Vestas Wind Systems A/S is the energy industry’s global partner for sustainable energy solutions. As a market leader in wind turbine manufacturing, Vestas has installed more wind turbines across the globe than anyone else.
For 10 years, the company has been using SAP Document Management System (DMS) to manage documentation for SAP objects, such as materials and digital assets. Today, more than 5,000,000 documents are in the system, and more than 3,000 lookups are performed daily.
The Situation
Despite the system’s myriad benefits, exporting documents out of SAP DMS—for printing, distribution, and conversion, among other business activities—proved more difficult for Vestas than structuring and securing documents within SAP DMS.
In instances when Vestas initiated dialogues with one or more vendors to specify required products or services, whether issuing requests for proposals or updating documentation for product maintenance in existing vendor-customer relationships, distributing all relevant documentation and ensuring compliance with various legal requirements around this distribution proved to be a time-consuming and inefficient process.
Negotiations—when developing agreements or contract documents with third parties in order to reach an understanding for project scope and agree on terms and deadlines—were similarly held up by inefficiencies in SAP DMS. Quickly administering safe and controlled document distribution, in instances such as critical document upgrades and emergency maintenance procedures, was another pain point in SAP DMS.
Additionally, while enabling organization-wide collaboration on time-sensitive processes, Vestas needed to meet various functional, legal, and security requirements while controlling which users and external vendors could access documentation in various ways: opening folders, commenting, adding documents, and providing feedback.
The Initiative
Inter-organizational collaboration, though essential for driving innovation and achieving common goals, came with its fair share of challenges at Vestas. Most specifically, Vestas faced various challenges to collaboration in its pre-existing documentation management system.
Time-consuming manual processes contributed to business inefficiencies, which also included difficulty coordinating activities and managing complex projects involving multiple organizations. Additional concerns regarding the confidentiality of shared information and intellectual property contributed to collaboration issues.
Additionally, Vestas faced unclear data ownership and version control across its organization, with barriers to seamless information sharing including compatibility issues, data integration issues, and interoperability concerns.
The Solution: Netcare International’s Document Collaboration Hub (DCH)
Document distribution and control, request for proposal (RFP) handling, and export of data are all daily realities of Vestas’ organizational workflows. In order to take information sharing and collaboration to the next level at Vestas, the company sought a service that could enable it to bolster inter-connectivity with the larger business landscape.
Netcare International’s Document Collaboration Hub (DCH) is a cloud service for on-demand document distribution and collaboration, one that—put simply—ensures that information owners have absolute control of a document’s contents at all times.
Featuring multi-layer data encryption, complete control of document distribution and vendor access rights, immediate distribution of updates/changes to existing documents and creation of new documents, stamping for distribution and records, and document delivery in standard formats (Excel, PDF, Word, and Text file), DCH is built for customer convenience, featuring an architecture for documentation that minimizes manual work for the customer or consumer by integrating with their content management system.
Whether clients are needing to work with contracts, reports, proposals, or any other document, DCH empowers users to seamlessly share and collaborate on documents with targeted recipients on demand, accelerating decision-making processes, streamlining workflows, enhancing productivity, improving communication, and driving effective collaboration among stakeholders.
Establishing a centralized space for collaboration in which multiple users can edit a document simultaneously, with real-time updates and notifications keeping everyone in sync, DCH allows administrators to set specific permissions and access levels for each document, ensuring that only the right people have the privileges necessary to handle documentation.
In addition, DCH never stores documents itself, instead delivering all files upon request, to ensure maximum security. Built with a flexible interface (API) that integrates with various document management systems, DCH emphasizes ease-of-use for the end user, allowing for easy configuration of distribution settings—such as on-demand distribution based on user commands and automatic updates triggered by document changes—to align with the user’s preferred workflow process.
To learn more about the seamless connectivity across document management systems that Vestas unlocked through integrating DCH with SAP DMS, download this ASUG case study, developed in partnership with NetCare International.
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