Südzucker tames the flood of paper

Europe's largest sugar producer now manages documents centrally in a DMS and is thus streamlining workflows. This was only possible thanks to a coordinated project procedure and a sense of proportion.

With the expansion of business areas, which was partly a decline of the sugar monopoly over the last year, the Südzucker Group began restructuring and streamlining its organisation. "IT can make a major contribution to the Group strategy in this area, by enabling more efficient business management with a uniform view of all the key corporate data", says Dirk-Alexander Kogel, Team Leader in the Organisation/IT-BA department at Südzucker, defining one of the future core tasks within the Group. At the same time, there was a need to reduce spending on maintaining and administering the systems.

In order to meet both objectives, the Südzucker Group decided a few years ago to "harmonise" its IT systems. This was done by concentrating previously dispersed resources at Group headquarters in Mannheim and standardising applications and procedures. In 2006, for example, a central R/3 system replaced SAP systems that were previously operated in parallel (SAP R/3 and SAP R/2 in the subsidiary companies) and an archiving solution from Mobius.

"We turned five systems into one and consolidated the data and processes", explains Jakob Lang, head of the central Organisation/IT at Südzucker.

Tip from end-users

Part of the IT harmonisation process was to set up a central Document Management System (DMS), a task in which Ursula Conrad, head of the central Organisation department, played a key role. This started way back in October 2000, when work began in Mannheim to identify an archiving system for financial accounting in particular. Users then recommended the software from ELO Digital Office in Stuttgart, because they had already had good individual experience of the product in its Office version.