to our commercial system,” says Alfons Marschnig, head of IT, commenting on the main benefits of the system.
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