Initial situation
The municipal data center in Stuttgart (today: Komm.ONE) bundles various companies in order to provide optimal services for customers. Office automation was examined as a solution to relieve the secretariats and at the same time improve flexibility and error rates.
At top management level, managers and secretaries therefore deal with correspondence for various topics and companies within the Group. Document work therefore requires careful and time-consuming steps to select and prepare documents. There are various Microsoft Office templates in the file system that need to be maintained in order to take into account the differences in logos, headers and footers, legal conditions and, in some cases, layout and design that exist in each company.
In addition, there is paper printed with a logo for each company, which must be supported by templates without a logo, whereby it must be ensured that the positioning of logos and variable content is consistent in each case.
Office automation as a solution
Due to the large number of templates, managing the templates is currently time-consuming and difficult, especially when logos are changed, as a large number of templates have to be adapted and checked for consistency with each change.
The desire is therefore to maintain as few templates as possible in order to reduce effort and errors, without having restrictions on the possible number of templates or variants. With the support of SharePoint, Office automation, workflows and the SharePoint-based CRM solution from BPA Solutions, this goal should be achieved.
SharePoint as a hub for Office automation
In the context of the introduction of a SharePoint-based CRM solution, the companies, the responsible managers and secretariats with their respective authorizations were stored in the CRM. The existing templates were mapped in the CRM so that documents can be created directly from accounts or contacts.
When creating new documents, the system allows you to select the specific sender and recipient information as well as the desired target format (print with/without logo, e-mail), then selects the appropriate template for this combination and fills in the header, footer and contact data as well as any legal provisions in the background.
The document creator can therefore concentrate fully on creating the content and sending the correspondence and has an overview of all correspondence created and sent at all times. Documents created in this way can also be bundled in so-called transaction files.
Incoming correspondence can be assigned to case files to facilitate correlations and the tracking of deadlines.
